One of the comments has an amazing line “ Persuasion is at the heart of information security. Not “information technology security”, but the security a person h

One of the comments has an amazing line “ Persuasion is at the heart of information security. Not “information technology security”, but the security a person has about their ability to make information-based decisions about which actions they can take in their best interest.” That being said, its seems the event that has brought the concern over persuasive technologies to the fore is the election of Donald Trump. New sorts of persuasive technologies may have Trump over the finish line, but I'm pretty convinced that he ran a competitive campaign without them. He identified policies and cultural grievances (immigration, anti-elite sentiment, trade, and white identity politics for example ) that no one else was talking about, ran with them. I dislike that these subjects resonated with enough of my fellow Americans to win an election, but they did. To retreat into a mindset of "those rubes must have been tricked" is to deny them agency and is problematic in and of itself.