Carl,
I wish I could believe that you were correct. But my observations tell me that
the masses are gullible and dumb. They are easily manipulated. They believe the
lies that are told to them. That's why they fight in wars, the purpose of which
is to enrich their governments or the corporations in their countries. That's
why they get caught up in supeerficial issues used by our political parties to
win points rather than seeing through all of the propaganda to the real issues.
I remember listening to Obama's talks to the nation, the ones that everyone
praised because he sounded so erudite and intelligent, and being furious
because I felt like he was talking down to all of us. And as I have been
reading Belafonte's book, what has become clear is that to accomplish something
good, whether it be racial integration here or relief for famine victims in
Africa, what was needed was huge amounts of money and the use of celebrities to
sell the cause to an otherwise, uncaring public. He also describes how a good
socialist African country turned into a dictatorship, partly because of the
paranoia of its leader who was once his friend. My feeling is that the Left has
the same faith in believes, unsupported by evidence, as religious people have
in their stories, unsupported by evidence. And I'm also currently reading an
excellent, detailed fiction book about people in Nazi Germany called
Wanderland. It describes how people can be seduced into a pathological belief
system.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2020 1:59 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Obama-Era Officials Call for More Government
Control of Your Facebook Feed
If our government officials treated Americans as adults, and practiced truth
telling instead of lying or hiding vital information, or distorting facts, or
patting us on the heads and sending us off to bed, we would see a major
reduction in speculation. But the federal government has not gotten the
message. We, the People, are not the stupid fools the federal government sees
us as. The real fools are those politicians who think that shilling for the
billionaires will provide them with a lifetime security. Have they not noticed
the mass demonstrations and the rioting? Have they forgotten such events as
the French Revolution or the Russian overthrow of Czar Nicholas II?
And what about that little uprising when the Colonists became fed up with being
treated like serfs, back around 1776?
On 10/26/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Obama-Era Officials Call for More Government Control of Your Facebook
Feed Facebook content is already partially curated by
government-linked think tanks, but for Samantha Power and others, that is
simply not enough.
by Alan Macleod
October 26th, 2020
By Alan Macleod
Writing in the Washington Post, senior Obama-era official Samantha
Power has called on social media giant Facebook to do more to crush
what she calls conspiracy theories and disinformation circulating on
its platform.
Describing it as being "overrun with foreign disinformation," Power
demanded Mark Zuckerberg "take far more drastic steps" to "detox" the
company's algorithm. The former United States ambassador to the United
Nations compared the viral vitriol circulating on Zuckerberg's
platform to the weaponized disinformation campaigns in the former
Yugoslavia, implying that it could help spark a conflict in the United
States.
52 percent of Americans get news on Facebook, making it an enormously
powerful and influential news service, not just a social media or
messaging app. For years, it has at least partially outsourced its
news feed algorithm cultivation to the Atlantic Council, a NATO cutout
organization funded by the U.S. government and headed and controlled
by former CIA chiefs. Thus, the government already has significant
control over the content on America's most important media platform.
Zuckerberg also recently admitted that in 2017 he changed Facebook's
algorithm to deliberately throttle traffic to left-wing alternative
news sites, even those as mainstream as Mother Jones. MintPress News
was similarly negatively affected.
One reason to be skeptical of greater censorship of Facebook to fight
fake news is that the Atlantic Council itself is perhaps the chief
driver of one of the modern era's most prominent conspiracy theories: that of
RussiaGate.
Samantha Power Atlantic Council
Samantha Power speaks at the Atlantic Council to warn of a "Russian Threat"
in January of 2017. Victoria Langton | Atlantic Council
The extent of Moscow's involvement in domestic affairs can be debated,
but the Atlantic Council has produced report after report making
outlandish, unverified assertions, including that virtually every
non-establishment political party in Europe, from Labour and UKIP in
the UK, Podemos in Spain, Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, and the
Five Star Movement in Italy are all secretly the "Kremlin's Trojan
Horses" - under the personal thumb of Vladimir Putin.
As part of Obama's National Security Council, Power herself strongly
pushed for war in Libya, which was sold to Americans on the claim that
Colonel Gaddafi was giving his troops Viagra to encourage mass rapes.
No evidence was presented for such a remarkable claim. Even after the
destruction caused, turning the country into a failed state with
active slave markets, Power praised her government's response for
"[helping] orchestrate the fastest and broadest international response
to an impending human rights crisis in history," brushing off
criticism of the country's current state by claiming that she, "could
hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately
predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own." She
also supported the U.S. bombing of Syria on grounds now proven
incorrect. Thus, misinformation merchants are themselves calling for
restrictions on conspiracy theories online.
While Facebook is undoubtedly flooded with conspiracy theories and
other types of fake news, the term is a loaded one that means very
different things to different people. While readers might associate
"conspiracy theories" with ideas about the Moon landing, aliens or
various political assassinations, the establishment often uses it in
an altogether different context. An example of this comes from an
article on conspiracies from The Guardian, the most liberal of the
United Kingdom's major newspapers. The outlet claimed that the
statement that, "even though we live in what's called a democracy, a
few people will always run things in this country anyway" was a
conspiracy theory, comparing it to the neo-Nazi white genocide myth.
Thus, to many at the top of society, basic scrutiny of the rich and
powerful on the grounds of their class is akin to lurid fantasies
about an attempt to destroy the white race.
Power's husband Cass Sunstein, another influential high-ranking Obama
official, has, since at least 2009, argued that the U.S. government
should be conducting "cognitive infiltration and persuasion" of
anti-establishment groups he calls conspiracy networks, suggesting
that "government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms,
online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to
undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about
their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political
action." Sunstein stressed that this must be aimed only at
demonstrably false theories, and done in secret: "Although government
can supply.independent experts with information and perhaps prod them
into action from behind the scenes, too close a connection will prove
self-defeating if it is exposed," he cautioned.
Whether Sunstein got his wish or not is unclear, but two years after
he published the article, it came to light that the U.S. military was
using an extensive network of fake online accounts and personalities
to spread propaganda conducive to their interests. The military did
not deny it, but instead insisted that their entire operation was
aimed purely at foreign audiences, as anything else could be deemed
unconstitutional.
While attempting to combat the spread of misinformation is a laudable
goal, those calling most loudly for it are often those most
responsible for pushing some of the most dangerous lies themselves.
Furthermore, the effect has been to limit public debate and discourage
legitimate criticism of those in power. Fake news and conspiracy
theories continue to run rampant on the Internet, but legitimate
criticism to power is harder to find every day.
from Mint Press News
