After a solid year of [1] hate-China spewing from all my feeds, [2] comments that I have made mysteriously being erased, and [3] the most contentious articles being flooded with “likes”… you have to wonder if you are in some kind of fake-mirror world.

It really seems that way.

We, as humans, have feelings and thoughts, ideas, and relationships. We have emotions, both good and bad, and we have desires, goals and yearnings. Yet, if we try to participate in any of the American forums… our opinions are often scrubbed and erased.

I’m not talking about swearing. Nor am I talking about being racist or making threats. I am talking about saying something innocuous like “I like hamburgers”, and then finding that you offended a vegan, who immediately pressed the “alert” button.

Yes, “safe” areas have sprung up all over the internet where people of “like minds” can communicate and put forth their opinions. Such as “Gab”. But even there, you risk banishment if your comments do not fit the appropriate target audience in the associated “news” venue.

It’s pretty much evidence that people are being put into nice tidy boxes based upon their thoughts.

And this, boys and girls, are how governments isolate, control and manipulate people. Which should give everyone reason to pause and think.

Historically, this has resulted in people's names going onto lists. And then later on, the police and military rounding up people on those lists, and doing very, very bad things to them.

Now, I know it’s hard to absorb if you are right now sitting in the middle of all this. So, instead of looking at the American media reality, maybe take a gander at another nation.

Like India…

If you read (for example) the Indian news media, you would be convinced that India is ready to invade China, and walk straight into Shanghai and no one can stop them. If you read Alex Jones or Hall Turner, you will be convinced that Donald Trump will win next weeks election in a landslide, and if you read CNN you will be convinced of the absolute opposite. Nothing is moderate or neutral. It’s all just nonsense.

Or is it really?

Are we really reading “news articles” and listening to the “comments” by others like ourselves? Or, as I believe, we are reading “fake news” which are really articles designed to manipulate, with comments and opinions and “likes” generated by ‘bots and software algorithms.

No longer “news”; a reporting of events.

Let’s look at the morning Drudge Headliners.

Drudge Report 29OCT20

Instead, of “news”, we now see the generation of “articles of manipulation”. These articles are fully intended to change how the reader thinks. They are not designed to inform. You know, like these…

• Media election planners prepare for night of mystery…

What news? Every election is like this. No one really knows who will win an election. So is this news, or is it something else?

• Biden vows to unify and save country…

Indeed. Isn't what they all say? Elect me and I will make everything all right!

• HEBDO cartoon of Erdogan lifting woman’s burqa to see naked body sparks fury…

Oh, every six months of so, someone writes a book, draws a cartoon, makes a statement, writes a poem, and fundamentalist islamic's are enraged and demand death! Is this news?

• DEBT CLOCK TICKS PAST $27 TRILLION…

Oh yeah. This debit clock thingy has been in the read for decades now. Why keep track? No one really cares, at least those who have the power to do anything about it.

• Second night of clashes in Philadelphia after police kill Black man…

The police shoot and kill a black man, and the black folk in ghettos riot. Black folk riot. It's what they do.

It's sort of a cause and effect kind of thing. But is this news? You all ever been to a black ghetto in Philly? Do you know him? Is Pennsylvania on your radar screen?

• COSTCO pulling products allegedly made with forced monkey labor…

Seriously? 

I think that the real interest in an article like this is how any one can train monkeys to do anything. Than how to create a for-profit model around it.

• Beijing Invasion of Taiwan Has Already Started…

Of course Drudge must have the obligatory anti-China article. It's a thing in America, don't you know.

So any-day-now Beijing is gonna invade Taiwan!  Taiwan is a state of China. Just like Texas is a state within America. The Taiwanese all have Chinese passports, speak the Chinese language, learn Chinese history, and so forth.

It's sort of like "any day now, Washington DC will invade Texas." Silly, I know. But the American audience has been so enormously dumbed-down that they just are not able to discern how ignorant they are.

To me, it looks a lot like a science fiction horror flick where the people haven’t a clue as to how badly they are being manipulated.

Let’s look at this.

Let’s look at (what I like to call) Internet Forum Manipulation…

Internet Forum Manipulation

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all innocently comment on articles that we read on the Internet, and then our thoughts can be read by others. Others could read our thoughts and there would be a free exchange of ideas and thoughts. Oh, wouldn’t it be nice…

Not so. It turns out that the control of thoughts and ideas is one of the most important tools in the arsenal of power and control. (Not to mention world-line alteration and redirection.)

As such, those in power, whether rich, wealthy, powerful or in government are totally desirous of harnessing this avenue to serve their own purposes.

It’s a horrible reality.

There are several techniques for the control and manipulation of an internet forum no matter what, or who is on it. We will go over each technique and demonstrate that only a minimal number of operatives can be used to eventually and effectively gain a control of a ‘uncontrolled forum.’

.

Let’s look at some of the techniques that those in power use to control us.

PTB - The Powers that Be.
The Oligarchy - The top 1% of the richest in a society.
The deep state - The long-employed unelected government employees.
The elected - The visible face of the government farce.

The caretakers - Actually, they are not involved at this level.

Forum Sliding

If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum – it can be quickly removed from public view by ‘forum sliding.’

A very popular technique on Freerepublic.com.

In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly prepositioned on the forum and allowed to ‘age.’ Each of these misdirectional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a ‘forum slide.’ The second requirement is that several fake accounts exist, which can be called upon, to ensure that this technique is not exposed to the public.

To trigger a ‘forum slide’ and ‘flush’ the critical post out of public view it is simply a matter of logging into each account both real and fake and then ‘replying’ to prepositined postings with a simple 1 or 2 line comment. This brings the unrelated postings to the top of the forum list (“bump to the top” or BTTT), and the critical posting ‘slides’ down the front page, and quickly out of public view. Although it is difficult or impossible to censor the posting it is now lost in a sea of unrelated and unuseful postings.

By this means it becomes effective to keep the readers of the forum reading unrelated and non-issue items.

Altering Opinion & Reviews

Your opinion does not matter. If it did, then you would be able to speak freely and without fear.

There would be no such thing as “freedom of speech zones”, and “no hate” campuses.

The days of the first amendment protections are over. The first amendment only applies to those who regurgitate the narrative as defined by the government, or their owners; the oligarchy.

Here, in this section we discuss just some of the techniques that those in power use to suppress your thoughts, opinions and activities. The reader should be well advised that it is terribly out of date and obsolete. Such is the situation in the United States today.

“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation … The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. 

They practically control both parties … [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. 

They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. 

It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.”

– John F. Hylan, Mayor of New York City from 1918-1925

It is common knowledge that businesses and even individuals can alter the behavior of those on the Internet.  But what is not so well known is that the Government takes this kind of manipulation very seriously and is doing their best to replicate it. 

Consider these examples that have somehow become public knowledge.

Facebook Manipulation

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”

-George Orwell

Facebook Quietly Admits to Censoring information regarding the WikiLeaks DNC Links, but doesn’t say why.

Well, we know why.

Facebook and the DNC are partners in the collection of raw data of American citizens.  I am sure that their efforts are quite extensive, and because of this, I shall only offer one or two examples of their efforts. If the reader chooses to disbelieve my conclusions in this matter, it will make no difference to me. So believe what you want.

Previously, Facebook was discovered to have removed a Live video of Philando Castille dying, and posts of the Bastille Day aftermath were scrubbed from the newswire.

Its news bar has also come under fire for being biased.

Facebook can call the issues disparate, but they’re not — not to users. At some point, the ignorance and blind claims of ‘damn that algorithm’ have to end. If Facebook wants us to turn to it for news and treat it seriously, then it has to be much more open.

Afterall, no one want’s to be spoon fed censored material.

The WikiLeaks link issue has reportedly been fixed, which is great — but also not really the point.

The fact links to the archive was blocked at all suggests there’s a very tight reign on what’s allowed on Facebook across the board, and that’s a problem.

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Not to mention, that this manipulation can be directed from outside the organization as well, such as from government agencies.

“More than 1,800 requests were so-called “emergency disclosures,” which are granted to law enforcement on a case-by-case basis, and are a subject of some controversy. 

They include, for instance, requests to suspend someone’s account, as was the case with Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old mother who was shot and killed by police in 2016, after she reportedly threatened officers with a weapon. 

She was broadcasting her confrontation on Facebook, and police asked the company to shut down her account, saying that other users were egging her on.”

-Hanna Kozlowska in the article titled “Facebook is giving the US government more and more data” (I guess that the First Amendment no longer has any validity.)

Google Manipulation

Google could influence who voters pick to be America’s next president.  This is the conclusion that research psychologist Robert Epstein came to after studying the demographics and algorisms used by the software firm.  Writing for Politico Magazine, Epstein, contends the Google search engine behemoth (as well as others) has;

"…amassed far more power to control elections … to control a wide variety of opinions and beliefs … than any company in history has ever had."

He continues;

"America’s next president could be eased into office not just by TV ads or speeches, but by Google’s secret decisions, and no one — except for me and perhaps a few other obscure researchers — would know how this was accomplished,"

According to Epstein, Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more and even up to 80 percent in some demographic groups. 

Even if we ignore that voting is the imposition of a majority’s will on a minority, facilitated by wielding the violence of the state. Even if we disregard that voting only allows its participants the choice between two entrenched, corrupt, archaic political parties (while third party and independent voices are intentionally blocked, ridiculed and plowed under.) 

We must then begin to confront the fact that electronic voting is such an openly obvious fraud to any “democracy” that would insanely choose to use it. 

To have an unverifiable invisible counting mechanism, a proprietary, secret software and hardware platform, a meaningless archiving and recount system, a closed-source software system that cannot be audited and inspected is essentially and deliberately the worst possible implementation. 

Not only does our country have the obvious electronic voting problems to deal with, but we have also implemented electronic voting in the most counter-intuitive, corrupt and problematically designed manner that it can possibly be implemented.

Epstein points to one telling experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups in which search rankings favored either Candidate A, Candidate B or neither candidate.

In the experiment, the participants were given brief descriptions of each candidate and then asked how much they liked and trusted each candidate and whom they would vote for.

Then they were allowed up to 15 minutes to conduct online research on the candidates using a Google-like search engine.   Each group had access to the same 30 search results, but the ordering of the results differed among the three groups. 

When our participants were done searching, “opinions shifted in the direction of the candidate who was favored in the rankings,” he writes. “Trust, liking and voting preferences all shifted predictably.”

"Perhaps the most effective way to wield political influence in today’s high-tech world is to donate money to a candidate and then to use technology to make sure he or she wins…"

- Robert Epstein

It is interesting to note that while Google had been extremely active in attempting to manipulate the 2016 election in favor of their preferred candidate Hillary Clinton, they ultimately failed. 

It was not because of their techniques however, but rather due to their expectation that the race would be close with Hillary leading by five points.  Their manipulations did not take into account other scenarios.

Google is facing new scrutiny in the wake of revelations that it stores users’ location data even when “Location History” is turned off.

In the past, Google quietly edited its description of the practice on its own website—while continuing said practice—to clarify that “some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps.”

As a result of the previously unknown practice, which was first exposed by the Associated Press, Google was sued by a man in San Diego. Simultaneously, activists in Washington, DC urged the Federal Trade Commission to examine whether the company is in breach of its 2011 consent decree with the agency.

In the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in San Francisco, attorneys representing a man named Napoleon Patacsil argued that Google is violating the California Invasion of Privacy Act and the state’s constitutional right to privacy.

The lawsuit seeked class-action status, and it would include both an “Android Class” and “iPhone Class” for the potential millions of people in the United States with such phones who turned off their Location History and nonetheless had it recorded by Google.

Further Reading

Google’s new scheme to connect online to offline shopping scrutinized

Also on August 17, attorneys from the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote in a sternly worded three-page letter to the FTC that Google’s practices are in clear violation of the 2011 settlement with the agency.

In that settlement, Google agreed that it would not misrepresent anything related to "(1) the purposes for which it collects and uses covered information, and (2) the extent to which consumers may exercise control over the collection, use, or disclosure of covered information.

"Until the Associated Press story on August 13, Google's policy simply stated: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored."

This turns out to not be true.

Amazon Manipulation

Sorry, but I am going to use an example from politics. Hopefully this one (being so dated) will not be offensive to my readership. Just remember people, politics in America is just a big game of "bread and circuses for the masses". All the participants work together. 

Amazon can and will change and manipulate reviews for political reasons.  With the proper amount of money, they will do so for ANY reason. (And, we all know, that the United States government has a bottomless supply of money…)

Let’s go back to later 2016, early 2017…

Hillary 2016 Book – Stronger Together

Here’s a funny story that wasn’t reported in the mainstream media.  It took place during the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald trump. Both had written books to promote their causes and beliefs.  However, Hillary Clinton’s book tanked and was poorly received.  Here’s a screen shot;

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As The New York Times reported at the time, the book was a disaster.  Both Mrs. Clinton and her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, have promoted the book on the campaign trail, but the sales figure, which tallies about 80 percent of booksellers nationwide and does not include e-books, firmly makes the book what the publishing industry would consider a flop.

“Stronger Together,” whose cover shows Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kaine waving, arrived closer to Election Day than most of these types of books. Named after the campaign’s slogan, “Stronger Together” offers readers, according to the book jacket,

“specific and practical solutions, while also articulating a bold and expansive vision of change and renewal.”

Its roughly 250 pages intersperse bullet-point policy ideas, like “launch a national initiative for suicide prevention” and “humanely address the Central American migrant crisis,” with photographs of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kaine on the campaign trail, charts in the campaign’s signature chunky font and highlights from Mrs. Clinton’s speeches.

Unfortunately the book was a flop. 

No one wanted it, and the one’s whom actually bought the book gave it negative reviews.  So, as with everything else in this ‘new normal rigged’ world, something had to be done and (Washington Post) WaPo-owner Jeff Bezos’ Amazon reviews appear to have been ‘tweaked’.

They apparently changed the reviews and the stats to reflect a much more favorable view of the book. 

Indeed, more than doubling Hillary’s top reviews.

But, as WND.com explains, Amazon’s steps to ‘fix’ Hillary’s book reviews has resulted in 5-star ratings with scathingly negative comments. (I guess that is what happens with the literate masses object to such blatant manipulation.)

If you can’t even win when the rules are changed in your favor, things must be REALLY bad.

That’s how it looks for Hillary Clinton’s new 2016 campaign book, “Stronger Together,” co-authored with running mate Tim Kaine. WND reported this strange turn of events when the book was being savaged on Amazon.com with negative reviews, with 81 percent one-star ratings and an average of only 1.7.

Of course denials were everywhere, and the Clinton organized shrills quickly lashed out at “trolls” they said were criticizing the book only because they oppose the Democrat’s presidential candidacy.

It’s really quite funny.

Once it became news what Amazon was doing, other purchasers of the book had to chime in.  WND previously reported there were more than 1,200 reviews, and the number grew to than 2,000.

.

However, that just couldn’t possibly stand, and by Thursday afternoon, the amount was yet again culled (again!) until there were only 255 reviews, with many of the most critical reviews removed by Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post, which created an army of 20 reporters and researchers to investigate the life of Donald Trump.

Victory for the Clinton book, however, remains out of grasp, with the negative, one-star responses, outnumbering positive, five-star responses nearly 2-1. The one-star ratings Thursday were 62 percent, to 35 percent for five-star ratings.

And, of course,  knowing the DNC manipulation of all their reviews, the book reviewers simply punched the five-star button then made harshly critical condemnations of the book and Hillary Clinton.

That way their opinions were still posted…

"I didn’t buy this book or read this book, but I have read the reviews, and enjoyed hours of entertaining, fun filled reading, expressing the TRUTH, about a crooked, lying, corrupt, terminally ill Presidential candidate, who stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, and who is about the steal the Presidency with the use of election fraud. 

10 Stars to the authors of these reviews. 

Proof that not only are Amazon.com shoppers of superior intelligence, but thye call it like they see it…. Amazon shows this as a verified purchase, when I didn’t buy the book … how fun!”

- From suz702, who posted a five-star ranking

On and on, there’s pages of this stuff…

 “the book confirms the hrc is a racist. every matter in her mind is about racies (sic). but reality is she does not care about the black people. just look at the ever increasing trend of black population that are relying on welfare since the obama rule. the fundermental (sic) cause of this result is the fact that lefties of the country favor the riches by allowing outsourcing jobs to other countries. black people should wake up, stop supporting dnc and hrc, who is effectively a puppet of the elite class. the book is simply a propaganda.”

- Ian alexander, another five-star reviewer said.

Just two days earlier, out of 1,244 reviews, 81 percent were one-star and 16 percent five-star. The book plunged from No. 840 earlier this week to No. 1,538 on Thursday. It was No. 5 in the subcategory “Books-Politics & Social Sciences-Politics & Government-Elections & Political Process-Leadership.”

The reviews dripped sarcasm, both before the Amazon edits to the reviews and after.

“I bought this thinking it would be a how-to book. 

I wanted ‘How to set up your own Foundation for fun and profit.’ Also, would like to have seen a chapter on ‘Ten easy steps to setting up your own secure server in a bathroom,'”

-Elaine.

And, here’s another…

“Not only no but hell no. I’d rather read Mein Kampf,”

- Anthony Messina.

Chjhores said:

“Pre-ordered an autographed copy but had to return it after this week’s announcement as I was worried it was contaminated with pneumonia bacteria. 

I didn’t want to end up exposed to the illness like her grandkids in Chelsea’s apartment she was playing with on 9/11 after she collapsed, or the little girl she was hugging in the street afterwards. Thought about ordering the Kindle version but I thought it might open my device up to being hacked by communist countries. I wasn’t too surprised to see Tim Kaine on the front cover giving the traditional National Socialist salute (“Heil Hitler!”), I felt it fitting.

Strongly recommended for those who believe the USA isn’t anything special and should be more like the peaceful utopias of North Korea, Iran, or Cuba.”

And kpm said,

“Imagine my dismay when key parts of her life were omitted, would have made for far better reading if she had included all of the below starting with flunking the D.C. Bar Exam to:

• Was removed from her House Judiciary Committee staffer job because of incompetence and lying.
• The Whitewater scandal.
• Married a serial liar and cheater, who occasionally had sexual encounters with nonconsenting partners.
• Lied about “sniper fire” in an attempt to simulate exposure to danger in a war zone.
• The subject of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that led to the impeachment and disbarment of her husband
• Took crockery, furniture, artwork and other items from the White House — had to return and/or pay for them.
• Said “what difference, at this point, does it make” about four brave people killed in Libya as a direct result of her failure to protect them on the anniversary of 9/11.
• Totally ignored the structure and rules for the handling of sensitive national security information.
• Amassed a personal fortune with “speaking fees” and payments from private sector political donors and foreign governments into transparent “foundations” in obvious exchange for future political favor.”

Nearly 1,500 people found that review “helpful.”

But more than 3,400 found helpful the comments from Daniel B.:

“I was going to read this book … I really was. 

But just as I got started, I found myself under sniper fire, passed out, and fell and hit my head. After that I got double vision and had to wear glasses that were so damn thick I couldn’t even see to read. 

As if that wasn’t enough, I then had an allergic reaction to something and started coughing so hard I spit out what looked like a couple of lizard’s eyeballs, my limbs locked up, and I passed out and fell down again, waking up only to find out I had been diagnosed with pneumonia 2 days earlier. 

Somehow I managed to power through it all, but it’s a good thing I was able to make a small fortune on this random small trade in the commodities market (cattle futures or some such thing) and then, miracle of all miracles, a few banks offered me a few million to just talk to their employees for a few minutes – and all that really helped out because I swear I was dead broke and couldn’t figure out how I was gonna come up with the 6 bucks to pay for this book, let alone pay the $1,500 for my health insurance this month. 

I still want to read it, but, honestly, what difference at this point does it make? I hear it sucks anyway.”

Clinton’s 2015 book, “Hard Choices,” received an average of only three stars despite garnering 2,460 customer reviews.

Here’s some screen captures of the “Stronger Together” reviews, because by the time this manuscript is released all of these reviews will be erased to fit the new narrative.

Of course Bezo would manipulate the data his company controls.  It is in his own best interests. WND also has documented Bezos’ interest in the election outcome, with the Post’s army of investigators looking into Trump’s life.

As WND reported this summer, Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward told the National Association of Realtors Convention in Washington Wednesday:

“There’s a lot we don’t know. We have 20 people working on Trump. We’re going to do a book. We’re doing articles about every phase of his life.”

Woodward said he has been investigating Trump’s real-estate deals in New York. Why a book on Trump and not Hillary and her 22 biggest scandals?

“[W]e have years and years of reporting on Hillary Clinton to draw from, including her last presidential campaign, her time as secretary of state, and her position as U.S. senator, Because Trump’s involvement in political life is far more limited, the Post newsroom decided to embark on a book as a special project. In order to complete the book in a timely fashion, reporters from throughout the newsroom have been assigned to work for a brief period on particular aspects of his life and career.”

Coratti explained.

The one-star reviews for the Clinton book also continued. All were dripping with sarcasm.  Just Thursday afternoon, Jimsdun wrote:

“Well I’m disappointed. This doesn’t tell me how to create a faux charitable foundation and then use it for money laundering.”

Hillary 2017 Book – What Happened

You would think that Amazon would know better than to repeat their manipulative techniques, but obviously they do not read alternative media.  They are still drinking off the teat of mainstream media and are completely unaware of the public knowledge of their actions.

In what many have dubbed a flagrant intervention by Amazon itself to seemingly boost the rating of Hillary Clinton’s new book “What Happened“, the Telegraph first reported, and subsequently many others observed first hand, that Amazon has been monitoring and deleting 1-star reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book “which was greeted with a torrent of criticism on the day it was released.”

Reviews of What Happened have been mixed, with some accusing Clinton of using it as an opportunity to blame others, such as former FBI head James Comey, Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, social media and pretty much everything else, for her failure, rather than herself.

Even The New York Times, which supported Clinton’s campaign, wrote that the book is “a score-settling jubilee”.

What is fascinating, is how few one-star reviews have remained on the website amid reports and screen-grabs showing that reviewers used the space to criticize the former First Lady. One 1-star review, which remained on the website earlier, read:

"Read all the promotional excerpts, which combined come close to book length – pretty good novel. It is fiction, isn't it? Surely, someone is playing a joke."

Another wrote…

"Picked this book up at Wal-Mart out of sheer morbid curiosity. Returned it, claiming I bought the wrong book"

While this is not the first time Amazon has intervened to “adjust” the ratings of its products, in November negative comments under a book by anti-Trump broadcaster Megyn Kelly appeared to be removed by the retailer, it has rarely “adjusted” reviews of such a prominent product so publicly.

Speaking to Fortune, an Amazon spokesperson said:

"In the case of a memoir, the subject of the book is the author and their views. It’s not our role to decide what a customer would view as helpful or unhelpful in making their decision. We do however have mechanisms in place to ensure that the voices of many do not drown out the voices of a few and we remove customer reviews that violate our community guidelines."

So how does this change reality….

Well just look though the lens of a clock.

And then seven hours later…

What Amazon.com shows as of today 29OCT20;

Yes, it’s a best seller!

Man! If only my writings could become a best seller. What’s her secret? Are her ghost writers all that great. Truthfully, I am terribly jealous.

Twitter Manipulation

Perhaps one of the most manipulated social media platforms is Twitter. I don’t use it.  I signed up for it when it first came out, and then lost interest after two days. That is the sum total of my twitter experience. However, I am an outlier. Others, such as Donald Trump, use it quite frequently.

Let’s look at some of the ways it is manipulated to serve the needs of those in power.

Twitter Manipulation – Shadowbanned

Following the permanent banning of [1] conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos from using its service; the [2] suspension of the account of Glenn Reynolds, aka @instapundit and creator of the Instapundit blog, a University of Tennessee law professor and a conservative columnist for USA TODAY; and [3] blocking veteran reporter Mahir Zeynalov after bowing to pressure from Turkish president Erdogan; October 2016 saw the [4] ‘shadowbanning’ of thoughtful – non-violent – twitter-er Scott Adams – the creator of the Dilbert cartoon character.

Scott Adams asked his followers for examples of Clinton supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supports in public… which seems to have ‘triggered’ some people and got Adams “Shadowbanned” from Twitter…

“This weekend I got “shadowbanned” on Twitter. It lasted until my followers noticed and protested. Shadowbanning prevents my followers from seeing my tweets and replies, but in a way that is not obvious until you do some digging.

 Why did I get shadowbanned?

 Beats me.

But it was probably because I asked people to tweet me examples of Clinton supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supporters in public. I got a lot of them. It was chilling. 

Late last week my Twitter feed was invaded by an army of Clinton trolls (it’s a real thing) leaving sarcastic insults and not much else on my feed. There was an obvious similarity to them, meaning it was organized. 

At around the same time, a bottom-feeder at Slate wrote a hit piece on me that had nothing to do with anything. 

Except obviously it was politically motivated. 

It was so lame that I retweeted it myself. The timing of the hit piece might be a coincidence, but I stopped believing in coincidences this year. 

All things considered, I had a great week. I didn’t realize I was having enough impact to get on the Clinton enemies list. I don’t think I’m supposed to be happy about any of this, but that’s not how I’m wired.”

Twitter Manipulation – Bots

“Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. 

In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. 

Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.” 

-Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited (1958)

In a 2014 report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the social networking site Twitter estimated that more than 23 million of its active user accounts were being run by “bots” — software agents or bits of code that act on their own to respond to news and world events. They interact with real users, never revealing their true nature.

Bots of this kind have been used in efforts to sway public opinion in Central America already for a decade. The hacker and political operative Andrés Sepúlveda claims to have employed armies of bots to influence at least a half-dozen major election results in Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua and elsewhere.

Could the same happen in the U.S. and Europe?

Probably so, given findings on bot activity ahead of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. As part of the Computational Propaganda Research Project at Oxford University researchers looked at some 300,000 Twitter accounts and found that a mere 1 percent of them generated about one third of all tweets relevant to the Brexit debate.

1/3 of all Brexit debate were generated by 1% of accounts.

They believe that many of those accounts were run by bots, because human users could not have sustained such a level of activity without the help of automation. It’s not clear whether the activity swayed the result, though the Leave campaign did generate more automated tweets.

This issue is far bigger than Brexit: The disturbing reality is that computational propaganda is already with us.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential race, Twitter bots support both Trump and Clinton. Bots of various kinds live on cloud servers and operate 24 hours a day, and account for about 50 percent of all activity on the web.

According to the Central American hacker, Sepúlveda, peoples’ opinions tend to be swayed more by views they see as coming spontaneously from real people than by views expressed on television or in newspapers.

Twitter Exposed by the NY Times

Most of the reports regarding the manipulation by the media are buried deep down in the lower nooks and crannies of the mainstream media.  Obviously they do not want people to know how they manipulate and conspire to alter viewpoints and opinions. Yet, occasionally an excellent article comes out that just “kicks the door down” regarding just this type of activity.

The New York Times wrote just this kind of article regarding Twitter. It’s worthy of a read. Here is what political commentator Rush Limbaugh (The New York Times Exposes the Fakery of Twitter, on 29JAN18.) has to say about this article;

Folks, I have to tell you something. The New York Times put on their website late Saturday and published in their newspaper on Sunday one of the most phenomenal stories. Now, I know. I am on record as having lost respect for the New York Times, and I am on record as having said many times that my instinctive reaction to anything in the New York Times is not to believe it. However, this story I happen to know is true — and it is phenomenal.

It is a very, very long story. I would recommend that you read this story on your computer so that you can benefit and experience the amazing graphics that they use to illustrate the point. The point of the story is that you, anybody, can buy followers on Twitter and Facebook. You can buy retweets. In other words, you can buy fake human beings and have them reported as following you. The names of people who have done this are listed in the story. They run from actors, to athletes, to pundits, to journalists.

These are bots. You know, I’ve found a lot of people — when I say a Twitter bot or a Facebook bot — say, “What is that?” Well, the easiest way to explain it is it’s just an automatic script. It’s just a little piece of code that is triggered by anything the creator wants it to be triggered by. It’s called a robot or a bot because there’s no real person behind it. It’s a fake. It’s made to look like an actual human being with a Twitter account but no human being exists.

It’s totally fake, made up. Some of these bots are actually based on real people whose identities are stolen and modified ever so slightly so that you wouldn’t notice it to the naked eye. And others are just manufactured out of whole cloth. There’s an actor mentioned here in this story that has 975,000 followers with the vast majority of them unreal. They have been purchased. The number one company selling these bots is right here in West Palm Beach, above Rocco’s Tacos on Clematis Street!

Not to be confused with the Rocco’s Tacos on PGA Boulevard. The Rocco’s Tacos on Clematis Street is where this little guy’s office is. He’s 27 years old. He makes people think that his office is in Manhattan. It’s exceedingly cheap. You can buy 100,000 followers for 10 bucks. The guy has earned six to $7 million selling fake followers. My friends, what this means is that very little is real on Twitter, ditto Facebook when you can buy followers.

Ray Lewis, future Hall of Fame linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens is listed as one who has purchased followers. Now, some of these people are gonna say, “I — I didn’t know! My agent must have done that.” But the bottom line is, you can create bots to do anything. The reason I know this is true is because — as I have shared with you on countless occasions — we have run up against this procedure, this technique trying to damage our business here. And we have found out in our investigational research, it is exactly what happened.

In our case it was 10 people who were flooding our advertisers with massive amounts of emails made to look like it was coming from tens of thousands of people, and it was 10 people creating fake Twitter users, fake customers, fake everything. So it’s one thing to create bots to bombard your enemies. It’s another thing for you to knowingly go out and purchase followers. So what it means is that when you’re on Twitter and you’re looking at somebody that is somewhat known, not the well-known at all, a YouTube star that has millions of followers, the likelihood it is it is nowhere near true.

But look at the influence that it has had. This is why followers are purchased. Look at how often the Drive-By Media quotes Twitter in every story they do. How many times have you heard in reaction to a story “Twitter is melting down”? And you are being led to believe that a story happens, whatever it is, and on Twitter there is this massive reaction to it, either positive or negative — and then you are further led to believe that that story is huge and that millions of Americans have an opinion on it.

And the likelihood is that very little of that is even true. Now, you might be asking, “Why would the New York Times be doing this?” It’s very clear to me. The New York Times had to weigh a couple of things here. On the one hand, these bots can be used to really damage your enemies — business enemies, business opponents, political opponents, political enemies, personal enemies — because you can create fake bots, and you can make it look like a person is literally despised and hated when that person isn’t.

And you can turn it around. You can make it look like a person is universally loved and adored and renowned by gazillions, and that isn’t true. It’s a way to earn fake popularity. Everything is fake on this social media. Not everything. So much of what social media is is fake. So much of it is unearned. So much of it is the result of shortcuts. I’m certain the New York Times did this because they’re fed up with Twitter having more influence than they do. “The New York Times is the paper of record!

“The New York Times is the media of record. Who the hell, what the hell is this Twitter business?” they have probably been saying themselves. I mean, it is a long story. It has many different writers and reporters on it. The evidence is pretty clear. As I say, if I didn’t have firsthand knowledge of this, then I would be highly suspicious of the reporting, of the agenda, the whole narrative. But since I know that this stuff happens. Now, by the way, I have to tell you, I did not know — and I’m happy admitting this.

It makes me sound like I’m a bit naive. I did not know you could buy followers. I didn’t know that. But a lot of people have found out you can buy followers. Do you realize the power of that, folks? Let’s say you’re a B actor or a B pundit, you’re a YouTube star. In reality, you don’t have millions of people watching. Ridiculous! Streaming hasn’t grown that much yet. But yet there’s all these “YouTube stars.” Can I give you some evidence of this? There was some YouTube guy. I forget his name.

I don’t mean this to be critical of the YouTube guy. Please do not misunderstand. But some YouTube guy was creating very clever videos. I don’t even know what the genre was. His first name was Casey. So CNN thought this guy had this massive Millennial audience. And they signed this guy up to start producing videos for them. And they got zilch. The guy finally had to admit that he didn’t know how to do what CNN wanted. He didn’t know how to… So… Well, what the real problem was, the guy didn’t have anywhere near the number of followers and audience that it was made to appear that he did.

See, when did you live by the fake sword, you die by it. When you want fame but it isn’t real, it’s gonna come back and bite you. When you want wealth but that isn’t real — you’ve stolen it, you’ve cheated it, you haven’t earned it — that’s gonna come back and bite you. You want popularity. And everybody on social media does. And this is just one side of social media that’s bad. The other side is just the absolute sewer that it is with the cultural-destroying language and behavior that is used on these social networks, the discourse and all of that.

And then the third element of this is all the lying about what great lives people have and how exciting their lives are. And people read this and think their lives are miserable and they get depressed. I mean, this is… It’s bad all the way around, and now adding this buying followers to it. So how many people have now comfortably gotten a false, totally incorrect opinion of the popularity of certain issues, of the popularity of certain people, when you can go buy it all? And I’m telling you, it’s cheap.

You can buy 100,000 followers for 20 bucks, folks. All you have to do is know where to go do it. Some of these bots are actual real people who do not realize they’re being used. Their e-mail address is changed with one letter. A capital I might become a small I so that nobody would notice it. The user photo might be compressed a little bit so that it looks slight different color but not enough so you wouldn’t notice it without a side-by-side comparison. They make up people and they take actual people and steal their identities, ’cause you have to have some legitimate feel of the follower scam to work.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This Twitter debauchery is even worse. You can kill a stock. You can drive a company’s stock down or the other way with some of these fake bots, the followers and so forth. I’ll tell you what. James O’Keefe, folks, his latest book involving his expose on the political nature Twitter and how they literally ban conservative thought is called American Pravda. It’s been outs a couple of weeks. If you read books, and if you want to learn — at least get a primer on what Twitter really is and how it operates — James O’Keefe, American Pravda.”

Altering Product Reviews

Talk about a glowing review: one five-star review given to a light-up USB cable for sale on Amazon had a headline claiming that this product “has lit up my life.”  That review was not only glowing, it was steaming, Amazon says.

In today’s world, anything can be bought for the right price. 

This includes written opinions about products and services.  One particularly worrisome example is with the book reviews on the website Amazon.com.  It turns out that there is a high percentage of them (relatively) that are fake; fabricated and simply made up to deceive either one way or the other.

In the case of the glowing review of the light-up USB cable;  The review was fake, purchased by a third-party Amazon seller, the online retailer claims, and probably cost the manufacturer between $19 and $22 (£13 and £15) to write it and have it listed on the Internet for (assumingly) forever.  Those are the accusations Amazon has made in its first-ever lawsuit against sites that sell reviews.

The suit, filed Wednesday in Seattle’s King County Superior Court, accuses Jay Gentile, a California resident, and the websites [1] buyamazonreviews.com, [2] buyazonreviews.com, [3] bayreviews.net and [4] buyreviewsnow.com, of trademark infringement, false advertising and violations of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and the Washington Consumer Protection Act.

The sites sell packages of reviews, from as few as 3 to as many as 100.  Promises include “drip-feed delivery” that won’t raise Amazon’s suspicions and a “100 percent stick guarantee” for reviews, promising to replace any that Amazon deletes or filters out.

One of the sites Gentile is accused of running, buyazonreviews.com, sounds like it’s on the up-and-up:

“We use real people that are sourced from all around the world to deliver high quality unbiased reviews on your products.”

The fine print sounds just as legit:

“We are not receiving any money for your reviews nor are we paying reviewers. Your payment goes towards review sourcing, database management, and operation costs. “

But Amazon says that the reality “is far different.”

In this, its first ever crackdown on fake reviews since it debuted the review platform 20 years ago (with its first review of Dr. Seuss’s “The Butter Battle Book”), Amazon accuses Gentile of promising to “provide as many five-star reviews as the purchaser wanted” and to “slow drip” them onto Amazon’s product pages so that the company would have a “more difficult time detecting them”.

In the complaint, Amazon also accuses Gentile of advising his customers to “do a few verified purchase reviews … so as not to raise any eyebrows with Amazon.

"The reviewers don't actually have to receive the products, Gentile allegedly told customers.  Rather, his clients could just send empty boxes to try to fool Amazon into thinking that the reviewer was a "verified purchaser."

The complaint quotes the advice Gentile allegedly gave:

Note: You do not have to actually ship the item unless you want to. We suggest that for tracking purposes is that you just ship out an empty box or envelope, this will show [A]mazon that the item was actually shipped.

When one clueless reviewer working for buyazonreviews.com complained about not having actually received a product, Gentile allegedly reassured his client that she’d be brought in line:

“All our reviewers know of the process and I am not sure as to why she sent this to you but I will ensure it does not happen in the future.”

Amazon gave a number of examples of what it says are phony reviews, such as the USB cable five-star review:

This has lit up my life
By j9 on March 31, 2015

Verified Purchase

“Review: I was kinda doubtful about the "electroluminescent technology" of this USB cable. That it actually would work. But it actually did. Not only did the blue light function as they should, they were clear and bright, plus they turned off when the charge was finished. It's rad. They should make them in other colors too. Let's just say we're really impressed and are going to order a few more...”

Amazon is bringing claims of [1] trademark infringement, saying the websites are using the company’s name and logo without authorization.  It’s also accusing the websites of [2] cybersquatting by hosting sites with names “identical to or confusingly similar to” Amazon’s own site.  Amazon has asked the court to force the various websites to stop using its name and trademarks and to stop selling Amazon reviews. It’s also seeking triple damages and attorney’s fees.

Imagine a world where if individuals can set up a cheap website and system to do this, what powerful and well-funded governments can do. 

It should not be believed that they would do nothing, for the maintenance of those in power (regardless of where they reside) are all heavily dependent upon securing the mass opinions of the populace.  The reader should view everything on the Internet with suspicion, from news reports, to product reviews.  The Internet is a wonderful tool, and it’s use in shaping your opinion on various matters is a well-honed and well-sharpened skill.

Flooding the Forum with “Likes”

In most forums, those posts with the greatest number of “likes” are presented first (or at the top of the forum).  By controlling and altering the number of “likes” by various computer bots, one can effectively control the postings on a given internet forum. 

This is a very common practice, and is common at Facebook, and Google where the actual software companies takes control of the forums in this manner.  However, outside entities can also manipulate the forum using this technique.

Bangladesh “Click Farm”

The idea behind a click-farm is simple, but it takes a little explanation to understand how they came to be.

In the old days, when social media likes and website views were incredibly valuable, many webmasters turned to the dark side of the Internet to find ways to inflate them. Earning 1,000 likes or 1,000 website hits was a tough process, but it could be made a lot easier by setting up a program to refresh the page over and over. For Facebook, those bots would register accounts and use them to like the page.

Robots are easy to detect. 

Facebook fan page likes  could easily find these fraudulent accounts and remove them. Something needed to be done to make those number-inflating accounts less visible. Something to make them look more legitimate.

The answer, as it turned out, was just to make them legitimate – or as legitimate as it was possible to make them, anyways.

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Webmasters pay people in developing nations like Bangladesh, where an annual income of $120 is acceptable, to create Facebook accounts. Or, more likely, webmasters pay a company that in turn pays these people.

These people register accounts, sometimes dozens, and sit idle until the money comes in. They receive a payment and a target Facebook account, and they relentlessly like the page with their accounts.

Even this was fairly easy to detect.

After all, if 10,000 accounts all mobilize in the span of a week and they all like the same selection of 10 pages, those ten pages very obviously purchased likes from a click farm.

At one point, Facebook purged so many fraudulent accounts it totaled nearly 10% of their entire user base. Unlike YouTube wiping views, however, Facebook’s deletions didn’t remove fake likes.

The modern version of a clickfarm still works the same way, only the people running the accounts take steps to obfuscate their traffic.

In addition to liking the pages they’re paid to like, they also click through ads and related pages on Facebook and like pages they aren’t paid to follow. This is how your page, running legitimate Facebook ads, can run afoul of a click-farm. The flurry of “organic” likes makes it much harder to pick out the mobilization of a click-farm for purchased likes.

The Chinese “Click Farm”

In 14MAY17, an unnamed person disclosed the operational details of a Chinese “click farm” used to manipulate the number of “likes” on a given Internet forum[i].  Photos were provided and some details were presented.  From the article;

The bizarre ‘click farm’ of 10,000 phones that give FAKE ‘likes’ to our most-loved apps

Pages on social media websites are given fake ‘likes’ to make them look more popular by thousands of phones

“Footage has emerged of a giant "click farm" that uses more than 10,000 mobile phones to give product ratings and pages on social media websites phoney "likes". 

Companies reportedly pay thousands to get their apps more likes by using services like this massive plant offers. 

This covert clip in China shows rows and rows of like-making machines all wired to other devices in a factory. And there are said to be thousands more phones in the same building all made for the same purpose.”

The reader should note some details regarding all of the cell phones.  They are all smart phones, typically generic or “off make” brands (probably due to cost considerations). 

Note that the camera is covered by tape so that if any agency wanted to turn on the camera, it would not be able to record any video. Notice the screens, all of them are slightly different, but the forum that they are posing on is identical.  The computer software provides a kind of software personality that automates the clicking algorithm.

A Russian man took video footage of the like-making machines and shared it online. But social media users reacted angrily to this clip. One viewer wrote: “Is everything in the modern world ‘fake’?” While, a third furious user shared: “Is anything actually real anymore?”

To which I must educate the reader. 

Yes.  Everything on the Internet is fake.

The Thailand “Click Farm”

Three Chinese men arrested in Thailand have acknowledged that they were operating a “click farm,” using hundreds of cellphones and several hundred thousand SIM cards to run up “likes” and views on WeChat, a Chinese social media mobile application, Thai police reported on 13JUN17.

Immigration Police Capt. Itthikorn Atthanark said the men explained they were paid according to how many likes and views they generated, each earning 100,000-150,000 baht ($2,950-$4,400) per month. Click farms are hired to inflate an online site’s viewership for prestige and profit.

Some politicians boast of how many followers they have on social media, while clicks can generate ad revenue.

WeChat is China’s most prominent online social media platform, incorporating a text-messaging service as well as marketing for online stores.

Police seized 476 cellphones and around 347,200 SIM cards during the arrests Sunday at a house in Sa Kaeo province, about 200 kilometers (120 miles) east of Bangkok. The men, identified as Wang Dong, Niu Bang and Ni Wenjin, were charged with working without a permit and importing the phones without paying taxes.

Itthikorn said the arrests followed a police stakeout at the Sa Kaeo house after receiving reports of suspicious activity. He said a police search Monday at another residence believed to be engaged in the same activity came up empty-handed, though police believe others connected with the business are still at large.

Russian “troll farm”

Not only can you find “click farms” in Russia, but they are also used with ‘bots to flood the social media with trolls and other denizens of internet discussion. These farms park themselves and place ‘bots fully intended to disrupt the discussion on social media sites.

And what’s more, they are open for hire, and will do so for any social media. Apparently some of their biggest clients reside in the United States where they make princely amounts disrupting discussion as tolls on social media. So in Russia, not only do you have click-farms, but they also double as ’bout farms, and bit-mining operations.

The Internet is full of articles on this subject…

• See surprising location of Russian troll factory – CNN Video
• A Russian Company Is Opening a Mining Farm in the Arctic …
• Judge allows US to drop two of 16 defendants in Russian …
• Before Russia’s ‘troll farm’ turned to US, it had a more …
• How Russia’s Troll Farm Is Changing Tactics Before the …
• Russian troll farm makes US comeback | Financial Times

Consensus Cracking

A second highly effective technique (which you can see in operation all the time at www.abovetopsecret.com) is ‘consensus cracking.’

Pig Farts are destroying the Ozone Layer
Posted by Trustworthy Joe Average

Everyone knows that XXXXXX. It has been proven that XXXXXXX. And since XXXXX is a Y-chromosome, and Brando is good for plants, that DNA is great with JAVA, and the study clearly indicates that bovine farts are safe, while pig farts are dangerous.

To develop a consensus crack, the following technique is used. Under the guise of a fake account a posting is made which looks legitimate and is towards the truth is made – but the critical point is that it has a VERY WEAK PREMISE without substantive proof to back the posting.

Once this is done then under alternative fake accounts a very strong position in your favor is slowly introduced over the life of the posting. It is IMPERATIVE that both sides are initially presented, so the uninformed reader cannot determine which side is the truth. As postings and replies are made the stronger ‘evidence’ or disinformation in your favour is slowly ‘seeded in.’ Thus the uninformed reader will most like develop the same position as you, and if their position is against you their opposition to your posting will be most likely dropped.

This works on most websites, such as Facebook.

However in some cases where the forum members are highly educated and can counter your disinformation with real facts and linked postings, you can then ‘abort’ the consensus cracking by initiating a ‘forum slide.’

In April 2020, my LinkedIN feed was filled with articles stating that the Italian government was being overwhelmed with lawsuits against China for "mishandling" of the Coronavirus.

The only thing was, all of Italy was in lock-down at that time, and mail, servers and the Judicial apparatus were not functioning. They didn't even begin to resume operation until July.

Obviously it was a big lie. 

No legal actions were taken inside of Italy against China at all, but you would never realize that if you were not aware of the situation within both Italy and China, and how the legal systems works. Things that most Americans are unaware of, which is why this technique is so prevalent in America today.

Topic Dilution

Topic dilution is not only effective in forum sliding it is also very useful in keeping the forum readers on unrelated and non-productive issues.

This is a critical and useful technique to cause a ‘RESOURCE BURN.’ By implementing continual and non-related postings that distract and disrupt (trolling ) the forum readers they are more effectively stopped from anything of any real productivity. If the intensity of gradual dilution is intense enough, the readers will effectively stop researching and simply slip into a ‘gossip mode.’ Which is the ideal outcome.

In this state they can be more easily misdirected away from facts towards uninformed conjecture and opinion.

The less informed they are the more effective and easy it becomes to control the entire group in the direction that you would desire the group to go in.

Caution is often warranted. It must be stressed that a proper assessment of the psychological capabilities and levels of education is first determined of the group to determine at what level to ‘drive in the wedge.’ By being too far off topic too quickly it may trigger censorship by a forum moderator.

Information Collection

Information collection is also a very effective method to determine the psychological level of the forum members, and to gather intelligence that can be used against them.

In this technique in a light and positive environment a ‘show you mine so me yours’ posting is initiated.

From the number of replies and the answers that are provided much statistical information can be gathered. An example is to post your ‘favorite weapon’ and then encourage other members of the forum to showcase what they have. In this matter it can be determined by reverse proration what percentage of the forum community owns a firearm, and or a illegal weapon. This same method can be used by posing as one of the form members and posting your favorite ‘technique of operation.’ From the replies various methods that the group utilizes can be studied and effective methods developed to stop them from their activities.

This method has become famous by various anti-gun groups who intentionally collected information on gun owners in selected cities in anticipation of a anti-gun government.

Anger Trolling

This technique is known as anger trolling.

Statistically, there is always a percentage of the forum posters who are more inclined to violence. In order to determine who these individuals are, it is a requirement to present a image to the forum to deliberately incite a strong psychological reaction.

From this the most violent in the group can be effectively singled out for reverse IP location and possibly local enforcement tracking.

To accomplish this only requires posting a link to a video depicting a local police officer massively abusing his power against a very innocent individual. Statistically of the million or so police officers in America there is always one or two being caught abusing there powers and the taping of the activity can be then used for intelligence gathering purposes – without the requirement to ‘stage’ a fake abuse video.

This method is extremely effective, and the more so the more abusive the video can be made to look. Sometimes it is useful to ‘lead’ the forum by replying to your own posting with your own statement of violent intent, and that you ‘do not care what the authorities think!!’ inflammation.

By doing this and showing no fear it may be more effective in getting the more silent and self-disciplined violent intent members of the forum to slip and post their real intentions. This can be used later in a court of law during prosecution.

JTRIG

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

Over a period of several weeks, NBC News published a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance.

As of 2015, another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.” Was published with goes into great detail how the United States government intentionally smears and destroys the reputation and credibility of anyone whom it wants to.  It does this through pure application of honed Nazi and KGB techniques.

By publishing these stories one by one, NBC reports highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: [1] the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, [2] the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, [3] the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and [4] destructive viruses. But, here, specifically, lets focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two primary tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: [1] “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), [2] fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and [3] posting “negative information” on various forums.

Gaining Full Control

It is important to also be harvesting and continually maneuvering for a forum moderator position. Once this position is obtained, the forum can then be effectively and quietly controlled by deleting unfavorable postings – and one can eventually steer the forum into complete failure and lack of interest by the general public.

The goal is to only have forum postings favorable to your desired point of view present.

This is the ‘ultimate victory’ as the forum is no longer participated with by the general public and no longer useful in maintaining their freedoms. Depending on the level of control you can obtain, you can deliberately steer a forum into defeat by censoring postings, deleting memberships, flooding, and or accidentally taking the forum offline. By this method the forum can be quickly killed.

However it is not always in the interest to kill a forum as it can be converted into a ‘honey pot’ gathering center to collect and misdirect newcomers and from this point be completely used for your control for your agenda purposes. The object is to gain full control.

Prohibit Non Approved Opinion

The powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry. In fact, some of this past century’s greatest dystopian authors warned of this very danger.

• In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
• In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
• In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”
• And in almost every episode of Twilight Zone, Rod Serling urged viewers to unlock their minds and free themselves of prejudice, hate, violence and fear. “We’re developing a new citizenry,” Serling declared. “One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

Conclusion

Yes, the manipulation of speech is an important tool for the control of people.

And we see a lot of this in regards to politics. Specifically in politics related to “democracies”, which pretty much rely upon “mob rule” to select the leadership. Thus we see that data in democracies are subject to popular opinion and thus must also be manipulated.

So, we see that in a “democracy”…

• Leadership and politics are heavily involved in censorship and manipulation.
• And in data sets and metrics of success, leadership also manipulates heavily.

But this is not the case in other forms of governance.

In totalitarian, and Republic forms of governance, there is no need to appease the population, thus there really isn’t a need to manipulate or censor. You can use China as a good example.

China
There was an outbreak of COVID-XXX in ZhangXin on March XXXX. 2,338 were infected, 388 died, and 78 were arrested for non-compliance with the mask law. 

The Chinese don’t need to lie about these figures, or the presentation of them. They are facts. And whether you like them or not, agree with them or not, or anything else has no bearing on the issue. They do not CARE about your opinion.

Compare that to America, where mob opinion is very important and can result in positive or negative opinions of the leadership. Eventually resulting in their termination if things go bad.

USA
COVID-XXXX hits Boston. 456 infected, 34 deaths. But these figures are not verified by a secondary source and there are indications that they might be artificially enlarged by confusing it with the influenza. A government spokesperson admitted that there were a "few" deaths, but that everything was under control and a vaccine is under production right now to prevent further infections. Further, the vast majority of those that died had prior conditions, were old and feeble, or had other complication.

Sound familiar?

Remember these techniques are only effective if the forum participants DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THEM.

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Once they are aware of these techniques the operation can completely fail, and the forum can become uncontrolled. At this point other avenues must be considered such as initiating a false legal precedence to simply have the forum shut down and taken offline. This is not desirable as it then leaves the enforcement agencies unable to track the percentage of those in the population who always resist attempts for control against them.

Do you want more?

I have more posts along these lines in my Functional and practical notes section of my SHTF Index…

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