Information Warfare: Facebook is a tool of the mind control program and military interface of controling the decisions

There is a program of mass mind control to maintain population working 24 hours giving information and use the psyops and fake news to manipulate informative websites to wrong informations and also, control people's decisions into personal lives, poltical ideologies and social behavior.

Facebook works well at this program, having an interface that promotes integration of people and friends of people around, making a virtual society of unity, everyone knowing and controling everyone's opinions, and giving the capability of everyones having opinion on everything, including personal actions and decisions, personal ideologies.

Facebook also is a part of it, integrating other virtual networking and having information insert in every plataform. Wit the control of social networking, the programmers can have the personal informations, as accounts, bank accounts, passwords and everything, as the navigator and the plataforms are all connected themselves.

There is another part of this mind control program. The INCOM, a division of U.S. Army for Inteligence and Security COMmand works on softwares to receive posts on internet, having the capability of detect the hashtags and other key words, like 'terrorism' for exemple.

The social networking is implementing a step to the PSYOPs operations, and the plataforms use it together inteligence and military personal, oficialy promoted by governments to understand the social behaviors, and the and the operational instrument is the 'how many likes' people will receive when do something, to understand how they will be accepted or not, and to manipulate their opinios, givind a direction to what they must do to have popularity.

The instruments also goes to the capability to translate any language content (message text, voice, images, etc.) from the social media environment into English, and also, understand the cultural specific phrases of colloquial  spelling variations, social media brevity codes, and emojis.

New tools were insert to promote an understanding on people's feelings with emojis, ancient emoticons, using the smileys to show people how they feel at the moment. This tool make people all the time express the inner feeling, from sadness to happyness, passing through anger, suicidal emotions, starve, sexual pleasure and others.

This use is capable to understand for exemple by the posts, and together the historic of the navigator, personal desires, like favourite porns, even understand what kind of sexual life the user want to have or, even have, when we go to the Ashley Madison program.

The implementation of an Information Warfare promotes a social division and dystopia, that divides more and more the society, weakening the unities and promote a populist government, that embraces each minority individual, and with this, the basic business consultancy tactic that is to 'create a problem to sell the solution'. This tactic is well used by governments in every step, to promote social inequality, raise the particularities and use it as a question to embrace these particularities as a friend government, not a political program. 

The new programs of government are based in social cases and cultural exploitation and not economic, the educational system became corrupted by political ideologies and not the basic education of math and languages (for exemple). The political elections are based with social causes like legalization of drugs, religious or not religious representatives, if the candidate is or not black, ando not the technical abilities of the candidate, if he is capable or not to promove an economic wellfare, or he is or not is able to promote a secure society.

This is a part inserted in social media, to collect information and direct the way of thinking of the users and with the mind control program of 'likes' they can make people more unproductive in general life (work, family, training, studying), having the ncessity of always being 'giving information' on internet, posting pictures at Instagram, and giving opinions at Facebook.

In general they will justify that this trace of information is to promote national security, to track terrorism and prevent attacks, but all attacks that must happen, have happened, and the security state never anticipated any one, or at least the majority, sounding lie that this information stealing is for help. The police state is there to promote a control of people, understand and also anticipating attacks, for sure there are maps for tracking of pedophiles, drug dealers, users, terrorists agents, like lone wolves, but the police state don't anticipate any of them, they map them just as they track your money by having the informations of bank accounts accessed virtually.

To be honest, government are not interested on clash on criminal activities. Criminal activities help the crowd controling and in some cases, as Venezuela, orhter countries, including USA, they can use criminal activities as local militias as mercenaries, to achieve goals of government's will, like security borders, help on persecution, use to destroy military the opposition and the implementation of 'Eraser' tactics, etc. And in case of sexual crimes, possible export sexual activities, explore the sexual market, etc. 

Weapon control and sexual activities move the economy of a nation, and government by the shadows explore these activities.

Very well explained the movie "The Circle", shows how these big networking corporations act, stealing informatin and protecting the accounts of the businessman, the financers and the involved with the decision governemnt programs.

The idea is also, have a networking with public cams, use the facial reconigtion, have the digital reconigtion on the phones make the companies to copy the digital of the users and use the front camera all the time as a spy cam (webcams in case of notebooks). Also, the strorage clould for save archives online in a 'virtual hard disk' is not so secure, as the backbones are connected to a central brain computer that has the full storage capability to archive everything, having all data saved in a place that someone interested have access to the files.

Also, the program counts on facial reconigtion, and the 10 years challange, to promote a capability of manipulate the face for the next years, creating an artifial intelligence, capable to anticipate any actions in the future.

With these technologies working, the idea is to criminalize even to think different, not to anticipate criminal actions, but to protect the government of the opositions. It's like to promote oposition just justifying a democracy, because the result is already decided in the shadow agenda.

The use of military intelligence in PSYOPs and to determine which nation will be targeted, by the assumption of chemichal weapons, dictatorships, or terrorist activities, just focusing in how to promote geopolitical projection by military actions and implementing an environmental usurpation by big companies.

Facebook: Yeah, we hoovered up 1.5 million email address books without permission. But it was an accident!

So that's all OK then

By John Oates 18 Apr 2019 at 12:31

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/18/facebook_hoovered_up_15m_address_books_without_permission/

Facebook has admitted to harvesting email contacts from 1.5 million people without permission.

Since May 2016, Facebook collected all email contacts when some new users signed up to the antisocial network.

An anonymous security researcher, who sports the handle e-sushi on Twitter, first noticed that the company was asking some new users to enter their email passwords to verify their identities, a deeply anti-security request even on its own. Business Insider then spotted that if you did this a dialogue box popped up warning you – with no chance to cancel, pause or opt out – that it was importing all your contacts.

The company has now admitted that the emails were collected, analysed, used for ad targeting and to push its add-a-friend feature.

Facebook said that before May 2016 it had offered an option to voluntarily upload all contacts while using your email password for verification. It then changed the text informing users of what was happening but neglected to remove the functionality which sucked up the contacts.

The company said it didn't read the contents of the emails and that the actual contacts were "inadvertently uploaded".

Business Insider pointed out that the total number of people affected likely runs into tens or even hundreds of millions because each address book could contain hundreds of email addresses.

Facebook said: "Last month we stopped offering email password verification as an option for people verifying their account when signing up for Facebook for the first time. When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people's email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account."

The company said "up to 1.5 million people's email contacts may have been uploaded".

It is notifying users and deleting the illegally collected details.

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office referred queries to Ireland's Data protection office – The Reg is still are waiting for a response. We also asked Facebook if the contacts were stored securely or in plain text, but have not heard back

The UK's data protection watchdog last year chucked Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, universities and political parties into the dog house as it condemned a "disturbing disregard" for personal privacy across the system.

This is just the latest in a string of screw-ups by the company. Last month it emerged that top management knew about Cambridge Analytica's shenanigans at least four months before the story hit the news. Facebook previously claimed, and testified in court, that it was completely unaware until alerted by the media.

The ad giant made revenues of over $55.8bn in 2018, up 37 per cent from $40.6bn in 2017. It had 1.52 billion daily active users, up 9 per cent on the year before. ®

Bots, Hashtags and Fake Social Media: How Facebook Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Divide and Conquer America

https://www.globalresearch.ca/bots-hashtags-and-fake-social-media-how-facebook-psychological-operations-psyops-divide-and-conquer-america/5637860

“Analytica’s personality model has allowed it to create a personality profile for every adult in the U.S. – 220 million of them, each with up to 5,000 data points.”

Much of this is done through Facebook dark posts, which are only visible to those being targeted…. Bots, or fake social media profiles, have become its foot soldiers – an army of political robots used to control conversations on social media and silence and intimidate journalists and others who might undermine their messaging….

This post features excerpts from my new report which can be read here.

In a Bloomberg interview, Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix explained:

“Your behavior is driven by your personality and actually the more you can understand about people’s personality as psychological drivers, the more you can actually start to really tap in to why and how they make their decisions. We call this behavioral microtargeting and this is really our secret sauce, if you like. This is what we’re bringing to America.”

By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion….

It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle – a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas.

This new wave has brought the world something exponentially more insidious – personalized, adaptive, and ultimately addictive propaganda. Silicon Valley spent the last ten years building platforms whose natural end state is digital addiction….

“This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them…. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go,” said professor Jonathan Albright.

Led by Dr. Philip Howard, the team’s Principal Investigator, Woolley and his colleagues have been tracking the use of bots in political organizing since 2010. That’s when Howard, buried deep in research about the role Twitter played in the Arab Spring, first noticed thousands of bots co-opting hashtags used by protesters.…

The world these informants revealed is an international network of governments, consultancies (often with owners or top management just one degree away from official government actors), and individuals who build and maintain massive networks of bots to amplify the messages of political actors, spread messages counter to those of their opponents, and silence those whose views or ideas might threaten those same political actors.

They also frequently respond automatically to Twitter users who use certain keywords or hashtags — often with pre-written slurs, insults or threats….

They assume fake identities with distinct personalities and their responses to other users online are specific, intended to change their opinions or those of their followers by attacking their viewpoints….

Never has such a radical, international political movement had the precision and power of this kind of propaganda technology…. Elections in 2018 and 2020 won’t be a contest of ideas, but a battle of automated behavior change…

[Imagine an election campaign with] 250 million algorithmic versions of their political message all updating in real-time, personalized to precisely fit the worldview and attack the insecurities of their targets…

Instead of having to deal with misleading politicians, we may soon witness a cambrian explosion of pathologically-lying political and corporate bots that constantly improve at manipulating us.

While Facebook and Twitter get most of the attention, Google, YouTube and fake websites also play pivotal roles:

“Albright started looking into the ‘fake news problem’. As a part of his research, Albright scraped 306 fake news sites to determine how exactly they were all connected to each other and the mainstream news ecosystem. What he found was unprecedented — a network of 23,000 pages and 1.3 million hyperlinks….

They have been able to game Search Engine Optimization, increasing the visibility of fake and biased news anytime someone Googles…. ‘This network,’ Albright wrote in a post exploring his findings, ‘is triggered on-demand to spread false, hyper-biased, and politically-loaded information.’…

‘I scraped the trackers on these sites and I was absolutely dumbfounded. Every time someone likes one of these posts on Facebook or visits one of these websites, the scripts are then following you around the web. And this enables data-mining and influencing companies like Cambridge Analytica to precisely target individuals, to follow them around the web, and to send them highly personalised political messages.’…

The web of fake and biased news that Albright uncovered created a propaganda wave that Cambridge Analytica could ride and then amplify. The more fake news that users engage with, the more addictive Analytica’s personality engagement algorithms can become….

Albright’s most-recent research focuses on an artificial intelligence that automatically creates YouTube videos about news and current events…. It spooled out nearly 80,000 videos… in just a few days….

Instead of battling press conferences and opinion articles, public opinion about companies and politicians may turn into multi-billion dollar battles between competing algorithms, each deployed to sway public sentiment.

Stock trading algorithms already exist that analyze millions of Tweets and online posts in real-time and make trades in a matter of milliseconds based on changes in public sentiment. Algorithmic trading and ‘algorithmic public opinion’ are already connected. It’s likely they will continue to converge….”

With behavioral microtargeting, politicians now know exactly what to communicate to each individual to win their allegiance. Our last two presidential elections are proof of that.

In 2012, with the support of Facebook employees the Obama campaign sucked up all Facebook data on every American citizen who has ever used their platform. Once they knew all of our “likes” and who our “friends” were, the “whole social graph,” it was like taking candy from a baby. They were able to manipulate us on an unprecedented level; knowing exactly what to say to each individual and even going as far as to tell people what friends they should share specifically tailored messages with.

Then, in 2016, the Trump campaign hired SCL’s infamous Cambridge Analytica, of which Trump’s Chief Campaign Strategist Steve Bannon was a Vice President and founding board member.

Like the Obama campaign in the previous presidential election cycle, Cambridge Analytica also leveraged Facebook data. CEO Alexander Nix summed up their work for the Trump campaign by saying:

“We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy.”

For more detailed information on how they handled the Trump campaign, here is a Channel 4 News report:

“Mr. Turnbull described how the company could create proxy organisations to discreetly feed negative material about opposition candidates on to the Internet and social media.

He said:

‘Sometimes you can use proxy organisations who are already there. You feed them. They are civil society organisations. Charities or activist groups, and we use them – feed them the material and they do the work…. We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands, but with no branding – so it’s unattributable, untrackable.’

Cambridge Analytica’s senior executives were also filmed discussing a twin-track strategy to campaigning, putting out positive messages through the official Donald J Trump for President campaign, while negative material was pushed out through outside organisations.

Cambridge Analytica’s chief data scientist Dr Tayler said:

‘As part of it, sometimes you have to separate it from the political campaign itself. So in America you know there are independent expenditure groups running behind the campaign… Super PACs. Political Action Committees.

So, campaigns are normally subject to limits about how much money they can raise. Whereas outside groups can raise an unlimited amount. So the campaign will use their finite resources for things like persuasion and mobilisation and then they leave the ‘air war’ they call it, like the negative attack ads to other affiliated groups.’

In a different meeting, Mr Turnbull described how the company created the ‘Defeat Crooked Hilary’ brand of attack ads, that were funded by the Make America Number 1 super-PAC and watched more than 30 million times during the campaign.

Coordination between an official election campaign and any outside groups is illegal under US election law.”

As Nix (image on the right) also said:

Image result for Alexander Nix

“Many of our clients don’t want to be seen to be working with a foreign company… so often we set up, if we are working then we can set up fake IDs and websites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists, there’s so many options we can look at. I have lots of experience in this.”

When questioned by the undercover reporter about his meeting with Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill regarding their investigation into presidential election interference, Mr. Nix scoffed at it and dismissively said:

“They’re politicians, they’re not technical. They don’t understand how it works.”

He went on to say,

“They don’t understand because the candidate never is involved. He’s told what to do by the campaign team.”

The undercover reporter then asked,

“So the candidate is the puppet?”

“Always, in every election, or nearly,” replied Mr. Nix, before breaking into a chuckle.

When you analyze political demographics, you find that liberals tend to hope for the best, while conservatives tend to fear the worst. With Obama we had an amazing public speaker who knew all the right things to say to evoke liberal hopes. With Trump, we have a Reality TV host who knows all the right things to say to stoke conservative fears.

Is Mr. Nix right? Are politicians PSYOP puppets of covert Intel interests who are actually running the show?

4) Full Spectrum Dominance, Psychological Operations (PSYOPS)

“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.”~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In addition to using surveillance and illegal activities to create “behavioral change” in targeted individuals and populations worldwide, SCL specializes in psychological operations (PSYOPS).

As SCL’s Mark Turnbull describes it:

“The two fundamental human drivers are hopes and fears, and many of those are unspoken and unconscious. You didn’t know that was a fear until you saw something that just evoked that reaction from you. And our job is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else, to understand what are those really deep-seated, underlying fears, concerns.

It is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts, because actually it is all about emotion.”

Keep in mind what SCL’s Alexander Nix said,

“these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed.”

Turnbull continued:

“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control.”

For insight into how that “remote control” manipulates the minds of the masses, let’s read how SCL describes their “behavioral change” programs:

“SCL Group provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations worldwide.

We have taken on the challenge of big data in the intelligence community. We augment IC data with our own ongoing proprietary quantitative research and our behavioral data sets.

Our industry-leading data scientists use this data to build predictive models using machine learning, so that analysts are able to focus their time and tools on the right data subsets.”

In a section on “Psychographic Market Segmentation” SCL says:

“The barrage of media and communication noise becomes impossible for the audience to process, psychographic segmentation is proving most effective.

SCL uses advanced psychological models to segment audience data into usable target sub markets. This dramatically increases the effectiveness for each segment.”

SCL is by no means the only Global Private Military company engaged in these psychological operations. Palantir, SAIC, AggregateIQ, DataTrust and i360 Themis are all significant players. After all, Big Data is a fast-growing multi-billion dollar industry. It is a dream come true for advertisers and Intel PSYOPs experts. It’s a boom market, and U.S. Intel agencies, such as the NSA and CIA are leading the charge.

They are using everything that we do on our computers, mobile phones, televisions and credit cards — every purchase, change of the channel, online search, website-visited, comment, like, friend, follower, private message, email, text, phone call — every digital thought-print is recorded and fed into Big Data analytics and algorithms to create your “personality profile,” so they can predict, manipulate and increasingly control your behavior.

This is a major front in what the Pentagon calls “Full Spectrum Dominance Psychological Operations.”

The 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is now null and void. Privacy laws have become absurdly corrupt.

In a significant way, our computers and mobile devices are an externalization and extension of our minds. Our cell phones are deeply infiltrated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithmic bots and PSYOPS agents.

Make no mistake, they can “drop the bucket further down the well” of your consciousness then you realize, and may know your “hopes and fears” better than you do.

If you think that is an exaggeration, or some futuristic dystopian conspiracy theory, consider Artificial Intelligence created by Dr. Michal Kosinski, who specializes in Psychometrics, Big Data and Social Psychology.

Dr. Kosinski reveals, “with a mere ten ‘likes’ as input his model could appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could ‘know’ a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes, Kosinski’s machine could predict a subject’s behavior better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.”

Now ask yourself: How many social media posts have you “liked”?

*

This article was originally posted on the David DeGraw’s Facebook. David DeGraw is a frequent contributor to Global Research

The Internet, Psychological Warfare, and Mass Conspiracy

Controlling minds and manipulating behavior through social media

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/201803/the-internet-psychological-warfare-and-mass-conspiracy

"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work…when you go to church…when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth... That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

— Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

 It’s official. On March 18, 2018, I became a conspiracy theorist.

Many conspiracy theorists claim to have started as skeptics searching for the truth, only to stumble upon some hidden seed that crystallizes and spreads within a moment, resulting in a sudden broader awakening in which the world is seen in a new and often ominous light. I would seem I fit that mold — since embarking as the author of Psych Unseen four years ago, I’ve spent each post trying to debunk false beliefs, fake news, truth denialism, Alex Jones and Infowars, flat earthers, and even “breatharians” by explaining the psychological forces that allow them to thrive and highlighting the role of the internet in the rampant spread of misinformation within filter bubbles and echo chambers.

So, what was my moment of satori? It started, predictably enough, on Twitter. A tweet from my psychiatrist colleague, fellow Psychology Today blogger, and occasional co-author Dr. Allen Frances, linked an article that he described as “the scariest story I’ve ever read.” The piece, authored by Carole Cadwalladr and appearing in the March 18 edition of The Guardian, was called “The Cambridge Analytica Files – ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower.” In it, Cadwalladr shines the spotlight on Christopher Wylie, a young man pursuing a behavioral economics PhD who was hired as a research director for a “behavioral research and strategic communication” firm called SCL Group to apply his knowledge of fashion forecasting to political elections. Apparently disregarding non-disclosure agreements out of a guilty conscience, Wylie provided Cadwalledr with ample quotations and source material that connects the dots of a conspiracy that links SCL Group to an offshoot shell company called Cambridge Analytica funded by Republican donor Robert Mercer, to another company called Global Science Research (GSR) owned by St. Petersburg University psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan (aka “Dr. Spectre”), to Cambridge Analytica board member/investor and later Trump presidential campaign manager Steve Bannon, to Russia and Vladimir Putin.

The lines of connection are outlined in the article, as well as another co-authored by Cardwalladr in the New York Times, but the short version is that Kogan, replicating the work of Cambridge University psychologists Michal Kosinki and David Stillwell, developed an app called “thisismydigitallife” that collected “psychographic” data on the personality traits of users while gaining access to their Facebook profiles and those of their friends under the guise of academic inquiry. Kogan’s GSR then partnered with Cambridge Analytica to mine the profiles of some 30-50 million Facebook users without their permission and, under the direction of Mercer and Bannon, directed Wylie to develop ways in which their personal data could be used to promote and shape the political campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. The issue of a “data breach” from Facebook and the use of personal information without informed consent aside, the partnership of GSR (with Kogan’s ties to Russia) and Cambridge Analytica (staffed mostly by Canadians and Europeans) is now under scrutiny for possibly violating US laws that limit the involvement of foreign nationals in American elections. According to The Guardian article, Cambridge Analytica also made a business pitch in 2014 to a Russian oil company with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin that had nothing to do with anything related to petroleum, but instead focused on “election disrupting techniques” involving the use of misinformation to influence voters based on their online psychographic profiles. It is suggested that Cambridge Analytica thereby handed a loaded gun to Russia, if not through any formal business arrangement, giving it the means to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election.

It’s still not yet clear whether there’s cause to invoke conspiracy or collusion within the Trump campaign — that part of the story will no doubt continue to unfold as the FBI investigation under the direction of Robert Mueller trudges on and as Wylie, Kogan, and Cambridge Analytica become household names. But even if that piece of the puzzle does materialize into something beyond a liberal echo-chamber fantasy, it could be considered trivial within the larger context of something else destined to become a household word — “information warfare.”

If information warfare has a chief conspiracy theorist with a mainstream voice, it might be NYU philosophy professor Tamsin Shaw who is quoted at the end of Cardwalladr’s article. In a recent New York Times book review, Shaw defines modern information warfare as “the exploitation of information technology for the purposes of propaganda, disinformation, and psychological operations.” Writing in another New York Times book review that highlighted Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data a year ago, Shaw explained:

“The findings of social psychology and behavioral economics are being employed to determine the news we read, the products we buy, the cultural and intellectual spheres we inhabit, and the human networks, online and in real life, of which we are a part. Aspects of human societies that were formerly guided by habit and tradition, or spontaneity and whim, are now increasingly the intended or unintended consequences of decisions made on the basis of scientific theories of the human mind and human well-being.

The behavioral techniques that are being employed by governments and private corporations do not appeal to our reason; they do not seek to persuade us consciously with information and argument. Rather, these techniques change behavior by appealing to our nonrational motivations, our emotional triggers and unconscious biases. If psychologists could possess a systematic understanding of these nonrational motivations they would have the power to influence the smallest aspects of our lives and the largest aspects of our societies.”

In connecting her own conspiratorial dots, Shaw traces the origins of modern informational warfare back to Daniel Kahneman, who shared a 2002 Nobel Prize for his pivotal work in the field of behavioral economics. She suggests that at the heart of his theory of binary systems of thought described in Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman’s lasting practical contribution to economics was to reveal how psychological “nudges” can guide human decision making and therefore be harnessed to influence choice. Shaw seems to have a dark view of psychology’s potential for evil, highlighting the role of psychologists in developing torture/interrogation techniques in the wake of 9/11 and indicting the moral authority of psychology as a field along with the specific contributions of noteworthy psychology luminaries like Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and Joshua Greene.

Beyond psychology at large, Shaw takes “the Big Five” tech companies Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google to task for exploiting the psychology of choice in her recent review of Alexander Klimsburg’s The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace:

“Only in recent months, with the news of the Russian hacks and trolls, have Americans begun to wonder whether the platforms they previously assumed to have facilitated free inquiry and communication are being used to manipulate them. The fact that Google, Facebook, and Twitter were successfully hijacked by Russian trolls and bots (fake accounts disguised as genuine users) to distribute disinformation intended to affect the US presidential election has finally raised questions in the public mind about whether these companies might compromise national security.

…the Internet has exacerbated the risks of information warfare. Algorithms employed by a few large companies determine the results of our web searches, the posts and news stories that are featured in our social media feeds, and the advertisements to which we are exposed with a frequency greater than in any previous form of media. When disinformation or misleading information is fed into this machinery, it may have vast intended and unintended effects.”

For Shaw, the most concerning “intended effect” of weaponizing psychology has been to transplant it from its initial military applications into corporate and political sectors. Indeed, it's hardly conspiratorial to note that “psychological operations” (aka PSYOP) have been a tool of the US military and the CIA since the 1950s, applied in the name of winning over “hearts and minds” during military conflicts as well as in steering foreign elections in favor of democratic regimes and US interests. Nor can it be disputed that wrangling the wedded power of psychological influences on behavior and social media by US presidential campaigns began before Bannon and Trump. After recruiting a Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) to advise and direct his campaign efforts, it was President Obama that came to be dubbed “the first social media President.” A 2012 article’s title appearing in The Atlantic — “Meet the Psychologists Who Convinced You to Vote for Obama” — speaks for itself. A subsequent 2017 article in The Atlantic suggests that President Obama was “too good” at social media, which “blinded him to technology’s dangers” and all but set the stage for the Trump campaign. Already, there are claims that little beyond personal bias allows us to condemn the use of informational warfare by the Trump campaign, and by extension Russia, while praising the innovation of President Obama’s, though Mike Masnick, writing for techdirt.com’s (Mis)Uses of Technology blog, notes:

“…there is one major difference between the Obama one and the Cambridge Analytica one, which involves the level of transparency. With the Obama campaign, people knew they were giving their data (and friend's data) to the cause of re-electing Obama. Cambridge Analytica got its data by having a Cambridge academic (who the new Guardian story revealed for the first time is also appointed to a position at St. Petersburg University) set up an app that was used to collect much of this data, and misled Facebook by telling them it was purely for academic purposes, when the reality is that it was setup and directly paid for by Cambridge Analytica with the intent of sucking up that data for Cambridge Analytica's database.”

Of course, the trouble with conspiracy theories is that every once in a while, they end up being true. In retrospect, this one seems obvious, hardly requiring a stretch of the imagination and lying just under our noses all this time. Make no mistake though, the “real conspiracy” — because there’s always a bigger picture in conspiracy theories — isn’t about Trump and Russia. It isn’t about one country, or one political party, or one corporation. It’s about the potential exploitation of cognitive biases as cognitive vulnerabilities at every level and in every sphere.

Though cynical to say, it was probably an inevitability that psychology, as a science set on understanding human behavior, would be applied to not only predict, but manipulate that behavior. What couldn’t have been foreseen 50 years ago with the start of modern PSYOPS, and what is just now coming into focus, is just how the internet has made that possible on a much larger scale and in a much less ridiculous way compared to say, mass atmospheric spraying (aka “chemtrails”). Nor how a tool seemingly devised for beneficence could be applied for more nefarious purposes (realizing full well the quagmire of moral relativity in the realms of economics and politics where one can forever debate the merits of democracy, capitalism, and globalism as the best models for the “greater good”).

Although Shaw draws a bold line between the exploitation of cognitive vulnerabilities and the moral bankruptcy of psychology, we can hardly fault psychologists for revealing cognitive biases that are already there. And if there’s blame to be laid, we shouldn't point fingers at an inanimate entity like the internet either, but at those who exploit its power, glossing over ethical responsibilities related to autonomy, privacy, data protection, and informed consent. In the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the “rise of the machines” can be traced back to the work of Miles Dyson, an engineer who develops artificial intelligence called Skynet for a company called Cyberdyne Systems. In our current version of art-becomes-life, it’s not so much the machines that we have to worry about, but the people. In the coming years, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg could come to be known as a real-life Miles Dyson, the man responsible for unwittingly causing the downfall of humanity.

Chamath Palihapitiya seems to imply as much in recently coming out to apologize for the unintended effects of his own role as former “vice-president of user growth” at Facebook:

“It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.”

…Bad actors can now manipulate large swaths of people to do anything you want. And we compound the problem. We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short-term signals — hearts, likes, thumbs up — and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth. And instead, what it is is fake, brittle popularity that’s short-term and leaves you even more, admit it, vacant and empty before you did it.”

In the end though, the worst and most insidious part about the conspiracy to hijack social media for the purposes of psychological warfare is that we’re all willing, or at least semi-willing, participants. We know that decades of television advertisements have biased our choices as consumers, but we still eagerly tune in to Superbowl commercials. We’ve read that internet search engines offer a biased view of what’s out there in cyberspace and that online algorithms are designed to make us more prolific consumers, but we still go to Siri and Alexa for knowledge. We’ve come to accept that Russian “web brigades” and “troll farms” churn out social media "bots" that attempt to foment dissatisfaction with living in a multicultural democracy at every click, and we've recently been told that real human beings are 70% more likely to retweet falshoods than facts, but we still rely on Facebook and Twitter as our main news sources. And now that we learn how social media platforms are bypassing consent to access personal information and use it for agendas beyond our awareness and potentially contrary to our own on the scale of a presidential election, we still click on Facebook quizzes and submit photos of ourselves to apps that purport to analyze our ancestry or find our dopplegangers in fine art.

We do all of this because we tell ourselves the opposite of what psychologists like Kahneman have told us, holding onto our own intuition that we have unmitigated contra-causal free will and are immune to hidden forces that manipulate our behavior. We tell ourselves that the power of the internet, with its fake news and Russian bots, is limited.

In short, we’re in denial. On some level, we know that we should devote less time to debating anonymous strangers online and more time to face-to-face discourse and human interaction. Palihapitiya suggests that the path to salvation is to unplug and notes that he doesn’t allow his own children to use social media. But can we really unplug? Will we? Do we want to?