It’s Too Late to Close It, But We Can Lessen Some of the Damage.
A perspective on the subject of covert mass psychology and modern internet-based social networks—with a curated collection of resources. Skip to resource links.
Introduction
Update: my new home for writing is over at substack: https://cognitivecarbon.substack.com.
If you find this post interesting, see my two-part posts over there about anti-social media.
EDIT: Since the time I originally started to write this blog post, my Twitter account has been deactivated (thanks to the very same authoritarian Tech Titans that this article is partially about.)
Because of this, there are some broken links to images that I will have to go find the originals for, and fix when I have time. They pointed back to my Twitter account, sadly, which has been nuked.
This post is a continuing work in progress and not particularly well structured at the moment; I had to paste material from a variety of sources simply to salvage it before it got memory-holed by Big Tech. I will go back and edit it when I can.
Social Networks and Mass Psychology
I have collected links over the past few years for a number of illuminating resources on the subject of mass psychology, particularly in the domain of modern social networks, of which I was an early participant as far back as 1999.
These resources includes evidence of covert psychological operations—conducted by public, private and foreign entities—on modern “anti-” social networks as well as on mass media or through institutions of government and education.
In this post, I mainly focus on the social network perspective.
I used the term “anti-” social media in the title of this piece deliberately. It is impossible to conclude that the long term effects of the current abusive exploitation of these platforms–and the tools they enable which are used for “narrative” steering, conflict escalation and “thoughtcrime” punishment (that is, for carrying out covert PSYOP psychological operations campaigns on US and other citizens)—is anything other than ultimately destructive for a free and civilized society.
Exploits like this are not conducive to a stable society:
Recent studies have shown that in the US, the “polarization” gap between the “left” and the “right” members on the ideological spectrum has been widening—ever since the introduction of Facebook and Twitter, as it so happens.
In the below chart, the political “left” pole moves further left while the “right pole” remains essentially stable over time (this chart comes from the Economist.com.) This phenomenon is no doubt true of other countries as well.
There is a actually a good reason, in terms of social psychology, why this has happened. This video touches on the foundations of the idea, and it uncovers a particular vulnerability of the political left: as a group they are much more concerned with social conformity than the political right–and (anti)-social media platforms dramatically amplify this vulnerability in pathological ways.
The above graph covered the period from 1994-2017, but the gap has no doubt widened further in 2020. Here is another picture of the same thing:
And another one:
It is quite clear that the current Congressional ideological divide is *even worse” than these charts suggest, given that they are all several years old.
A question we all need answers to: why is this happening, “who” is behind it, and how is it being exploited?
I have a unique set of qualifications for speaking about this topic as it relates to social networks and technology, as you’ll discover by reading more of this post. I had collected these links and resources and added them over time to my pinned Twitter profile tweet thread, but having been locked out of my account recently for 10 days with no explanation given (which happened to many other conservative voices as well this year), it is clear I have to find another home for these resources or risk losing access to them.
The rise of “counter-offensive” campaigns such as “Q” is evidence of just how pervasive and important this “digital battlefield” on the social network platforms has become.
It is literally a war for the hearts and minds of the populace, and given that this covert digital warfare can stoke deep divisions and create mass hysteria (COVID-19, anyone?) it is capable of wreaking economic damage on the scale of conventional warfare without a single bomb being dropped.
While the future of anti-social networking at the tail end of 2020 looks increasingly grim given all the disinformation, censoring, deplatforming and digital warfare that has occurred this year (of which the “pandemic” and its knock-on effects are arguably one of the bits of evidence), there is a glimmering of hope.
There are methods to counteract some of the covert exploitation of social networks that contribute to this pathology (some of which are included in the resources section.) But it requires regulation of social networking companies that may be impossible to achieve at this late juncture. Time will tell.
While I would like to hope that the free market could resolve these issues, it is clear that there is (a) monopoly power being wielded by the Tech Giants to maintain their control, and they all tend to lean heavily toward the left end of the ideological spectrum and (b) there is a covert “push back” against solving the underlying vulnerabilities of modern social network platforms, because it would then close doors that certain agencies and entities want to keep firmly wedged open–because it allows them to do what they do.
A few simple changes in requirements for how platforms currently operate would slam the door shut. it remains to be seen if there is the political will to make these changes mandatory.
When I mention conventional “mass media” in the context of explaining some the ideas contained in this blog to people unfamiliar with the topic, I use a simple but powerful example to get them to start thinking differently about the “media” (social or otherwise) that they actively or passively consume.
Most people are blissfully unaware of the “passive consumption” effect. A simple question to ask get the conversation started: why do so many “internet” and device companies offer their “customers” curated news?
For example, why does Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. have a “news division”, and why do they have an interest in showing you a list of news headlines on their homepages, their devices, and even in the mass emails they send out?
I understand why Apple would want to inform you of their latest i-Gadget release in their emails, for example; but do you really need Apple News telling you what’s going on with “climate change”, politics, and international events? Why?
Given that there is a cost to operate these news curation “divisions”, what is the economic incentive to the companies running them? Who is paying the bills for these divisions, and why? Who is paying to place content there, and who manages the algorithms that select and prioritize headlines for your personalized “feed”? Why is it called a “feed” by the way? Think.
Let’s take a step back and address the higher level question first: why does this even matter?
Because the power to “curate”—the power simply to decide what headlines you are exposed to, in what order, headlines whose very wording often betrays a mild to strong bias—is immensely powerful as a means of subtle persuasive control.
When you realize that video content is even more persuasive than written content in subtly shifting public perceptions, the power to curate video streams (hello, YouTube!) is even more concerning.
With respect to curated news or content: most people often won’t read past the headlines for all but a fraction of the “news” that assails them daily; but even the act of just glancing past the headlines (or video thumbnails) on your screen or phone exposes your subconscious mind to the messaging.
Whether you know it or not, you’re absorbing the “message”. This, in fact, is why “news tickers” on the CNN TV screens that are ubiquitous (and exclusive!) at major US airports are so dangerous: even if you aren’t watching or listening to the talking heads on screen, you can still see the ticker out of the corner of your eye, and you will absorb the message unconsciously–and that message will often slip past the filters of your conscious mind. Things that you would reject if you perceived them consciously can sneak past your defenses.
A critically important question: Who decides what the ticker on the CNN news screen in the airport–the one that you’re not watching, but still absorbing subconsciously–streams past you? Why do you trust them?
Update: as of January 2021, CNN has cancelled its airport contracts! An end to subconscious propaganda peddling is in sight!
While this idea of subliminal persuasion has long been known and exploited by product marketers as well as propagandists (Edward Bernays is mentioned below in the resource section), the nature of (anti-) social media and modern digital internet-connected devices makes both the spectrum of channels of delivery and the frequency of exposure much more effective and potent.
In the US Intel community, the word “SIGDEV” (SIGINT Development, or Signals Intelligence Development) is becoming more widely known, and job titles with this term are now prominently featured. SIGDEV rose into the public consciousness thanks to famous “whistleblowers” such as Bill Binney, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, among others.
While Snowden was a user of these intelligence agency systems at the NSA and CIA, and became (in)famous for exposing some of their dangers via the materials he leaked to the public, I hold the dubious distinction of being one among thousands of engineers and scientists who wittingly or unwittingly built those technologies and installed them in the caverns of the NSA.
What I was told at the time about what the systems I was working on were to be used for—and what they actually came to be used for—were two very different things. Had I possessed the foresight to see that it would lead to the complete violation of our privacy and undermining of our 4th Amendment rights, in spite of protections like the FISC Court, perhaps I would not have participated in that work. Hindsight, as the say, is 20/20.
In my younger years I helped to design and build supercomputing machines that came to used for signals intelligence gathering at the NSA and elsewhere. Bill Binney and other whistleblowers have long since disclosed the existence of these programs, so I have nothing new to add other than to say “yep, they did exist, I helped build them.” I was not given any details about what they were being used for, nor the information contained in them; I only learned of this later on, after the whistleblowers exposed the facts.
I also launched a “social networking” company as far back as 1999—years before Facebook and Twitter came into existence—that already began to explore the use of GPS tracking of cell phones in the context of the “social graph” (the network of people to whom you are connected.)
While our original aims seemed innocent—using your phones’ GPS to offer you discounts at nearby Starbucks and help your friends find you there, for instance—the Pandora’s Box of nefarious abuses of the “social graph” connected to location tracking was far beyond our ability to see at that time. (That was an idea for which I actually wrote a preliminary patent in 1999—one that never progressed to a full patent because we ran out of funds).
In the end, I’m glad our company failed and we had nothing to do with the current nightmare of abusive exploitation of these anti-social network tools.
The concept of “Signals Intelligence” was once mainly “defensive” (collecting electronic and other intelligence on adversaries to allow the formulation of a defensive strategy against attempted attacks by them) but it has long since transformed into an “offensive” tool. By this I mean the exploitation of electronic networks and the content flowing through them to disrupt or defeat an adversary, primarily through psychological means. The ideas aren’t new, the aims aren’t new, but the channels of exploit are.
This is the age old tactic of deploying propaganda, now re-invented by exploiting very potent and often invisible channels of sociological influence on modern social networks. “SIGDEV” has now mutated from the concept of simply “monitoring” to the concept of electronic “exploitation”—from monitoring to “digital” control of large numbers of people.
I use the term “PSYOPS” in this post to broadly include both subliminal and overt attempts to persuade mass groups of people to not only shift attitudes, awareness, and perceptions—through the use of carefully crafted strategies and narratives using tools that exploit the strengths and weaknesses of the “social graph”—but more ominously, to influence people into self-destructive actions or patterns of behavior.
The “network of influencers” that makes up the “social graph” underlies all modern social networking platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Google, etc. Simply put, your ‘network’ is that constellation of people with whom you interact; information about “where” and “when” you create content, and what content you create and share to whom and who reacts to it and how is a valuable piece of information about you (your psychological and voting preferences profile can be inferred from a large sample of your posts over time.)
In this “social graph”, each person is a “node” in this sample network of people; some people have more “influence” than others on reaching, informing, and persuading others in their networks (and by extension to other loosely coupled networks.)
The reason I have decided to relocate this content here on my blog—I had been collecting nuggets in my pinned profile thread on Twitter, for ease of access via Tweet—is because the crazed censorship of the modern leftists in charge of social media.
At any moment my Twitter account—the years of history of my thoughts and utterances contained in it—can be lost in an instant, including these resources I have painstakingly curated and assembled.
This past month, a vast purge of “undesirables”, as the leftists see them, have been eliminated from Youtube, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, all for the “thoughtcrime” of taking positions opposite those of the “ministry of Truth” on these platforms.
That fact alone should give all of us serious pause. The specter of “digital book burning” and Orwell’s 1984 “thoughtcrime” is all too real in the current digital media landscape.
We find ourselves at a moment in history in which the private sector, rather than the government, is actually an oppressive authoritarian regime, intent on stamping out any voices that do not conform with the “party line”.
Resources
Links to resources with brief descriptions of each appear below. You will find that most links I provide below are presented in two forms: one to the original article or resource, and another to the webarchive of that same resource. Who knows if even this resource will remain accessible over time.
It pains me that it is even necessary to do this, but digital censorship has become so extreme that any piece of “contrarian” content can be disappeared at anytime by the platform fascists as they “unperson” the original author who creates or even references the work. Many links to content I had created earlier in the year now point to “Error: this content has been removed” pages on the (anti-)social network platforms.
The power to “deplatform” and destroy the digital identity of people should NOT be left to the authoritarian fascist left operators of (anti-) social media, but that is the world we find ourselves in.
As I provide these resource links, its useful to share with you the lens through which I view all content that I come across. I use the “rule of three criteria”:
The content might be objectively true.The content might contain misinformation (innocently wrong, or innocently false: meaning that the author or person sharing the content is unaware that the material is not objectively true.)The content may contain disinformation (maliciously and deliberately wrong, with the intention to deceive.)
At times, there is a 4th strategy: perhaps 95% true, with 5% deliberate disinformation. This technique is used to build “trust” in a source, but then inject just enough disinformation to subtly undermine some desired narrative.
My Twitter Profile starts with this pinned quote from an article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
I found this quote in a synopsis of Taleb’s writing in this ZeroHedge [2] article. The idea that he discusses is a doubled-edged sword: the “minority rule” also shows how a small number of intolerant and “evil” people can leverage the same effect to destructive ends. You don’t need a majority to bring about massive changes in a society. A cunning and crafty minority is sometimes all that it takes.
I use this next chart a lot. It came from the Edward Snowden leak archive, and was broadly disseminated in this article [2] from The Intercept. It came from “training materials” being used by US and other intelligence agencies who used this material to train new SIGDEV analysts in the tradecraft. (FVEY stands for the “Five Eyes” network, which is a consortium of the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.)
What the existence and content of this chart should make you realize is that the mechanics of using false personas on social media to influence is well understood by shadowy agencies of many governments, not just the US.
This slide from the same materials that Edward Snowden leaked is also very eye-opening:
It shows the means and methods for executing deceptions. Some of these tricks have been exploited for centuries by magicians, and also by demagogic politicians. But again: cast these techniques into (anti-) social media contexts, and you can clearly see the potential for dangerous exploitation of propaganda. These slides appear in full here [2]
This video (who knows if it will be scrubbed from memory on YouTube anytime soon) is also very illuminating. Listen carefully to the source. Remember again my “rule of three” for gauging its credibility.
Another anecdote that I found interesting was this one. It comes from this source.
What it reveals is that (some, but not all) Online Social Networks spend a great deal of effort trying to “clean up” the proliferation of fake accounts that are exploited by various entities to engage in digital warfare. It gives you some idea of how widespread the problem is, and an idea of the scale of the “combatants” who are using OSNs to disseminate propaganda.
This next resource exposes some of the ways in which the CCP exploits (anti-) social networks to achieve its objectives. A two minute excerpt is here on Twitter (but it could disappear at any time.)
The full video is here
Another Twitter thread that uncovers some of the details of how the CCP has expoited (anti-) social media to steer narratives around COVID-19 lockdowns in Italy appears here or here [2] It was written by Michael P Senger. Note that even the Twitter Threader App has been “compromised” by the leftist thought police: notice the injected banner at the top of the thread:
This next resource reveals some of the underpinnings of how group psychology is exploited in systems of government, and by extension, gives insight into how and why social networks are exploited for narrative shaping (propaganda.)
It refers to work by Edward Bernays, one of the fathers of market psychology and psychology of propaganda. His uncle was Sigmund Freud. This photo comes from the video located here on YouTube. Pay close attention to the excerpted text
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
Edward Bernays
I mentioned earlier in this post that the “Q” phenomenon is a direct result of the digital warfare that is now taking place. I personally use this description of “Q”:
“Q” is a counter-narrative teaching “gamification” strategy designed, among other things, to create a larger base of the population capable of separating fact from propaganda using the tools of OSINT. It “fights” on the same battlefield as the social media manipulators.
“Q” came into existence on what was known at the time as the “8chan” network, now called “8kun”. This tool is part of the ‘grey web’, in that it is not widely known nor used by most of the general public. It has a few unique features: it is a “discussion board” for use by anonymous members (“ANONs”); it uses open source software, such that all of the code it relies on is available for publicly inspection, revision and critique; it has no concept of “followership” (so it is not a true social network with a clear “social graph”); and it offers a feature that is lacking in all other Online Social Networks: the ability to “digitally sign” posts on the boards, even though the person posting is anonymous.
This feature allows others to verify the authenticity of the “ANON” posting messages, even though he or she is anonymous. That is, the tripcode lets one verify that the same person is posting messages over time, thus preventing “impersonation” and theft of voice.
The importance of “impersonation protection” cannot be overstated, and will be discussed in depth later. This is the “door” that covert agencies want to keep wedged open: on all other (anti-) social networks, it is possible for covert agents to “take over” the voice of other accounts, and mislead followers who think they are reading the posts and utterances of the original poster.
Here is an insightful perspective on Cognitive Biases and Q: Leo Redfish and [2]. Because many of the “Q” community were recently the victims of the Digital Putsch by the Social Network Titans (Facebook, Twitter, et.al.) this tweet thread is of course no longer available on Twitter because the account was suspended.
I ask you this: read the thread on the archive links above, and ask yourself what is “dangerous” about this perspective to justify the suspension of this Twitter account?
I mentioned in the description of “Q” above two things: “gamification” and “OSINT”. “Gamification” refers to the notion of turning “work” into “games” in order to make people more likely to participate and keep participating over time. Before “Q” came into existence, there was a possible precursor: Cicada 3301. Among its possible purposes: identifying and coaching a class of “digital warriors” who would be capable of learning OSINT.
Here is an article that gives you an example of “Open Source Intelligence” gathering, or OSINT.
These next two videos are from Darren Brown, an English mentalist. In this show, Darren pulls a fast one on two advertisers, but it shows the devious potential of subliminal messaging.
This one, amusingly enough, is called “Toy Story: How to Control the Nation”. Darren is well aware of Bernay’s work.
This next thread [2] is a possible example of the 95% / 5% technique. It isn’t clear how much of it is credible information and how much is mis- or dis-information; there have been some apparently legitimate attacks levied against the credibility one of the people (Tore) in the documentary which Suzie Dawson unpacks.
That said, given my background I know that at least some of it is factual, credible or plausible. Even if the documentary in question is partially or wholly disinformation, it is worth studying: it is an example of the intent to deceive by obfuscation. If the claims in the documentary are false, it begts the question: who would want to confuse, distract or misdirect people’s attention around this topic? Who put up the funding to make and distribute the documentary?
Below are several video resources I have collected. As these were on YouTube, they may be disappeared down the memory hole at any moment.
Here are several of my more popular Twitter threads, which I fortunately saved on the wayback machine:
This was a good thread I wrote about the risks of Impersonation Thread and [2]
This was a response to article on Bloomberg by Quint Article and [2]
In this thread, I take apart those who call ‘Q’ a conspiracy theory; to the contrary, Q is a “counter narrative” tool that among other things is a theory about conspiracists.
This AOL thread AOL thread and [2] exposes some of the details of my former career:
This thread dug into the cell phone data set that was given to the New York Times by an unnamed source. I explain the dangers of this sort of data set, but also explain how it might lead to solving the Seth Rich murder in Washington DC: Cell Phone Data Thread and [2]
Cognitivecarbon 