De
algehele hysterie over ‘fake news’ (of: ‘nepnieuws’) is compleet en al dik meer dan een jaar gaande, waarbij de
sociale media werden aangewezen als de verspreiders, terwijl de echte
makers en verspreiders van nepnieuws juist de reguliere media zijn, zie de berichtgeving voorafgaand aan
de illegale oorlogen tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en Syrië, plus de
berichtgeving over Oekraïne (en ga nog maar een tijd door…….)

Nu
is er nieuws opgedoken over de VS overheid (en het leger) die al
actief negatief nieuws over de overheid en bijvoorbeeld het leger te
lijf gaan met een fiks aantal verzonnen personen, die meerdere
identiteiten hebben op het internet, personages die het echte nieuws
onderuit moeten halen. Het leger van de VS heeft al een klein
legertje aan personen samengesteld om hun werk te doen. Overigens heeft Israël al eerder aangekondigd kritiek en negatief nieuws op/over deze fascistische apartheidsstaat aan te zullen vallen met een ‘snelle reactiemacht…..’*

Overigens dient opgemerkt te worden dat de VS en Israël nog iets verder gaan dan alleen kritiek aan te vallen, daar ze actief nepnieuws zullen verspreiden die bijvoorbeeld de uitgeoefende staatsterreur (in binnen en buitenland) moeten rechtvaardigen……

Topmilitairen van de VS zien in deze vorm van volksverlakkerij een belangrijk wapen om de
bevolking te beïnvloeden, bijvoorbeeld (weer) met het schoonpraten van de
grootschalige terreur die dit leger op meerdere plaatsen in de wereld
uitoefent…….

Lees
de volgende stap in het vervolmaken van de Big Brother staat zoals
door George Orwell beschreven, alleen gaat de werkelijkheid straks
nog veel verder dan hij ooit had kunnen dromen…….

(door de immense technologische vooruitgang nadat zijn boek 1984 in 1949 werd gepubliceerd)

What
the Media Isn’t Telling You About Social Media

March
20, 2018 at 9:12 pm

Written
by Corbett
Report

(CORBETT) — Now
openly admitted, governments and militaries around the world employ
armies of keyboard warriors to spread propaganda and disrupt their
online opposition. Their goal? To shape public discourse around
global events in a way favourable to their standing military and
geopolitical objectives. Their method? The weaponization of social
media.

TRANSCRIPT:

It
didn’t take long from the birth of the world wide web for the
public to start using this new medium to transmit, collect and
analyze information in ways never before imagined. The first message
boards and clunky “Web 1.0” websites soon gave way to “the
blogosphere.” The arrival of social media was the next step in this
evolution, allowing for the formation of communities of interest to
share information in real time about events happening anywhere on the
globe.

But
as quickly as communities began to form around these new platforms,
governments and militaries were even quicker in recognizing the
potential to use this new medium to more effectively spread their own
propaganda.

Their
goal? To shape public discourse around global events in a way
favourable to their standing military and geopolitical objectives.

Their
method? The Weaponization of Social Media.

This
is The
Corbett Report.

Facebook.
Twitter. YouTube. Snapchat. Instagram. Reddit. “Social media” as
we know it today barely existed fifteen years ago. Although it
provides new ways to interact with people and information from all
across the planet virtually instantaneously and virtually for free,
we are only now beginning to understand the depths of the problems
associated with these new platforms. More and more of the original
developers of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter admit
they no
longer use social media themselves
and actively keep it away from their children, and now they are
finally admitting the reason why: social media was designed
specifically to take advantage of your psychological weaknesses and
keep you addicted to your screen.

SEAN
PARKER:
If the thought process that went into building these
applications—Facebook being the first of them to really understand
it—that thought process was all about “How do we consume as much
of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means
that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in
a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or
whatever, and that’s gonna get you to contribute more content and
that’s gonna get you more likes and comments. So it’s a social
validation feedback loop. I mean it’s exactly the kind of thing
that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re
exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. And I think that
we—the inventors/creators, you know, it’s me, it’s Mark, it’s
Kevin Systrom at Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood
this consciously and we did it anyway.

It
should be no surprise, then, that in this world of social media
addicts and smartphone zombies, the 24/7 newsfeed is taking up a
greater and greater share of people’s lives. Our thoughts, our
opinions, our knowledge of the world, even our mood are increasingly
being influenced or even determined by what we see being posted,
tweeted or vlogged. And the process by which these media shape our
opinions is being carefully monitored and analyzed, not by the social
media companies themselves, but by the US military.

MARINA
PORTNAYA:
When the world’s largest social media platform betrays its users,
there’s going to be outrage.

ABC
HOST: The
study to see whether Facebook could influence the emotional state of
its users on that news feed.

CNN
ANCHOR:
It allowed researchers to manipulate almost 700,000 users’ news
feeds. Some saw more positive news about their friends, others saw
more negative.

CNN
GUEST:
Well I’m not surprised. I mean we’re all kind of lab rat than the
big Facebook experiment.

PORTNAYA: But
it wasn’t only Facebook’s experiment. It turns out the
psychological study was connected to the US government’s research
on social unrest.

MORNING
JOE GUEST:
This is really kind of creepy.

PORTNAYA:
And it gets worse. What you may not know is that the US Department of
Defense has reportedly spent roughly $20 million conducting studies
aimed at learning how to manipulate online behavior in order to
influence opinion. The initiative was launched in 2011 by the
Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, otherwise
known as DARPA. The program is best described as the US media’s
effort to become better at detecting and conducting propaganda
campaigns via social media. Translation: When anti-government
messages gain ground virally, Washington wants to find a way to
spread counter opinion.

SOURCE: US
military harnesses social media to manipulate online behaviour

The
DARPA document that details the Pentagon’s plans for influencing
opinions in the social media space is called “Social
Media in Strategic Communication.”
DARPA’s goal, according to their
own website,
is “to develop tools to help identify misinformation or deception
campaigns and counter them with truthful information.”

Exactly
what tools were developed for this purpose and how they are currently
being deployed is unclear.

But Rand Walzman, the program’s creator,
admitted last year that the project lasted four years, cost $50
million and led to the publication of over 200 papers. The papers,
including “Incorporating
Human Cognitive Biases in a Probabilistic Model of Retweeting,”
“Structural
Properties of Ego Networks,”
and “Sentiment
Prediction using Collaborative Filtering,”
make the thrust of the program perfectly clear. Social media users
are lab rats being carefully scrutinized by government-supported
researchers, their tweets and Facebook posts and Instagram pictures
being analyzed to determine how information spreads online, and, by
implication, how the government and the military can use these social
media networks to make their own propaganda “go viral.”

As
worrying as this research is, it pales in comparison to the knowledge
that governments, militaries and political lobby groups are already
employing squadrons of foot soldiers to wage information warfare in
the social media battlespace.

AL-JAZEERA
ANCHOR:
The Pentagon’s got a new plan to counter anti-American messages in
cyberspace. It involves buying software that will enable the American
military to create and control fake online personas—fake people,
essentially—who will appear to have originated from all over the
world. The plan is being undertaken by CENTCOM (US Central Command),
and the objective of the online persona management service is to
combat enemy propaganda by influencing foreign social media websites.
CENTCOM has hired a software development company called “Ntrepid,”
and, according to the contract, the California-based company will
initially provide 50 user licenses, each of which would be capable of
controlling up to 10 fake personas. US law forbids the use of this
type of technology, called “sockpuppets,” against Americans, so
all the personas will reportedly be communicating in languages like
Arabic, Persian and Urdu.

SOURCE: Persona
Online Management, Fake Online Personas, Sock Puppets, Astroturfing
Bots, Shills

CTV
ANCHOR:
So is it okay to have the government monitor social media
conversations and then to wade in and correct some of those
conversations? With more on this, let’s go to technology expert
Carmi Levy. He’s on the line from Montreal. Carmi, do you think the
government’s monitoring what you and I are saying right now? Is
this whole thing getting out of line, or what?

[…]

CARMI
LEVY: It opens up a bit of a question. I’d like to call it a
Pandora’s box about, you know, what exactly is the government’s
aim here, and what do they hope to accomplish with what they find
out? And as they accumulate this information online—this data on
us—where does that data go? And so I think as much as we should
applaud the government for getting into this area, the optics of it
are potentially very Big Brother-ish. And the government really does
need to be a little bit more concrete on what its intentions are and
how it intends to achieve them.

SOURCE: CTV
Confirms Government(s) employing Internet Trolls, Shills & PR
Agents to ‘correct misinformation’

4WWL
REPORTER:
New evidence that government-owned computers at the Army Corps of
Engineers office here in New Orleans are being used to verbally
attack critics of the Corps comes in an affidavit from the former
editor-in-chief of nola.com. Jon Donley, who was laid off this past
February, tells us via satellite from Texas, in late 2006 he started
noticing people presenting themselves as ordinary citizens defending
the Corps very energetically.

JON
DONLEY:
What stuck out, though, was the wording of the comments was in many
ways mirroring news releases from the Corps of Engineers.

[…]

SANDY
ROSENTHAL:
These commenters tried to discredit these people . . .

4WWL
REPORTER:
And when Rosenthal investigated, she discovered the comments were
coming from users at the internet provider address of the Army Corps
of Engineers offices here in New Orleans. She blamed the Corps for a
strategy of going after critics.

ROSENTHAL:
In the process of trying to obscure the facts of the New Orleans
floodings, one of their tactics was just verbal abuse.

SOURCE: Government
Sock Puppets

NAFTALI
BENNETT: Mo’etzet
Yesha,
in conjunction with My Israel, has arranged an instruction day for
Wiki editors. The goal of the day is to teach people how to edit in
Wikipedia, which is the number one source of information today in the
world. As a way of example, if someone searches the Gaza flotilla, we
want to be there. We want to be the guys who influence what is
written there, how it’s written, and to ensure that it’s balanced
and Zionist in the nature.

SOURCE: Course:
Zionist Editing on Wikipedia

These
operations are only the visible and publicly-admitted front of a vast
array of military and intelligence programs that are attempting to
influence online behaviour, spread government propaganda, and disrupt
online communities that arise in opposition to their agenda.

That
such programs exist is not a matter of conjecture; it is mundane,
established, documented fact.

In
2014, an internal document was leaked from GCHQ, the British
equivalent of the NSA. The document, never intended for public
release, was entitled “The
Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert
Operations”
and bluntly stated that “We want to build Cyber Magicians.”
It then goes on to outline the “magic” techniques that must be
employed in influence and information operations online, including
deception and manipulation techniques like “anchoring,” “priming”
and “branding” propaganda narratives. After presenting a map of
social networking technologies that are targeted by these operations,
the document then instructs the “magicians” how to deceive the
public through “attention management” and behavioural
manipulation.

That
governments would turn to these strategies is hardly a shocking
development. In fact, the use of government shills to propagate
government talking points and disrupt online dissent has been openly
advocated on the record by high-ranking government officials for the
past decade.

In
2008, Cass Sunstein, a law professor who would go on to become
Obama’s information “czar,” co-authored a paper entitled
“Conspiracy
Theories,”
in which he wrote that the “best response” to online “conspiracy
theories” is what he calls “cognitive infiltration” of groups
spreading these ideas.

“Government
agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social
networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine
percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual
premises, causal logic or implications for political action. In one
variant, government agents would openly proclaim, or at least make no
effort to conceal, their institutional affiliations. […] In another
variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even
with false identities.”

It
is perhaps particularly ironic that the idea that government agents
are actually and admittedly spreading propaganda online under false
identities is, to the less-informed members of the population, itself
a “conspiracy theory” rather than an established conspiracy fact.

Unsurprisingly,
when confronted about his proposal, Sunstein pretended to not
remember having written it and then pointedly refused to answer any
questions about it.

LUKE
RUDKOWSKI:
My name is Bill de Burgh from Brooklyn College, and I know you’ve
written many articles. But I think the most telling one about you is
the 2008 one called “Conspiracy Theories,” where you openly
advocated government agents infiltrate activist groups of 9/11 Truth
and also stifle dissent online. I was wondering why do you think it’s
the government’s job, or why do you think the government should go
after family members who have questions and 9/11 responders who are
lied to about the air, survivors whose testimony conflicts, and also
government whistleblowers that were gagged because they released
information that contradicts the official story.

CASS
SUNSTEIN:
I think it was Ricky who said I’d written hundreds of articles and
I remember some and not others. That one I don’t remember very
well. I hope I didn’t say that.
But whatever was said in that article, my role in government is to
oversee federal rule-making in a way that is wholly disconnected from
the vast majority of my academic writing, including that.

[…]

RUDKOWSKI:
I just want to know is it safe to say that you retract saying that
conspiracy theories should be banned or taxed for having an opinion
online. Is it safe to say that?

SUNSTEIN:
I don’t remember the article very well. So I hope I didn’t say
either those things.

RUDKOWSKI:
But you did and it’s written. Do you retract them?

SUNSTEIN:
I’m focused on my job.

SOURCE: Obama
Information Czar Cass Sunstein Confronted on Cognitive Infiltration
of Conspiracy Groups

Now,
a decade on from Sunstein’s proposal, we know that military psyops
agents, political lobbyists, corporate shills and government
propagandists are spending vast sums of money and employing entire
armies of keyboard warriors, leaving comments and shaping
conversations to change the public’s opinions, influence their
behaviour, and even alter their mood. And they are helped along in
this quest by the very same technology that allows the public to
connect on a scale never before possible.

Technology
is always a double-edged sword, and sometimes it can be dangerous to
wield that sword at all. There are ways to identify and neutralize
the threat of online trolls and shills, but the phenomenon is not
likely to go away any time soon.

Each
of us must find our own answer to the question of how best to
incorporate these technologies into our life. But the next time you
find yourself caught up in an argument with an online persona that
may or may not be a genuine human being, it might be better to ask
yourself if your efforts are better spent engaging in the argument or
just turning off the computer.

Creative
Commons / Corbett
Report / Report
a typo