Well kids, It's time for the big bang. The mother of all bullspit, the greatest con since the A.B.A., the first insurance company, or the first manufacutred vaccine. Yes, of course, I am referring to none other than Social Media.
"But Chris...don't you use it too? Aren't you just as much a zombie as the rest of us?" Well? Yes...and no. Yes, I "use it", but generally, only for good. Do I sit there and play games all day when I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing with it; educating, exposing, or informing? Nope. Oh, I admit it...the trap was set when I got there, and I fell into it. For a while. Hell, there was even a time when I did nothing but play slot machines and bingo all day, then laughed at all the funny videos and pictures. But since I got out of that and into a real cause, there is no way on God's green Earth that I would ever go back to that trap. And what a truly dangerous trap it is too. Talk about being asleep!! And yeah, I use it. Almost constantly, no less. But at least I have a drive; a purpose.
But out of all the social medias alive today my friends, I can actually place my finger squarely on one in particular, as the mother of all evil. The baddest of the bad, and, believe it or not, I can prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this particular one is used to mind-screw us, probably every minute of every day, and is chock-full of law enforcement...on all levels, as well as people in there that are actually paid to cause dissent, place things on pages in just the right way, and incite hatred, love, libel, and more. Oh, and it's not Twitter. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure there's a lot there, too, just like there is on every social media used popularly. But this one's crimes exceed to a very high level where none have tread before. Yes, we'll be talking about Mr. Zucherberg's pride and joy, for true, for true. Facebook? Here I come for you baby.
Number of total users in 2015? 1.49....BILLION. Out of those? 1.31 BILLION use a mobile version. Wow. Of the total number of daily users of all types, 968,000,000 people use Facebook every....single...day. Out of all of the stats that I read on Facebook that scared me most? That during Thanksgiving day, in 2014, 88 percent of all users accessed facebook, at least once. And you wonder if maybe we're a little bit leery of Facebook.
But why, you ask? Why worry? Well, the last stat speaks for itself. This means, that rather than deal with our families on Thanksgiving, Facebook was more important in some way. Speaks volumes for our social skills...and no, I don't mean our social MEDIA skills either. We would rather speak to our inordinate amount of "friends" on Facebook than eat and socialize with living breathing human beings, especially our families. This fact alone (which, to be honest, it surprises me that Facebook would even do and present a factoid such as this one) should be scary enough. Unfortunately, it isn't, by far, the most scary stat. No, these stats forthcoming may scare you a whole lot more.
So I did a little search for law enforcement and social media, and came up with some good sources. One was directly from Lexis-Nexis, the premier electronic search instrument in law and law enforcement.
I insist that you read this report, here:
http://www.lexisnexis.com/risk/downloads/whitepaper/2014-social-media-use-in-law-enforcement.pdf
Probably the most disturbing part of this law enforcement approach is the very subversive method of creating false profiles and personas to illicit information, or disseminate the same. Facebook has become a prime psy-op, in and of itself, and is further used to guage public reaction to true as well as false news stories, videos and posts. In this writer's opinion, this is a dangerous game for the Government, as well as law enforcement (including the FBI, the CIA and the Secret Service) to play, and could go as far as to start conflict among factions, both religious and patriotic, be used to "nudge" personal feelings and outcomes(shown a little later), where primary and current issues are concerned. Worse yet, this has been shown to be ABSOLUTELY TRUE where votes and issues concerning our country are concerned.
Another article, more comprehensive and useful in how law enforcement utilizes social media in "Crime solving" and "Crime Prevention" can be found here. Also, in this one, you will find several good references for reading elsewhere about this wonderment of technologically advanced Crime solving:
http://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/Free_Online_Documents/Technology/social%20media%20and%20tactical%20considerations%20for%20law%20enforcement%202013.pdf
A while back I did a show that featured a rant about how Obama rigged the 2012 election...but not the way people might imagine. I now give you an article that I found on Facebook. Unfortunately, I cannot give you the author, as I have now deactivated, more than certainly, my current account; and plan, if I can help it, to never return to Facebook ever again. Not because I feel I'm doing wrong...but only because I just don't like anyone, LET ALONE LAW ENFORCEMENT/GOVERNMENT, snooping into my personal affairs. The problem is, not only am I certain that Facebook is, by any means, not the ONLY way they do this...but it's one of the main ones, and, by proxy, I give them full consent to do so everytime I log into it. That way, I can't say they're violating my rights, I imagine.
Here is that article, followed hotly by the Executive Order, still unnumbered as yet, where President Obama puts into law that he is allowed to "perform Behavior Experiments on the American People, supposedly for the purposes of "Serving Americans Better".
"The Scariest Thing Obama Has Proposed to Date
9/18/2015
Few people understand how President Barack Obama has succeeded in pushing through initiatives, programs and legislation that are distinctly unpopular with the total of the American population. To that end, few people understand how such a divisive incumbent president achieved re-election. Common sense would have that if a majority of people stood against a program, initiative or legislation – or a candidate for that matter – that success in achieving a positive result would be scant, if not impossible. But, as we have come to understand – almost seven years after the fact, Barack Obama and the Progressive machine do not play by a traditional set of rules. Instead, they play by a set of rules that are foreign and unintelligible to mainstream America and, especially, the tone-deaf Republican establishment.
Progressives have long understood the importance of not only the potency of “the message” but the need to control the message. They have become masters at crafting and controlling the framing of issues, and advancing talking points sympathetic to their cause. For many decades this consisted of touching Mr. and Ms. America in one of two vulnerable places, or both: the heart and/or the wallet. If a Progressive candidate, spin doctor or political operative could use a narrative to touch the voters’ hearts, making them sympathetic and/or angry to the allegory then they had succeeded – most of the time – in their call to action, in the political sense, to vote. Likewise, if they could demonstrate, via rhetorical example, how an opponent’s policy, legislation or platform would adversely affect their individual wallets the outcome was almost always in their favor. The truth seldom mattered. The end justified the means.
Today, Progressives have upped the ante to such a level that opponents – Republicans, Independents and Libertarians – stand nary a chance in the political arena if they continue to operate their campaign and political outreach structures in the manner of politics past. Progressives have combined the core strength of their “crusade culture” with cutting edge 21st Century technology, to create a campaign apparatus so potent that even today’s popular anti-politician anger might not be enough to defeat it.
On Tuesday, September 15, 2015, the President Obama signed an Executive Order that constitutes the most frightening political move since President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court. Outside of the sphere of government, Mr. Obama and his Progressive machine have authorized the government to conduct behavioral science experiments on the American people for purely political purposes.
Chuck Ross from TheDailyCaller.com reports:
“President Obama announced a new executive order on Tuesday which authorizes federal agencies to conduct behavioral experiments on US citizens in order to advance government initiatives.
“‘A growing body of evidence demonstrates that behavioral science insights – research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them – can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people,’ reads the executive order, released on Tuesday...
“The initiative draws on research from University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard law school professor Cass Sunstein, who was also dubbed Obama’s regulatory czar. The two behavioral scientists argued in their 2008 book ‘Nudge’ that government policies can be designed in a way that ‘nudges’ citizens towards certain behaviors and choices.”
As brazen and jaw-dropping as that sounds, this is simply an overt continuation of what was developed at the Analyst Institute in the run-up to the 2012 election; an organization quietly formed in 2007 by AFL-CIO officials and Progressive allies, which sought to establish a set of "best practices" for interacting with voters. Their creation: the Catalyst.
As Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab, integral in the creation of the catalyst, described in 2010:
“Before the 2006 Michigan gubernatorial primary, three political scientists isolated a group of voters and mailed them copies of their voting histories, listing the elections in which they participated and those they missed. Included were their neighbors’ voting histories, too, along with a warning: after the polls closed, everyone would get an updated set.
“After the primary, the academics examined the voter rolls and were startled by the potency of peer pressure as a motivational tool. The mailer was 10 times better at turning nonvoters into voters than the typical piece of pre-election mail whose effectiveness has ever been measured...”
The application of this technology-based strategy is a matter for the history books. The Obama campaign used it in 2012 and defied the odds in achieving Mr. Obama’s re-election despite a dedicated opposition and myriad policy failures that would have seen any other candidate defeated.
In the FOX News investigative series Prying Eyes, Peter Boyer explains:
“To nearly half of America...election night came as a shock. With a terrible economy at home and new dangers abroad, President Obama seemed so beatable. But Romney didn’t know what Obama knew. Obama’s team had used the advantages of incumbency, time and money, to create something new in politics...
“Sasha Issenberg literally wrote to book on this new science of campaigning that Obama mastered. By harnessing data – like your TV viewing habits, your social media network, your voting history – the Obama campaign made a virtual profile of every single persuadable voter in the country. Then, with experiments borrowed from behavioral psychology, they targeted people with personalized messages and coaxed them to the polls.”
And we know it worked.
Now Mr. Obama has delivered the Progressive psychological stratagem of “nudge” from the shadows, and, with the power of an Executive Order, has overtly sanctioned its application by government onto the electorate for what he describes as designing “government policies to better serve the American people.” The problem with this is this. Progressives have already demonstrated they cannot be trusted to use this technology for the purposes of serving the country. In fact, because they have already used this technology to coerce people into supporting the initiatives and candidates that they want; that they believe are good for the country, they have proven to be nefarious in their intent.
Imagine using behavioral psychology coupled with the Catalyst to individually target people; to individually pressure people into accepting Progressive policies, initiatives and programs, like amnesty for illegal immigrants, or support for Planned Parenthood, Obamacare or the Iran nuclear agreement. Imagine them using this technology to coerce people into supporting Common Core or the acceptance of another trillion-dollar “stimulus.” The examples of how this stratagem can be misused and abused are myriad. And Mr, Obama and his Progressive Machine have already proved they will use it to advance their line of thinking...exclusively.
Meanwhile, Republican leadership – still self-important in believing themselves intellectually superior to the Progressive political machine – advance their campaigns and candidates; champion their causes still worried about whether or not they have enough yard signs and generic mail-outs, tone-deaf to the fact that their campaign apparatus has been laid to waste by a technological advancement straight out of Orwell’s 1984.
In 1984, Orwell wrote of “doublespeak,” a language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words, making the truth sound more palatable. Mr. Obama’s government sanctioned unleashing of the Progressive psychological stratagem of “nudge” – the marriage of behavioral psychology and the Catalyst initiative – onto the American people will make the diabolical nature of “doublespeak” the thing of parlor games. Progressive oligarchic elites will decide what is best for the people; for the nation, and “nudge” those reluctant to automatically acquiesce into compliance.
And everyone in the New United States will comply."
- Source, unknown.
And now, the executive order, number still unknown:
"Executive Order -- Using Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People
EXECUTIVE ORDER
- - - - - - -
USING BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE INSIGHTS TO BETTER SERVE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that behavioral science insights -- research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them -- can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people.
Where Federal policies have been designed to reflect behavioral science insights, they have substantially improved outcomes for the individuals, families, communities, and businesses those policies serve. For example, automatic enrollment and automatic escalation in retirement savings plans have made it easier to save for the future, and have helped Americans accumulate billions of dollars in additional retirement savings. Similarly, streamlining the application process for Federal financial aid has made college more financially accessible for millions of students.
To more fully realize the benefits of behavioral insights and deliver better results at a lower cost for the American people, the Federal Government should design its policies and programs to reflect our best understanding of how people engage with, participate in, use, and respond to those policies and programs. By improving the effectiveness and efficiency of Government, behavioral science insights can support a range of national priorities, including helping workers to find better jobs; enabling Americans to lead longer, healthier lives; improving access to educational opportunities and support for success in school; and accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy.
NOW, THEREFORE, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby direct the following:
Section 1. Behavioral Science Insights Policy Directive.
(a) Executive departments and agencies (agencies) are encouraged to:
(i) identify policies, programs, and operations where applying behavioral science insights may yield substantial improvements in public welfare, program outcomes, and program cost effectiveness;
(ii) develop strategies for applying behavioral science insights to programs and, where possible, rigorously test and evaluate the impact of these insights;
(iii) recruit behavioral science experts to join the Federal Government as necessary to achieve the goals of this directive; and
(iv) strengthen agency relationships with the research community to better use empirical findings from the behavioral sciences.
(b) In implementing the policy directives in section (a), agencies shall:
(i) identify opportunities to help qualifying individuals, families, communities, and businesses access public programs and benefits by, as appropriate, streamlining processes that may otherwise limit or delay participation -- for example, removing administrative hurdles, shortening wait times, and simplifying forms;
(ii) improve how information is presented to consumers, borrowers, program beneficiaries, and other individuals, whether as directly conveyed by the agency, or in setting standards for the presentation of information, by considering how the content, format, timing, and medium by which information is conveyed affects comprehension and action by individuals, as appropriate;
(iii) identify programs that offer choices and carefully consider how the presentation and structure of those choices, including the order, number, and arrangement of options, can most effectively promote public welfare, as appropriate, giving particular consideration to the selection and setting of default options; and
(iv) review elements of their policies and programs that are designed to encourage or make it easier for Americans to take specific actions, such as saving for retirement or completing education programs. In doing so, agencies shall consider how the timing, frequency, presentation, and labeling of benefits, taxes, subsidies, and other incentives can more effectively and efficiently promote those actions, as appropriate. Particular attention should be paid to opportunities to use nonfinancial incentives.
(c) For policies with a regulatory component, agencies are encouraged to combine this behavioral science insights policy directive with their ongoing review of existing significant regulations to identify and reduce regulatory burdens, as appropriate and consistent with Executive Order 13563 of January 18, 2011 (Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review), and Executive Order 13610 of May 10, 2012 (Identifying and Reducing Regulatory Burdens).
Sec. 2. Implementation of the Behavioral Science Insights Policy Directive. (a) The Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST), under the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and chaired by the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, shall provide agencies with advice and policy guidance to help them execute the policy objectives outlined in section 1 of this order, as appropriate. (b) The NSTC shall release a yearly report summarizing agency implementation of section 1 of this order each year until 2019. Member agencies of the SBST are expected to contribute to this report. (c) To help execute the policy directive set forth in section 1 of this order, the Chair of the SBST shall, within 45 days of the date of this order and thereafter as necessary, issue guidance to assist agencies in implementing this order.
Sec. 3. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to a department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) Independent agencies are strongly encouraged to comply with the requirements of this order.
(d) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE,
September 15, 2015."
Finally, probably one of the shittiest ways the government plays with the minds of those on Facebook, we will briefly discuss the use of something that has been known in Facebook land: Provocateurs/Trolls.
What is a Provocateur or a Troll? Well, they are very nearly the same thing, but are defined and grouped differently.
A Provocateur's job is to cause dissent among organized groups. It's definition in social media sectors is this: A member of law enforcement or paid individual by the same, used to cause dissention amongst those of groups that intend to work towards a common goal, whether it be lawful...or not
A troll, on the other hand, may also be a provocateur, but has been officially defined as this by the Urban Dictionary:
Main Definition:
One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument
Secondary Definition:
One who purposely and deliberately (that purpose usually being self-amusement) starts an argument in a manner which attacks others on a forum without in any way listening to the arguments proposed by his or her peers. He will spark of such an argument via the use of ad hominem attacks (i.e. 'you're nothing but a fanboy' is a popular phrase) with no substance or relevence to back them up as well as straw man arguments, which he uses to simply avoid addressing the essence of the issue.
Souce: - urbandictionary.com
I guess my point here, folks, is that social media, not just Facebook for sure, but ALL social media is now suspect of not being, anymore, a place where you can connect with friends, family, and make new friends as well, share funny pictures and videos and more, but is now a playground where your privacy and your personal thoughts and feelings may now be investigated by law enforcement, or may even be used to perform behavioral experiments on you. Kinda takes the fun out of it doesn't it?
All social media should be carefully used. But then, with over a billion people just on facebook, including all of America, surely? Be afraid. Be very afraid. Not of the app itself, but of what is possible for law enforcement and government to do with it.
