Social media icons
There are many reasons people log onto social media, also known as social networking sites. They log on to connect with family and friends, to be abreast of the latest developments regarding, to share the latest that's happening to them and see the same that their friends and family post. Others use social networking sites as a platform for activism, while the motivation for some may be to connect with an online community made up of people whose experiences, interests, convictions or causes are akin to theirs, and so on.
Social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., are all, without exception, businesses. This means they make money off of the social networking services they provide. They are also, admittedly, used to manipulate public opinion by management of the social networking experience of those who use them. This manipulation stands apart from the business end of the networking site, and would be at loggerheads with it if not for the care taken to ensure it is done as covertly as is possible. employing in this all the means that ensure those who get the brunt of such surreptitious actions are isolated from others who are not being affected to the point they know their experience is under manipulation.
These actions are not designed to enhance the lucrative potential of the business but to prevent the social networking activities of individual users from either becoming threats to the order or veering off a desired path, and where the establishmentarian shares in the profits made in the venture, which is the case in almost all dominant social networking sites, the activities can be considered done in self interest.
As businesses, social networking sites do the very same things businesses do to maximise profits, and sometimes these activities can be illegal and under handed while being deleterious to users.
The recent Facebook user data abuse scandal is a case in point.
As public opinion control centres, networking sites operate in much the same way mainstream media is known to operate vis-a-vis public opinion. They guide people around the maze of the site to views that provide for the creation of brainwashed slaves, also referred to as sheeple.
It cannot be doubted or disputed that social networking sites have the power to rally the masses behind causes when left to their own devices, or in autopilot, in territories where the powers-that-be have no leverage within the site. They are in fact verified to have been used as the central organising points crucial to the outcome of many of the so called velvet revolutions that hit the middle east about a decade ago.
It is thus no surprise that governments worldwide are wary of social networking activities for their capacity to galvanise the masses around a movement or cause, or against an order, because they understand this could cost them their hold on power if left unchecked, or lead to instances of successfully coordinated public unrest.
The manipulative control social networking users are subject to by governments with leverage on and in them are therefore done with an eye on preventing social networking activity from becoming a threat to social order, and it should come as no surprise that governments without leverage in and on specific social networking giants are wary of their widespread use on their territory. Facebook, for example, is banned in some countries, including China, North Korea, and Iran where the bans are round the clock. In many other parts of the world it is just heavily restricted.
This banning or restriction of social networking giants in some countries can only come as a surprise to those who do not know the history of the most successful of these sites, including in this knowledge of who in fact controls specific sites.
It may just be my suspicion that Facebook, for instance, was not started by Mark Zuckerberg, as the official account goes, but by western secret service agencies at the behest of the Freemasons whose insignia the company fully bears. This real possibility has been expressed by more people I know, basing it on facts that may not be admissible in a court of law, a fact that can be used to further the conviction given people who conspire to deceive leave little room for evidence that is admissible in a court of law. The suspicion is further supported by bans Facebook has in countries that have developed their own alternative social networking giants, countries that have kept their eyes open, evidently.
The story of facebook's dubious rise to prominence is another factor that points to not so humble beginnings as the official version points out. A fact in point is this, that In the mid nineties, the persistence of Facebook to force itself onto computer systems earned it a placing on the list of active bugs on virus scanning and cleaning software. The facebook bug had the capacity to hijack a computer's desktop and change wallpaper settings and was hard to remove until a link was clicked that led to the Facebook registration page on the worldwide net.
This not so humble beginning of this networking giant at a time when social networking mega sites were already active and abundant, that were all forced out of the way using very dirty tactics that sometimes included founder suicides and flights, could not reasonably have been the work of two guys in some attic in America, but a body or social organ with control over more resources than could be accessible to average everyday Jim and Jack.
My plain English take on this ... but I stray.
As things stand today, facebook and a few other networking sites won out in this cyber war and it has become a fact that the capacity of social networking sites to reach a wide strata of the public is being abused to the detriment of the very people taking advantage of what these sites offer, and the manners that this is being done are manifold.
There are negative consequences from such abuse, starting with deliberately induced addiction, going on to much more sinister things that can be classed within the category of mind control. These operations are known about and have seen lengthy treatment and analysis by experts, so called conspiracy theorists and, not to be outdone, the leading media has also delved into this issue.
Anthony J. Christoff, MD, writer of the article The Mind Control Tactics Used Within Facebook, looking at some of the underhanded tactics Facebook and other social networking sites employ to ensure people are kept coming back.
My own experience of social networking platforms pre-dates facebook, but in the era of Facebook includes manipulations I have experienced for over a decade that are not designed to make me an addict, but to achieve the very reverse, and though I should be happy that I am as such not at risk of addiction, there is no comfort to be drawn from the fact the mind control is still an issue even when this is done to make me averse to logging onto the site and also the fact there have been consistent and persistent attempts to frustrate my activism on these sites, which is the major reason I joined Facebook and the rest of them.
The list of things that continue to happen to my Facebook experience amount to the deliberate creation of a world in which I am isolated from my target audience and find myself co-existing with total strangers and I can share the following hallmarks of the operation:
1. exclusion or distancing from the familiar:
a) . too few to no posts in my news feed by people who are related to me, loved ones, friends I am close to online or off-line and others I constantly communicate with on the same sites. This happens continuously even when these people are as busy if not busier than I am ... and the same is true in reverse.
b) People who are the most helpful in my activism, those who contribute a lot to my posts, are also gradually excluded from my news feed so that it comes to consist entirely of uninteresting posts by friends I can only refer to as acquaintances.
2. lack of notification of relevant activity
a) I am notified of posts people who are not in my friend list make to groups I belong to and not posts by friends to the same groups, which would not be the case if I was given moderator privileges within the group without my knowledge.
b) Reactions made to my posts are not always announced. I have to manually sift through older status updates to see whether comments and reactions have been made to previous status updates or posts to groups.
3. I am excluded from the wider Facebook network that I opted to be a part of. I no longer get updates from pages I liked and there were at some point a total of about 200 that have seen gradual deletion by a third party to the point now there are but a handful, forcing me to constantly like new pages as old ones are removed by a third party
4. There has of late been actual deliberate "in code" removal of an option that facebook provides all users to enhance the experience.
a) I recently noticed that the "on this day" feed that looks back in time to status updates I made on the same day in years gone by had been removed from the menu. At first I thought it had gone the same way the "explore feed" had gone but discovered when I logged into a professional and less busy profile I maintain on Facebook that it had not been removed from that account. I asked other users and verified that the feed was still available on their profiles. It went missing on my account for a good two weeks and only returned after I made the discovery it had not in fact been removed on other accounts. This was odd, but not unusual, and I can only conclude that my reliance on this feed had made it a pain to those who want my posts to be restricted in a certain way.
b) A fake version of my profile is spoofed to some people so they see updates I have not made. In one case the user in question was one that knew me well and, because they live far from me, could not verify my actual address. A post appeared with a GPS tag with a location set for England and they know that I am in Africa right now. The point of this was to sow the seeds of distrust, obviously.
c) My account was cloned several times and friends of mine were engaged in conversations by the cloners.
d) I have locked my profile from posts by others yet a scandalous image I had not posted was forced onto my profile with privacy settings set to "public". It was a picture of a naked man with nothing but a penis ring on his manhood, splashed across my profile while I slumbered. Facebook admin somehow found this picture and knew it got there through a hack. They deleted the image before I awoke to find a report asking me to review the post and change my password if necessary.
Images showing facebook's privacy settings page where you can set your privacy setting preferences.
And there is more, some of which you can read in a linked article at the bottom of this piece.
The list of things going wrong with the busiest profile I maintain on Facebook goes on and on and if you think it is an algorithm or settings I am failing to make causing this then think again. The list of things I mention above could not possibly be common experiences caused by an algorithm or settings I have made or not made.
As already mentioned, Facebook is a business ... and the algorithm or lines of code that manages user experience on the platform is designed to make the experience as addictive as can be. The algorithm is designed to lure people onto facebook, to encourage them to come back, to make logging on irresistible.
What is happening with my account is far from as well as the reverse of this. The posts I am being led to are not drawing the most reads and reactions. I am not abreast of developments in the lives of people close to me and also not being drawn to the rest that is relevant to my life no matter how much I manually direct my attention to these posts.
This procedure is being applied to a lot of people on facebook and other social networking sites, and there is no other way to explain how it is being done than that it is all manual. It is being done by groups of people, thousands of them to boot, at secret locations in the western world... employed for the purpose ... provided with names of people whose social networking experience they are tasked to manipulate because the establishment that runs facebook via via wants people like me vilified and/or isolated from friends, family and everything else that is relevant and important to our lives. This is the only viable explanation for what is going on because the alternative explanation to that does not make sense.
Saying it is all down to settings and the working of facebook algorithms does not explain this in that a line of code once written into the overall code that makes facebook should apply to all users without bias. Also, given personal preferences are sometimes used to direct traffic, the extreme and strange experiences people like me have should in some way reflect the clicks we make while on the social networking site. It makes no sense that notifications of posts by total strangers we do not interact with who may not even be our friends, to some group we belong to, are prioritised over posts by people who are friends, whose profiles we are constantly visiting.
And I should not mention the other bizarre happenings that prove the point.
On top of that, the impact of the business end of the algorithm should be felt more when an account is left in its default settings, when no preferences are made for some posts over others. I have not altered any of the preferences on both my accounts since I set them up other than restrict posts to my profile and set the audience of my posts to "public" from the "friends" default, and have never once manually clicked the follow button on any of my friend's profiles yet.
I have taken it that the follow button is automatically activated when I like a page on Facebook because this is what always happens when I do but know that I do not automatically follow anybody I befriend unless I manually go to their profile and click on the follow button there.
Bottom line is what is happening in my social networking experience and that of others experiencing the same or similar things that I am is abnormal. There is no need to look for faults with settings or me.
I know that many people who are blacklisted because of one thing or another, of which activism is a possible cause, are harassed and psy-oped and generally forced into what are referred to as "echo chambers" in order to both isolate them from people who matter to their lives, and others who are better off hearing what they have to say, as made to hate logging on ... using paid employees sitting in front of monitors monitoring their activities and ensuring that their experience and activities are damned in.
If we need to be dammed in then within the chamber are set loose a slew of those whose posts are pasted into our notifications from the blues, with whom we are expected to connect and be led astray or distracted.
But people being terrorised, harassed and censored this way can fight back and win.
We firstly need to understand the reason we are getting preferential treatment which is that our opinion is of a kind that can make a difference. We are deliberately being isolated because we have something to say that others are better off knowing about. We can defeat this effort to keep us away from others and one of the better ways of doing this is by breaking free of the confines of our profile ... by spending as much of our time engaging in interactions with others on groups, pages, and profiles.
Image from the film Rambo featuring Silvester Stallone showing the protagonist right after the episode where he paints his face to enhance/increase camouflage
We need to start posting everywhere else we can, and manually navigate to close ones we are being kept away from. We need to join and become active in as many groups as we can, and posting to a select number of these groups whenever we get info we feel should be out there, alternating between the groups we post to each time, also switching audiences according to the nature of the post we want to share.
our focus should be on getting our word out and launching from several places at once should be part of our strategy. We should avoid getting attached to a profile or social networking platform.
If, on facebook, we find we are not exposed to variety, we can switch social networking platforms, keeping in mind even when we are followed one to the next, we have a grace period before the surveillance paraphernalia is set up to dam us in, and if we do not wish to switch platforms then we can develop the habit of making status updates in which we post trending "hash tags" we feel we are not seeing in our newsfeed or are not interested in, to self, so that they are not visible to friends. Once posted, we can click on the link that results to be taken to posts about what others are saying about the same thing. For example, posting "#ShotPersonName" to "only you" as the audience, when we seek to hear what people are saying about a police shooting, we can click on the link produced that will lead to posts on the issue to which we can then also respond. This is a good way of being exposed to the range of opinions on an issue as well as having our opinion heard by more people than just those in our friend list.
We can also take to the abundant use of hash tags so that people who think of similar or same hash tags can find us in the social networking maze.
I am doing more than that which I propose above already because I want to defeat their censorship and attempts to create this limited world into which I can conveniently be locked up, and I advise all out there experiencing the same to adopt these, and the many other methods of evasion to get out there when there is need for this, which in most cases is true for activists.
In conclusion, addressing this last bit to a specific audience, to the global Targeted Individual (TI) community to which I belong, who are the most likely to get this treatment, caution should be taken when we get out there that we do not overload non TIs with too much of the kind of information only TIs can relate to, the kind that will label us delusional. We have to go it gently with non TIs when we communicate where they congregate.
Slowly does it, slowly introduce them to our plight by using opportune events, opportune news items, a good example being the Cuba, Uzbekistan, China US embassy attacks that allow us to make the technology we know we are being assaulted with common knowledge ... as opposed to the current state of affairs where it is easy for people to think it is imagined or nonexistent, in language that hints cleverly at our plight.
We should also ensure that when we have to get real with non TIs we are communicating using simple but highly logical and non personal language. We should avoid losing it and display as little emotion as possible because people out there are not really innocent. Most will know who we are and tempt us to make fools of ourselves to discredit the TI cause we fight for.
If in doubt, then it may be necessary to work in groups, to double check our posts with other people, to have others edit or proof read what we post as impression is vital in this war ... and also stand by each other in non TI groups and support or vouch for what the other is saying when it is under fire. We need to go about the whole procedure of introducing our plight to others methodically, scientifically, and systematically.
Related articles:
Facebook Profile Hacks Curiously in Line With The Target Isolation Objective
No comments:
Post a Comment