Pentagon Seeks to Manipulate Social Media for Propaganda Purposes

GREAT article.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/pentagon-seeks-manipulate-social-media-propaganda-purposes

Washington’s Blog

Wired reported on Friday:

The Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it.

On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.

This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media, according to Darpa’s announcement.

***

SMISC needs to be able to seek out “persuasion campaign structures and influence operations” developing across the social sphere. SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out who’s behind it and what. Moreover, Darpa wants SMISC to be able to actually figure out whether this is a random product of the hivemind or a propaganda operation by an adversary nation or group.

Of course, SMISC won’t be content to just to hang back and monitor social media trends in strategic locations. It’s about building a better spin machine for Uncle Sam, too. Once SMISC’s latches on to an influence operation being launched, it’s supposed to help out in “countermessaging.”

***

SMISC is yet another example of how the military is becoming very interested in what’s going on in the social media sphere.
Indeed, as I wrote in February:

I noted in 2009, in an article entitled "Does The Government Manipulate Social Media?":
The U.S. government long ago announced its intention to "fight the net".
As revealed by an official Pentagon report signed by Rumsfeld called "Information Operations Roadmap":
The roadmap [contains an] acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

***

"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system".
Indeed, the Pentagon publicly announced years ago that it was considering using "black propaganda" - in other words, knowing lies.

CENTCOM announced in 2008 that a team of employees would be "[engaging] bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information."

The Air Force is now also engaging bloggers. Indeed, an Air Force spokesman said:
"We obviously have many more concerns regarding cyberspace than a typical Social Media user," Capt. Faggard says. "I am concerned with how insurgents or potential enemies can use Social Media to their advantage. It's our role to provide a clear and accurate, completely truthful and transparent picture for any audience."
In other words, the government is targeting "social media", including popular user-ranked news sites.

In addition, when you look at what the Israeli lobby has done with Megaphone software to automatically vote stories questioning Israel down and to send pro-Israel letters to politicians and media (see this, this and this), you can start to see how the U.S. military - an even larger and better-funded organization - could substantially influence voting on social news sites with very little effort.

Moreover,the military has outsourced many projects to private contractors. For example, in Iraq, much of the fighting has been outsourced to Blackwater. And governmental intelligence functions have largely been outsourced to private companies.

It is therefore not impossible that the government is hiring cheap labor to downvote stories on the social media sites which question the government, and to post pro-government comments.
(other governments and large companies "astroturf" online as well. See this, this and this.)

I pointed out the same month:
Government propagandists, their hired private contractors and useful idiots are creating "downvote bots" or scripts to bury stories which question the government.

***

One free, simple scripting program to create automatic downvotes of certain topics or news posters is called "Greasemonkey", which is commonly used on large social news sites such as Reddit.

For example, there are some 2,480 hits [now past 9,000] for the google search site:reddit.com greasemonkey downvote. This is some 2,480 times that Reddit users are publicly admitting to using greasemonkey (see also this).

Propaganda agents obviously aren't going to publicly brag about what they are doing, and you can bet that their use of downvote bots is much greater. Moreover, they probably have more sophisticated software than Greasemonkey.
Today, Raw Story reports that the Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people:
Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my "friends" even real people?

In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online "personas," allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they'd like.

The revelation was among those contained in the company's emails, which were dumped onto bittorrent networks after hackers with cyber protest group "Anonymous" broke into their systems.

In another document unearthed by "Anonymous," one of HBGary's employees also mentioned gaming geolocation services to make it appear as though selected fake persons were at actual events.

"There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas," it said.

Government involvement

Eerie as that may be, more perplexing, however, is a federal contract from the 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base, located south of Tampa, Florida, that solicits providers of "persona management software."

While there are certainly legitimate applications for such software, such as managing multiple "official" social media accounts from a single input, the more nefarious potential is clear.

Unfortunately, the Air Force's contract description doesn't help dispel their suspicions either. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be "replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent."

It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator's Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it's a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.

The contract also sought methods to anonymously establish virtual private servers with private hosting firms in specific geographic locations. This would allow that server's "geosite" to be integrated with their social media profiles, effectively gaming geolocation services.

The Air Force added that the "place of performance" for the contract would be at MacDill Air Force Base, along with Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad. The contract was offered on June 22, 2010.

It was not clear exactly what the Air Force was doing with this software, or even if it had been procured.
Manufacturing consent
Though many questions remain about how the military would apply such technology, the reasonable fear should be perfectly clear. "Persona management software" can be used to manipulate public opinion on key information, such as news reports. An unlimited number of virtual "people" could be marshaled by only a few real individuals, empowering them to create the illusion of consensus.

***

That's precisely what got DailyKos blogger Happy Rockefeller in a snit: the potential for military-run armies of fake people manipulating and, in some cases, even manufacturing the appearance of public opinion.

"I don't know about you, but it matters to me what fellow progressives think," the blogger wrote. "I consider all views. And if there appears to be a consensus that some reporter isn't credible, for example, or some candidate for congress in another state can't be trusted, I won't base my entire judgment on it, but it carries some weight.

"That's me. I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective."

***

"Team Themis" [tasked by the Chamber of Commerce to come up with strategies for responding to progressive bloggers and others] also included a proposal to use malware hacks against progressive organizations, and the submission of fake documents in an effort to discredit established groups.

HBGary was also behind a plot by Bank of America to destroy WikiLeaks' technology platform, other emails revealed. The company was humiliated by members of "Anonymous" after CEO Aaron Barr bragged that he'd "infiltrated" the group.
And see this, this, this, this.

Indeed, as I noted in 2008, the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence programs to try to predict :

As a new article by investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham reveals, a governmental unit operating in secret and with no oversight whatsoever is gathering massive amounts of data on every American and running artificial intelligence software to predict each American's behavior, including "what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help".

The same governmental unit is responsible for suspending the Constitution ... in the event that anything is deemed by the White House in its sole discretion to constitute a threat to the United States. (this is formally known as implementing "Continuity of Government" plans).

***

Bear in mind that the Pentagon is also running an AI program to see how people will react to propaganda and to government-inflicted terror. The program is called Sentient World Simulation:
"U.S defense, intel and homeland security officials are constructing a parallel world, on a computer, which the agencies will use to test propaganda messages and military strategies.

Called the Sentient World Simulation, the program uses AI routines based upon the psychological theories of Marty Seligman, among others. (Seligman introduced the theory of 'learned helplessness' in the 1960s, after shocking beagles until they cowered, urinating, on the bottom of their cages.)

Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

The sim will feature an AR avatar for each person in the real world, based upon data collected about us from government records and the internet."
Postscript: Gaming social media is only one propaganda technique employed by the government:

Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says the CIA has already bought and paid for many successful journalists
The New York Times discusses in a matter-of-fact way the use of mainstream writers by the CIA to spread messages
A 4-part BBC documentary called the "Century of the Self" shows that an American - Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays - created the modern field of manipulation of public perceptions, and the U.S. government has extensively used his techniques
The Independent discusses allegations of American propaganda
And one of the premier writers on journalism says the U.S. has used widespread propaganda

How many years have we all known about this? LOL

Air Force Releases ‘Counter-Blog’ Marching Orders

By Noah Shachtman

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/01/usaf-blog-respo/

Bloggers: If you suddenly find Air Force officers leaving barbed comments after one of your posts, don’t be surprised. They’re just following the service’s new "counter-blogging" flow chart. In a twelve-point plan, put together by the emerging technology division of the Air Force’s public affairs arm, airmen are given guidance on how to handle "trolls," "ragers" — and even well-informed online writers, too. It’s all part of an Air Force push to "counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force," Captain David Faggard says.

Over the last couple of years, the armed forces have tried, in fits and starts, to connect more with bloggers. The Army and the Office of the Secretary of Defense now hold regular "bloggers’ roundatbles" with generals, colonels, and key civilian leaders. The Navy invited a group of bloggers to embed with them on a humanitarian mission to Central and South America, last summer. Military blogger Michael Yon recently traveled to Afghanistan with Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

In contrast, the Air Force has largely kept the blogosphere at arms’ length. Most of the sites are banned from Air Force networks. And the service has mostly stayed away from the Pentagon’s blog outreach efforts. Captain Faggard, who’s become the Air Force Public Affairs Agency’s designated social media guru, has made strides in shifting that attitude. The air service now has a Twitter feed, a blog of its own — and marching orders, for how to comment on other sites. "We’re trying to get people to understand that they can do this," he tells Danger Room.


The flow chart lays out a range of possible responses to a blog post. Airmen can offer a "factual and well-cited response [that] is not factually erroneous, a rant or rage, bashing or negative in nature."
They can "let the post stand — no response." Or they cancan "fix the facts," offering up fresh perspective.
No matter what, the chart says, airmen should "disclose your Air Force connection," "respond in a tone that reflects high on the rich heritage of the Air Force," and "focus on the most-used sites related to the Air
Force."

Despite the chart’s sometimes-stiff language, former military spokesman Steven Field says he’s "a fan." Field, who’s been occasionally critical of the armed services’ blog outreach efforts, tells Danger Room: "I’ve always thought that a military-like process would be a good bridge to connect the services with the blogosphere. There’s a field manual for everything in the military, so this flow-chart presents online communications in a DoD [Department of Defense]
friendly format."

One stipulation — While it should be a guide of communications, it shouldn’t become a ball-and-chain. Online comms require some level of nimble, on-your-feet response. As long as the Air Force doesn’t use the
"evaluate" phase to get approval from every Tom, Dick and Harry in the
Pentagon, it should be a good tool.

"Now they just need to lift those damn IP [Internet Protocol] filters," Field adds, so airmen can actually read those blogs that they’re supposed to respond to.

Posted in comments section of OP article.

by DavidPierre
on Thu, 07/21/2011 - 00:04

Quote :

After Woodrow “Making The World Safe For Hypocrisy” Wilson does his little flip flop on The Great War, it’s time to whip the American public into line. A week after Wilson’s declaration of war, he creates the imaginatively named Committee on Public Information (CPI) to propagandize the war and, quite literally, to mass brainwash America.

It marks the beginning of scientifically based mass mind control in America.

The CPI, headed by one of Wilson’s personal cronies, a publicist named George Creel, is made up of carefully selected people from the emerging film and advertising industries as well as from academia, psychology, the press, the music industry and the art world. The CPI is designed to “protect the control and management of American society” by “a technical elite who would serve established power”.

The Wilson regime's ministry of propaganda and manipulation immediately identifies the basic methods by which it will control the minds of the American masses: appeal to emotion while largely ignoring truth or logic, replace facts with symbols, demonize the "enemy" and promise a war which will "make the world safe for democracy". Astute readers will notice how much things change over the years.

"A newer and subtler instrument must weld thousands and even millions of human beings into one amalgamated mass of hate and will and hope. A new flame must burn out the canker of dissent and temper the steel of bellicose enthusiasm. The name of this new hammer and anvil of social solidarity is propaganda."
Harold Lasswell

The CPI’s top mind control expert is Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, who applies old Sigmund's work to the art of mass mind control by blending modern advertising techniques with a profound understanding of individual and mass psychology. The basic techniques of mind control used by the CPI are old ones, employed successfully by the ruling elite during the American Revolution, the Spanish American War and countless other events.
But, now, there are enormously powerful new tools to employ in the controlling of the American mind: radio and movies and, in a few decades, the most powerful brainwashing and disinformation tool of them all will appear, television.

The creation of the CPI by Wilson marks a turning point in world history. The control of the perceptions, thoughts and beliefs of entire populations is now not only possible, but remarkably easy.

Bernays called it the "engineering of consent".

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.

"Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."
Edward Bernays

As Bernays recognized, the most powerful tool with which to control a population is fear and an easily indentifiable, dehumanized enemy is needed to provoke that fear. Within a few months, by flooding the U.S. with anti-German hate literature, images, movies and music, the CPI has successfully transformed the U.S. from a nation consisting largely of isolationists to a gang of rabid and terrified Hun haters lusting for blood.

"So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor."
Harold Lasswell

The key to the CPI’s mind control program is the dehumanization and demonization of the German people and this includes German-Americans who fall victim to murderous “patriots” in large numbers.

Under George Creel, the CPI invents countless fake stories of German atrocities.

The tame mass media obediently carry the CPI's lies including ones of poisoned candy being dropped by German airplanes for children, German soldiers killing babies and skewering them on bayonets, the raping of Belgian nuns by Germans, Germans cutting the ears from corpses, German soldiers giving children hand-grenades to play with and Germans infecting God-fearing Americans with tuberculosis.

At first, most Americans see that the atrocity propaganda being pumped out by the CPI is nothing but absurd fabrication and refer to the practice as “Creeling” in honor of the CPI’s chief liar. But, in a few short months, the lies have been so thoroughly and repetitively distributed through every channel of communication in the United States that the vast majority of Americans accept the lies as being true.

"Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of the facts."
George Creel

Wilon’s Committee On Public Information carries out psychological warfare against the people of the United States on a scale unprecedented in human history and with a degree of success of which Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels could only dream.

The CPI is organized into nineteen divisions, each focused on a particular type of propaganda.
Teams of advertising experts and psychologists flood every possible means of communication in the U.S. with the goal of engendering hatred of everything German and making support of every aspect of the war the only possible option for a “patriotic” American.

Public figures such as John Dewey and Walter Lippmann are recruited to give the CPI’s propaganda credibility.

The CPI creates the Four Minute Men, 75,000 volunteer speakers in 5,200 communities, who deliver the CPI’s propaganda to their neighbors and to church congregations.

The CPI’s psychologists target various demographic segments of the American public with tailor-made propaganda. Foreign language speakers are used to target immigrants, farmers are used to sell the war to farmers, businessmen are used to convince other businessmen of the recently discovered virtue of the war. In all, the CPI’s speakers give more than seven million speeches provoking hatred and fear of Germany and Germans to more than three hundred million people. After many of the speeches, mobs form and attack German-American homes and businesses.

The CPI’s mind control experts are very well aware that graphic images are often more powerful propaganda tools than words and the Division of Pictorial Publicity recruits top advertising illustrators and cartoonists who work closely with publicity experts in the Advertising Division to provide propaganda via the print media, most notably posters and illustrations and advertising in magazines and newspapers in which they are given free space by cooperative publishers.

Virtually every mainstream publication in the U.S. carries a substantial quota of CPI propaganda. Emotionally powerful posters, frequently painted in patriotic colors, are plastered on billboards across the country urging the sacrifice of money or a son or life itself for the war.

The CPI’s Division of News, distributes over six thousand press releases and becomes the primary provider of war “news” to the American mass media and therefore the American people. In a typical week, over twenty thousand newspaper columns in the U.S. are filled with material provided by the CPI.

Aware of the fact that many newspaper readers pay scant attention to the “news” items it has planted, the CPI creates the Division of Syndicated Features and recruits leading novelists, short story writers and essayists to deliver the CPI’s propaganda in those forms. The CPI estimates that more than twelve million Americans read the Syndicated Features Division’s propaganda every month throughout the war.

For those even less interested in the written word, those Americans who skip right past the CPI’s “news” and features to the funny pages, Bernays and the boys create a cartoon division which plants enormous amounts of CPI propaganda in cartoon pages and supplements.

The division’s stated goal is to “mobilize and direct the scattered cartoon power of the country for constructive war work.” The cartoon propaganda achieves new heights in anti-German hatemongering. The evil Huns of the cartoons have snouts, tusks, hairy faces, red eyes and fangs. In the cartoons, the Germans render human corpses for fat, steal everything in sight, murder randomly and rape innocent maidens by the thousand.

One of the CPI's nineteen divisions uses popular music as part of its mass mind control program.

The CPI hires thousands of song writers who create songs with anti-German lyrics. Sheet music of the CPI songs is printed and distributed complete with illustrations of evil, grotesque Huns.

Among the composers is Irving Berlin who had been born Israel Isidore Baline. Curiously, Berlin didn't abandon his adopted, very German name in an environment where frankfurters had become “liberty sausages” and dachshunds had become “liberty dogs”. Perhaps Berlin calculated that, in the United States, it was better to have a "German" name, even in the midst of the CPI's anti-German hate campaign, than a Jewish one.

The CPI’s Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation uses tame scholars to write anti-German propaganda pamphlets with titles such as The German Whisper, German War Practices and Conquest and Kultur.
The CPI manipulates the nation’s librarians into becoming censors. They quickly adopt the CPI’s concept that it is their “duty” to protect patrons from “disloyal” material.

“Pro-German” and pacifist books are removed from library shelves and replaced with CPI propaganda. Works by great German writers such as Goethe and Schiller are purged from American libraries. Libraries even play a role in the CPI’s Americanization Registration Program. Thousands of cards are distributed to immigrants through libraries and then returned with signatures to the CPI’s Division of Work With The Foreign Born.

The CPI uses newspaper advertising campaigns to target the three million non-English speaking men eligible for the draft and, in a country already chock-a-block with organizations sporting falsified purposes and deceptive names, creates yet another, the League of Oppressed Nations, which supposedly represents the various "ethnic loyalty" groups in the U.S. but is, of course, nothing more or less than another propaganda tool of the Wilson regime via the CPI.

The Wilson regime’s mass mind control apparatus specifically targets its psychological warfare against American women, afraid that they “might constitute a subversive element in the nation, detrimental to wartime unity and the smooth functioning of selective service.” In plain English, they might not want their husbands and sons slaughtered in Europe for the futher enrichment of the Morgans, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Duponts et al and we can't be havin' none of that.

Prominent women peace activists, including Helen Keller, Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams and Kate Richards O'Hare are being heard and the CPI must silence them and counter their anti-war message.

The CPI wants to motivate women to stay quietly at home practicing food conservation, growing food and willingly sending their sons off to kill and die. The CPI forms alliances with the publishers of American women’s magazines, most importantly with The Ladies’ Home Journal.

The CPI effectively controls much of the content and many of the covers of the influential magazine, which obediently extols sacrifice, thrift and a willingness to send sons to the recently repositioned war. The CPI’s Four Minute Men establish a women’s division to speak to women’s groups to counter resistance to the war among women.

Moving images can be even more powerful than still ones, a fact that the CPI’s brainwashers are quick to exploit. American film makers seek respectability by giving almost unlimited support to the Wilson war machine.

A 1917 editorial in The Motion Picture News proclaims, "every individual at work in this industry wants to do his share" and promises that "through slides, film leaders and trailers, posters and newspaper publicity they will spread that propaganda so necessary to the immediate mobilization of the country's great resources."

The industry quickly pumps out outrageous anti-German hate propaganda such as The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin, The Claws of the Hun, The Prussian Cur and Wolves of Kultur.

Most of the films portray fictitious atrocities by Germans and include some of the completely false atrocity tales invented by the CPI including Germans murdering babies and various rape stories, in spite of denials of their accuracy by the U.S. War Department and American generals.

Among the top Hollywood producers of anti-German, pro-war propaganda is D.W. Griffith, producer of the movie lauding the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation, one of Woodrow Wilson’s favorite films.
Aside from the Hollywood output, the CPI’s Films Division itself produces over sixty official films seen by an average of eighty million people every week.

But nothing illustrates the Wilson regime’s utter moral bankruptcy in its successful quest to mass brainwash America as well as the use CPI psychologists make of American children to spread anti-German hatred to other children, at least those who aren't busy slaving away in mines and factories. Schoolboy “Four Minute Men” speak in their schools delivering CPI propaganda to their classmates. Travelling CPI sideshows with puported French officers deliver fabricated German atrocity stories to school children. Thousands of children’s books, including mysteries, comics and adventures, are published containing anti-German hate propaganda.

The CPI creates the Anti-Yellow Dog League, a vigilante group for children with about a thousand branches nationally, all based in public schools.

Eligible for membership are boys tens years and older who are urged to “search out disloyalty” and to “bark” when a “yellow dog” is suspected. American schools enthusiastically cooperate in the “hunts”. Some children go further in their quest to be “patriotic” and attack German-Americans. In St. Louis, children stone the daily deliveries of a German grocer. The children are congratulated by the local newspaper for “doing their duty”.

Ministers of the Christian religion are eager to cooperate in warmongering and spreading the CPI’s propagada in their sermons and, as the adults listen to the Word of God (or at least of Edward Bernays) praising the war and damning the Germans, the children get their own dose of anti-German hate at Sunday School with “Beat-up the Hun" coloring books.

Libraries sponsor "story hours" for thousands of children using pro-war propaganda supplied directly by the CPI. After the war, the U.S. government gives its thanks to the nation’s kiddies “for their loyal service in wartime” by distributing fifteen million piggy banks made from disengaged hand grenades to them.

You just can’t make this shit up.

Not only did the CPI spew out millions of pieces of propaganda, it enforced a form of self-censorship in the U.S. mass media by implementing "voluntary guidelines".

As they do to this day, American journalists obediently comply with censorship and news control in order to remain in the government “information loop”. Publications outside the controlled mass media are effectively destroyed by Wilson’s war on freedom of speech and freedom of the press in America.

Two books written by the CPI's master propagandist, Edward Bernays, Propaganda and The Engineering of Consent, remain key textbooks of the manipulation and control of the public by the ruling elite. The mass mind control techniques of Bernays have been in continuous use in the U.S. since the great democrat Woodrow Wilson introduced them in 1917.

Only the object of our fear and loathing is changed from time to time to suit the requirements of the ruling elite. Ironically, Bernays, who was Jewish, will live to see the techniques he developed to incite anti-German hatred used to great effect by Josef Goebbels to incite anti-Jewish hatred.

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it."
Edward Bernays

But... but ... but they own, and developed, all of the major social media sites already.

It's all about horizontal fusion, that's their purpose. In short, horizontal fusion = peer pressure. Shorten the lengths between each node (node = people) and crowd the space, and it makes it harder and harder to be free, to move freely and be independent. That's the purpose of social media.

C1 wrote:

But... but ... but they own, and developed, all of the major social media sites already.

It's all about horizontal fusion, that's their purpose. In short, horizontal fusion = peer pressure. Shorten the lengths between each node (node = people) and crowd the space, and it makes it harder and harder to be free, to move freely and be independent. That's the purpose of social media.

Brilliant observation...Yes, I see.

Thanks, C1.

ScoutsHonor wrote:

C1 wrote:

But... but ... but they own, and developed, all of the major social media sites already.

It's all about horizontal fusion, that's their purpose. In short, horizontal fusion = peer pressure. Shorten the lengths between each node (node = people) and crowd the space, and it makes it harder and harder to be free, to move freely and be independent. That's the purpose of social media.

Brilliant observation...Yes, I see.

Not really that brilliant, just kinda obvious when one starts reading and understanding the scientists and the science they developed that is running this system.

So, fyi, advertising is vertical fusion (ie add - vertical). Vertical fusion is aligning targets within a hierarchy, in most cases aligning the audience with an aggressor masked as a corporate brand.

Hence, we have advertising aligning us in a vertically fused alignment, and social media to align us horizontally. Pretty soon you have us in a box. Can you say "Borg" and their cube ship?

C1 wrote:

ScoutsHonor wrote:

C1 wrote:

But... but ... but they own, and developed, all of the major social media sites already.

It's all about horizontal fusion, that's their purpose. In short, horizontal fusion = peer pressure. Shorten the lengths between each node (node = people) and crowd the space, and it makes it harder and harder to be free, to move freely and be independent. That's the purpose of social media.

Brilliant observation...Yes, I see.

Not really that brilliant, just kinda obvious when one starts reading and understanding the scientists and the science they developed that is running this system.

So, fyi, advertising is vertical fusion (ie add - vertical). Vertical fusion is aligning targets within a hierarchy, in most cases aligning the audience with an aggressor masked as a corporate brand.

Hence, we have advertising aligning us in a vertically fused alignment, and social media to align us horizontally. Pretty soon you have us in a box. Can you say "Borg" and their cube ship?

I'd like to understand how horizontal fusion, for example, works in more detail. Can you recommend a source? Thanks!

Guess I'm going to re-view the "Borg" movie too, as I'm vague on the storyline, what the cube ship.was, etc.

I still believe that consciousness separated from its source, would not be human consciousness; that even if they were to succeed in abstracting 'something' --- that "something" would be some kind of freakish imitation worthy of a Dr. Moreau.

Horizontal fusion is only discussed, to my knowledge, in military strategy docs, which are publicly available. I don't have sources to send you right now, because it's been so long since I read them I don't remember the sources. Also, it's wrapped in military-speak, which is an entire learning process in itself. I think the best way to think about horizontal fusion is to put it in terms of peer pressure.

As far as consciousness, they don't give a fuck if it's human or not, just as long as we "believe" it and act upon it and they control it. I know it's important to you and I, but we gotta think like them.