Listen to this brilliant speech - I could not have said it better myself. This is why we have Exploding Heads

This keen and cagey fellow pinpointed 10 rules of propaganda. They are these:

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/84339 > It damages our country when we cannot tell truth from lies. This is exactly what tyrants seek — an electorate that cannot know what is truth and what is falsehood.

"I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it, they have to do it to their own population, & I don't think it's that awful."

Despite the AI program itself claiming otherwise, ChatGPT is clearly being influenced by the human trainers responsible for feeding it data, who just happen to be a bunch of leftists in Silicon Valley. The program refused to specify mistakes that Joe Biden has made as president, while quickly offering up a detailed list of mistakes Donald Trump had made. ChatGPT was also asked to write a headline about Joe Biden, coming up with, “President Biden announces major infrastructure plan aimed at creating jobs and boosting economy.” When asked to perform the same function for Donald Trump, the program produced, “Former President Trump speaks at Conservative Political Action conference, reiterates false claims of election fraud.”

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/78749 > To recap, they have shut Google searches down, memory holed/scrubbed the internet, deployed an army of bots, trolls and chaos agents to cause confusion and doubt on social media, and almost completely suppressed any coverage of the story by the many corporate media outlets that they have been pumping money into over the last three years. Payback time. > > And in the face of all of this, still the social media chaos agents persist with their work, claiming that since they are unable to find the actual Pfizer document primary source which others have found and screen shot, this is all fake news.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/74811 > Although the problem of spreading false information is usually conceived of as emanating from the public, during the Covid-19 pandemic, governments, corporations, supranational organisations and even scientific journals and academic institutions have contributed to a false narrative. > > Falsehoods such as ‘Lockdowns save lives’ and ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’ have far-reaching costs in livelihoods and lives. Institutional false information during the pandemic was rampant. Below is just a sample by way of illustration.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/73007 > The FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. > > The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses. > > A whole-of-society industry designed to shape elections and censor, propagandize, and spy on Americans was never simply a weapon to harm Donald Trump. It was designed to replace the republic.

Fleming’s 7,000-person agency has been highly scrutinized following a whistleblower report from Edward Snowden revealing that it collected all online and telephone data in the United Kingdom. The grand chamber of the European court of human rights ruled that these actions violated privacy rights, was unlawful, and breached the right to freedom of expression.

In the propaganda agreement, the two sides pledged to “further cooperate in the field of information exchange, promoting objective, comprehensive and accurate coverage of the most important world events.” They also laid out plans to cooperate on online and social media, a space that both countries have used to seed disinformation, pledging to strengthen “mutually beneficial cooperation in such issues as integration, the application of new technologies, and industry regulation.”

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/71263 > All Covid countermeasures, including the biological warfare agents marketed as “Covid-19 vaccines”, were ordered by the US DoD as a “large scale manufacturing demonstration” via Other Transactions Authority contracts. > > Hundreds of Covid countermeasures contracts became available via FOIA and SEC disclosures in redacted form. Review of these contracts indicates a high degree of control by the US Government (DoD/BARDA) and specifies the scope of deliverables as “demonstrations” and “prototypes” only. In other words, the US Government and DOD specifically ordered a fake theatrical performance from the pharmaceutical manufacturers. Just to make extra certain that the pharmas are free to conduct the fakery, the contracts include the removal of all liability for the manufacturers and any contractors along the supply and distribution chain under the 2005 PREP Act and related federal legislation.

Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report. I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one? I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

Researchers are focusing on the countries “Brazil, Poland, Serbia, and the US,” as they were “all led by populist leaders during the pandemic and capture different types of populist responses to the pandemic.”

“It sounds like DOD was doing something shady and definitely not in line with what they had presented to us at the time,” they said. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. “It’s deeply concerning if the Pentagon is working to shape public opinion about our military’s role abroad and even worse if private companies are helping to conceal it,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, a nonprofit that works toward diplomatic solutions to foreign conflicts. “Congress and social media companies should investigate and take action to ensure that, at the very least, our citizens are fully informed when their tax money is being spent on putting a positive spin on our endless wars,” Sperling added.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/68852 > “My concern was that this was a rogue FBI employee or two…but what we found today is the FBI had its own ministry of propaganda,” Comer continued. > > “This is serious. What else are they involved in at the FBI? The entire FBI needs to be dismantled. We need to start all over. We need to enact strict reforms and there need to be checks and balances at the FBI.”

Weapons systems are spread out across the Internet, deployed on mobile phones and active on every computer chip, tracking, sharing, and pushing digital information throughout the world. Instead of explosives and bullets, we have competing "narratives" whizzing past. The breadth of the campaign to control what information we see, how we process that information, and ultimately what we think and say makes even the most effective psychological operations of the past look antiquated and rudimentary. Whereas "mutually assured destruction" has so far succeeded as a deterrent against nuclear war, the tantalizing opportunities for governments to use programs of mass digital surveillance and communication to spread lies, manipulate opinion, and affect human behavior have created a kind of mutually assured dystopia, "where people lead dehumanized, fearful lives."

We were all amazed at the destruction during the Black Lives Matter (mostly peaceful) protests that swept across the country in 2020 - yet the FBI did nothing. Few arrests and fewer prosecutions. The Twitter Files reveal FBI et al were not just telling Social Media companies what to censor, but which ones to boost and make more viral. I wonder if the FBI et al were telling the Social Media companies to boost Black Lives Matter and make it more viral.

Yoel Roth. We encounter this archetype often in the higher echelons of power. The Pernicious Manager. The The Theater Kid Occupier. The Manageouisie... I've encountered him over and over again. What drives him? What is the source of his power?

"We can't overstate how dangerous this is," said gay black Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. "Yes, we still control Facebook, Google, Apple, Instagram, YouTube, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hollywood, TIME, USAToday, The Wall Street Journal, and pretty much all the rest, but we don't control Twitter. This is dangerous to democracy."