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Useless Press Hacks International Politics

Who needs a political advisor when you have the internet?
Images courtesy the artists

The moral fibers of our world leaders has been reduced to a simple algorithm, thanks to the good folks at Useless Press. This is the same group that recently imagined Mark Zuckerberg as a conceptual art terrorist, and their fixation with organizing the Internet’s boundless amounts of data is now creeping into the political sphere.

@WorldLeaderTips is the simplified, digitized, and commodified pocket-advisor that automates both foreign and domestic policy for the various types of world leaders that might need some extra help prioritizing their weekly to-do list. The algorithm is firstly based on a system called the GDELT System, which scans through the various happenings around the world for certain buzzwords such as “blame,” “denounce,” and “abuse,” as indicators to what a certain leader is up to.

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Following the GDELT screening comes a second wave of inspection, through a specified scale called the Goldstein Scale (also available as a tshirt!). The Goldstein Scale measures actions on a ranking from -10 to +8.3, based on severity (the inequity between how much action is negative and how much is positive ought to be somewhat indicative of the nature of politics). A -10 on the Goldstein Scale, for example, is “military attack; clash; assault”, and a +8.3 is “extend military assistance.”

@WorldLeaderTips has started with 297 leaders that are actively on Twitter, such as Pope Francis, Robert Mugabe, and Barack Obama. When all the data is organized into a cohesive graph of weekly progress, the system both predicts what the leader will do the following week and provides its own advice.

The software seems to be half tongue-in-cheek, half actually pretty valuable. When asked how they think leaders might react to it, Brian Clifton, one of the creators, predicts, “I’m confident Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina would send a note to @WorldLeaderTips probably in the form of a Twitter reply (or send an email to Useless Press), Edi Rama of Albania will offer us a proposal of some sort, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, we can expect him to make a pessimistic comment about @WorldLeaderTips. Whereas President Barack Obama would comment optimistically, and David Cameron would just chat about it on the phone.”

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According to the Useless Press website, “@WORLDLEADERTIPS IS THE HISTORIC CULMINATION OF A DECADES-LONG ENDEAVOR TO TRANSFORM GLOBAL POLITICAL ACTIVITY INTO DATA THAT CAN THEN BE TRACKED, MANIPULATED AND USED TO MAKE PREDICTIONS.” Check out what they think your favorite politician should say here.

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