‘Creepy & Scary’: US military harnesses social media to manipulate online behaviour

[DeSwiss]

RT * Published on Jul 26, 2014

Privacy watchdogs are in uproar following revelations the U.S. government may have been behind a recent Facebook experiment. Marina Portnaya reports.

- It was DARPA people who provided the first venture capital funding for Facebook. I'm sure it's just a coincidence though.......

[center][/center]

[MannyGoldstein]

1. Doesn't your racism wear you down?

[DeSwiss]

4. I'm sorry, but yes it does.

Humans are so fucking stupid.

They had it all and have all but pissed it away.

Half the time, I don't why I came back.

The other half when I remember I'm still pissed that I did......

[House of Roberts]

2. COINTELPRO never went away

it just evolved with technology.

[DeSwiss]

5. This.

[center]Frank Church Committee Hearings

[/center]

[Enthusiast]

15. Overreaching sounds so benign.

[DeSwiss]

24. Congress was benign back then.

- Now everything's malignant. Go figure.....

[center][/center]

[delrem]

3. If secret gov't agencies can work with social media to conduct experiments like this,

then those same agencies or other arms of gov't can work with social media to implement programs based on that research.

There can be no other purpose, so consider it DONE, and HAPPENING.

And now for a word from our sponsor. zzzzzzzzz.

What was that?
I forget.
Who cares.
What's tomorrows trendy topic?

[DeSwiss]

6. ''What's tomorrows trendy topic?''

- You may be sorry you asked:

[hunter]

9. I got an awesomely appropriate or inappropriate ad served up with that YouTube Video...

... depending upon one's point of view.

Degrees for CIA officers. Advance your career today. Learn from former CIA, FBI and DoD!

[DeSwiss]

16. Ad Block is your friend!

[Lenomsky]

7. OMG not that RT speaking the truth again!

K&R

I have no idea why anybody would use FacePuke it's a ridiculous platform.

[DeSwiss]

17. Cats.

- It's all for the cats.....

[Skittles]

8. my opinion of a person increases greatly

if I find they never were absorbed into the facebook borg

[DeSwiss]

18. Mine too!

It's like..... Brother!!! Sister!!! We're Not Alone!!!!

[whereisjustice]

10. The US Government is at war against its own people

just like any other surveillance state. It isn't Russia or China or India that is the enemy. We are the enemy. That's where the money is being spent. The US Government is unwilling to correct our twisted legal system, our disparity, the abuse and corruption of power by giant multinational corporations. Instead they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to understand how to manipulate and spy on us. You know, in case we get pissed at it all.

A well oiled propaganda machine is grooming us to accept it all without dissent. Even a political party that claims to be on the side of people rather than corporations won't stand up against it. Disgusting.

[DeSwiss]

19. We. Were. Warned.

- Over and over......

The War

"The Book" explains that the purpose of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labour and commodities, hence the economy of a superstate cannot support economic equality (a high standard of life) for every citizen. By using up most of the produced objects like boots and rations the "proles" are kept poor and uneducated so that they will not realize what the government is doing and they will not rebel. link

''In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.'' ~George Orwell, 1984

[johnlucas]

11. The Internet CAME from the military. It was ALWAYS designed to track the citizens

The reason they let the private sector develop it is for 2 major reasons.

#1: No one would divulge all their private business in the open if they knew the government was behind it.
(you'll blab all your secrets to a silly name like Google or Facebook but not the U.S. Network)
#2: To outsource the development costs. Takes the pressure off of them.

I came into the internet world knowing this at the start.
I learned much more just from being on the internet.

Here's the thing though.
Power is liquid. There's always a little bit that seeps between the fingers.

The internet & World Wide Web which fuels it was designed by the government to more easily trace & track the habits & movements of its citizens.
BUT it ALSO allows the citizens who use the internet to communicate ideas & organize themselves.

Always a double-edged sword behind everything.

Good things have come from internetworked communication, it's true.
But it's no surprise stuff like this happens when you understand the origins.
ARPANET came from the military.
It's the original Spyware! Hahahaha!

John Lucas

[DeSwiss]

20. Yep.

- They took a page from Madison Avenue and realized that they'd catch all the fish if they just turn everything into a fish tank. The fish never knew they were being observed.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” ~George Orwell

[johnlucas]

26. Correct. Everybody wants to be famous.

Everybody wants to be their own kind of celebrity.
It's a natural thing. We all need to be recognized & desired.
They play on that human need & let the private sector come up with ways for people to blab all their business willingly.

I came to the internet for a project. I was trying to get a storyline to a big company.
From there I looked at the internet much like I do today.
As a library & an entertainment source.

I see the positive potential of this spy device by putting out a thought no one else has quite assembled.
To give people a fresh point of view when they're stuck in a A-to-B argument.
I say what about C? What about D? What about 1, 2, 3? What about a, j, z?

Understanding media is the key in this information age.
And media doesn't just mean newspapers, movies, TV, radio.
I mean Media in its most original definition: The Go-Between within Two Points.
The Middle. The Center. The Medium. Media is plural of Medium which means Middle, Center.

Anything that passes a message between two points, between two people, between speaker & audience is MEDIA.

Media is your gossipy neighbor down the block, it's a drawing on notebook paper given to a friend, it's a dance on a public street, it's body language in the supermarket.

What can I do using this MEDIUM called the Internet to pass a message?

That's why I love forums so much.
An argument ground where I can shift the boundaries of the argument just by adding that unique point of view no one else quite considered.

This is the mistake the government made.
Power like I said is liquid. A little bit always seeps between the fingers into the hands below.
Sure, the government's tracking us & tracing us by having us root our daily activities on the Internet.
That's THEIR power.
OUR power is doing our little piece to transform thoughts & change points of view to pass a necessary message.
Double edged sword to everything.

Even though they designed this system to better control the actions & thoughts of the populace, they'll never have full control.
Having an agile mind is the key to surviving the negative side of the Information Age.

Everybody doesn't use the Internet to its true potential, it's true.
Some people just wanna be famous, yeah.
What I ate last night, my argument with my boyfriend/girlfriend, silly pics & posts on Facebook, Twitter, & Google+.
But some of us use this spy network to shape the machine in a whole new way.
Leaders will always be fewer than Followers. It's nature's way.

John Lucas

[DeSwiss]

28. Well said.

- And I don't get to say that often enough anymore......

[center]
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How the News Lies
Princeton University Global Consciousness Project -- The Noosphere

[awoke_in_2003]

12. The wealthy are getting nervous...

and so are their protectors.

[DeSwiss]

21. And rightfully so.

- Because they truly know how depraved they are.

[Gumboot]

13. Am trying to remember who coined the term 'evil empire'...

And I often wonder how much manpower is dedicated to monitoring and manipulating FreeRepublic, or Grassfire. Where those angry white men who actually do pose a threat to America(ns) are lurking.

[DeSwiss]

22. The Ronnie Puppet said it.

- Anthony R. Dolan was the hand that moved his lips.

He also said: "Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit" but I believe that was somebody else's hand up his ass when he said that one....

[blkmusclmachine]

14. http://simulatrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/THEY-LIVE-AGAIN.png

[DeSwiss]

23. !

[center]Put on these glasses!

[/center]

- I got mine on.

[Octafish]

25. And people wondered why the Army would send interns ''undercover'' to CNN.

CNN AND PSYOPS

by Alexander Cockburn
CounterPunch, March 26-28, 2000

Military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, have until recently been working in CNN’s hq in Atlanta.

CNN is up in arms about our report in the last issue of CounterPunch concerning the findings of the Dutch journalist, Abe de Vries about the presence of US Army personnel at CNN, owned by Time-Warner. We cited an article by de Vries which appeared on February 21 in the reputable Dutch daily newspaper Trouw, originally translated into English and placed on the web by Emperor’s Clothes. De Vries reported that a handful of military personnel from the Third Psychological Operations Battalion, part of the airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, had worked in CNN’s hq in Atlanta.

De Vries quoted Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service as having confirmed the presence of these Army psy-ops experts at CNN, saying, “Psy-ops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta through our program, ‘Training with Industry’. They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news.”

This particular CounterPunch story was the topic of my regular weekly broadcast to AM Live, a program of the South Africa Broadcasting Company in Johannesburg. Among the audience of this broadcast was CNN’s bureau in South Africa which lost no time in relaying news of it to CNN hq in Atlanta, and I duly received an angry phone call from Eason Jordan who identified himself as CNN’s president of newsgathering and international networks.

Jordan was full of indignation that I had somehow compromised the reputation of CNN. But in the course of our conversation it turned out that yes, CNN had hosted a total of five interns from US army psy-ops, two in television, two in radio and one in satellite operations. Jordan said the program had only recently terminated, I would guess at about the time CNN’s higher management read Abe de Vries’s stories.

When I reached De Vries in Belgrade, where’s he is Trouw’s correspondent, and told him about CNN’s furious reaction, he stood by his stories and by the quotations given him by Major Collins.For some days CNN wouldn’t get back to him with a specific reaction to Collins’s confirmation, and when it did, he filed a later story for Trouw, printed on February 25 noting that the military worked at CNN in the period from June 7, (a date confirmed by Eason to me) meaning that during the war a psy-ops person would have been at CNN during the last week.

“The facts are”, De Vries told me, ” that the US Army, US Special Operations Command and CNN personnel confirmed to me that military personnel have been involved in news production at CNN’s newsdesks. I found it simply astonishing. Of course CNN says these psyops personnel didn’t decide anything, write news reports, etcetera. What else can they say. Maybe it’s true, maybe not. The point is that these kind of close ties with the army are, in my view, completely unacceptable for any serious news organization. Maybe even more astonishing is the complete silence about the story from the big media. To my knowledge, my story was not mentioned by leading American or British newspapers, nor by Reuters or AP.”

Here at CounterPunch we agree with Abe de Vries, who told me he’d originally come upon the story through an article in the French newsletter, Intelligence On-line, February 17, which described a military symposium in Arlington, Virginia, held at the beginning of February of this year, discussing use of the press in military operations. Colonel Christopher St John, commander of the US Army’s 4th Psyops Group, was quoted by Intelligence On-Line’s correspondent, present at the symposium, as having, in the correspondent’s words, “called for greater cooperation between the armed forces and media giants. He pointed out that some army PSYOPS personnel had worked for CNN for several weeks and helped in the production of some news stories for the network.”

So, however insignificant Eason Jordan and other executives at CNN may now describe the Army psyops tours at CNN as having been, the commanding officer of the Psy-ops group thought them as sufficient significance to mention at a high level Pentagon seminar about propaganda and psychological warfare. It could be that CNN was the target of a psyops penetration and is still too naïve to figure out what was going on.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2000/03/26/cnn-and-psyops/

[DeSwiss]

27. Hey, well they helped CNN win all those war Emmys!!!

- So they owed them big time. And undercover and armed is the ONLY way I'd approach Wolf Blizter, myself.

Dude's creepy.....

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”

~George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

(America take note)

[Octafish]

29. ''And we can stand it.'' That's why...

[DeSwiss]

30. We've come a long way.....

Of course back then they told us that they were also gods. And we believed them. Now they say they're telling us the truth. And we still believe them. Or pretend to because we're afraid not to. Like always.

- We're not too bright, but we're consistent.......

[KoKo]

31. Kick..For OP Video and Others in the Thread....

Good Stuff here...