Even if you do not have a Facebook account and have never visited the domain, Facebook is still tracking you and they are keeping all this intimate information entirely secret.
The post Facebook Keeps Secret Files on EVERYONE Including Non-Users – Here’s How to See Yours appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Authored by Vasant Dhar, NYU Sterm Professor, op-ed via CNBC,
Unregulated social media platforms pose significant societal risks. That"s what we found out after the 2016 election, when it became clear that social media had been used for political mass manipulation in the world"s oldest democracy.
We should not be surprised. Despite a large scale scientific study conducted by Facebook in 2012 demonstrating that users" moods could be manipulated via messages fed to them, it continued to maintain a position of "algorithmic neutrality" on content. Given what we"ve witnessed, this won"t do going forward.
The Facebook study of 2012 had sparked outrage and concern around the use of data for social experimentation without consent of human subjects. It was worrisome that data usage policies of virtually all digital platforms had become increasingly rapacious over the years, allowing them to do what they please with the data they collect assiduously. Facebook"s social experiment wouldn"t have been approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) for university research involving human subjects.
But the outrage has resulted in little thus far. There was no regulatory body and there still isn"t one that addresses unethical or harmful uses of platform data even though the implications are arguably as serious as those involving national security. The very real possibility that a party with meager resources can potentially influence a democratic election represents an incalculable "externality" imposed on us through a trust vulnerability in our social media ecosystem.
Because trust is so important when it comes to our money, we have historically held banks and financial firms to much higher standards of compliance and control than other businesses. Financial institutions are required to follow well-defined processes with oversight and failsafe plans aimed at minimizing risk and maximizing public trust.
The terror attacks of 2001 ushered in stringent Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations requiring such institutions know their customers in great detail. The 2008-2009 crisis resulted in further regulation aimed at mitigating economic instability and curbing the use of funds for financing terrorism and other illicit activity.
In contrast, the news industry is expected to largely regulate itself. We pride ourselves on our freedom of the press, and the freedom of expression. Indeed, one of the wonders of the Internet era is the empowerment of individuals as publishers on digital platforms.
However, unlike news organizations whose reputations ultimately depend on careful verification, we have allowed digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter to function without much regard to the risks of propaganda and bias they create. They are now promising us they will do better in the future by employing more people for fact checking. Would we have trusted the bankers with such a promise after the financial crisis and left them alone to regulate themselves?
An important lesson learned from the rise of digital platforms is that they disrupt industries by blurring the boundaries between them. Which industry does Amazon belong to? What about Google? Facebook? Apple? The answers are increasingly vague. And yet regulation continues to be siloed largely by industry, like finance, retail, and telecommunication despite their increasing irrelevance in classifying some of our largest and most powerful businesses.
KYC is critical to finance because every industry uses financial services. Since digital platforms are becoming similarly ubiquitous to virtually every industry, KYC requirements should be considered for them, similar to those for financial institutions.
Advertisements on mass media are plain for everyone to see, and political ads require disclosing who paid for them. Yet in the narrowcasting world of digital targeting it is possible for parties to target individuals with customized hate speech ads completely under the radar without the public or regulators ever noticing, or even without the platform designers being aware of their algorithms being used in ways they had never envisioned or intended!
Requiring KYC requirements on digital platforms is not new. Airbnb already does an automated KYC in real time through verification of government issued IDs. Social media platforms could be required to do something similar but with the added restriction of requiring foreign publishers to obtain legitimate U.S. issued IDs to advertise in the U.S. This would pre-empt the use of legitimate identities issued by governments who may be sponsors of illicit activity or harmful propaganda.
Secondly, we need better guidelines around the ethical use of data, especially around profiling and social manipulation. Business should follow IRB policies around the use of human subjects for social experimentation similar to university researchers, regardless of their stated data usage policies which most individuals don"t even read let alone understand.
For too long, regulators have turned a blind eye to the use of data, emboldening digital platforms to do as they please with no oversight. We need something more proactive approach, where social platforms disclose broadly their data mining goals and policies and demonstrate that they are not violating the implicit intentions of users who entrusted them with their data. These points are not intended to be critical of Facebook and Twitter, but a warning that social media platforms in general pose risks that need to be considered seriously by regulators in free societies.
There are no easy answers, but turning a blind eye to this new Internet phenomenon will continue to expose us to considerable peril in the future. The U.S. government and our regulators need to understand how digital platforms can be weaponized and misused against its citizens, and equally importantly, against democracy itself.
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Scared yet... you should be... you"ll be begging for governemnt to regulate the freedom of speech out of social media soon enough... because it"s for your own security... or democracy itself is at stake - right? </sarc..>
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
When a big advertiser pulls its online adverts and its sales remain unchanged, that tells everyone who"s paying attention something important.
It"s an article of widespread faith that data-mining enables advertisers buying online adverts to target consumers with laser-like precision. Vast warehouses of servers grind through billions of records of consumer profiles and transactions and with a bit of algorithmic magic, distill all this data down to the prime target audience for whatever good or service you"re selling: probiotic goo, battery-powered back-scratchers, Zombiestra(tm), investment newsletters based on darts tossed by monkeys, etc.
And everybody knows online media is the place every advertiser wants to be and needs to be. By some measures, online advertising exceeded television advert spending in 2016 (around $70 billion each). Unlike traditional media advertising, which is stagnating or declining, online advertising is still expanding smartly--especially in mobile media.
Combine the promise of god-like targeting via data-mining with fast-growing online platforms, and you"ve got advertisers falling over themselves in their rush to spend billions more on online advertising.
As if that wasn"t enough to get advertisers salivating, the time consumers spend online continues to expand as well:
There"s one little problem with this narrative: online adverts don"t work as well as they"re advertised. Proctor and Gamble recently announced that a significant reduction in their online social-media advert spending had no measurable effect on sales.
The only possible conclusion (unless you"re selling online adverts for a living) is: online adverts don"t work.
There"s another little multi-billion-dollar fly in the ointment of online advertising known as click-fraud-- the clicks on adverts may not be humans actually interested in the product being advertised but automated bots skimming money from advertisers or competitors.
So all those clicks aren"t from actual consumers; they"re bots clicking on click-farm sites which send a small fee for every click to the owner of the site, which just so happens to be the owner of the bots clicking on the adverts.
Or an advertiser finds they owe $100,000 in click-fees for the tens of thousands of clicks their adverts garnered--but most of the clicks were generated by competitors seeking to bleed the advertiser of revenues and introduce false data points.
Click-fraud is the industry"s dirty little secret, and the numbers are kept secret lest the reality that the Emperor has no clothes gets out. Despite all the hoopla about mobile adverts, fast-growing market, blah blah blah, there is precious little real-world evidence that online adverts actually do the intended job of generating new sales and attracting new loyal customers.
Just look at the online advertising you"re being served. Do you get adverts promoting airline tickets to destinations you"ve just been to and that you"ll never return to, adverts promoting wrenches after you"ve just bought the only wrench you"re going to need in this life, etc.?
If this contextual advertising is the best that data-mining can do, it"s pathetically ineffectual. Assuming you haven"t installed ad-blocking software (another industry reality that is rarely mentioned), have you ever clicked on any of the adverts in the sidebars of your social media or email websites--except by accident?
But what about all those thousands of data-points Big Data has collected on us all? All our purchases, all our credit history, how much time we spend online, the sites we visit most often, and all the rest of the mind-numbing details of every day life.
All of this data-mining is predicated on a false assumption: that my past purchases predict my future purchases. Other than the most brain-dead conclusions--yes, I will buy gasoline again somewhere in the near future, probably at Costco, using either the Costco credit card or an airline mileage credit card--this data has little or no effective predictive value because our spending is tightly limited, controlled and prioritized, so there"s near-zero leeway for impulse buys or unplanned purchases.
Spending can be constrained by modest levels of disposable income (i.e. cash left after paying all the essential bills, existing debt, etc.) or by budgeting.
As for enticing me to buy gasoline elsewhere than Costco, or switching credit cards--you"re wasting your money. Giving me $1 off each gallon would work, but only as long as I got this enormous discount--a discount that will bankrupt the issuer in short order.
As for enticing me to switch credit cards--I tear up multiple card offers every week, and have done so for years. So the card offers are batting zero despite literally thousands of pitches via mail, print and online adverts. No "targeted ad" based on data-mining is going to change that.
I might switch if you give me back 10% of all purchases in cash, but that"s an offer that will bankrupt the card issuer.
The fantasy that"s repeated in every account of the staggering effectiveness of mobile advertising is this: I"m walking past a pizza shop and my mobile phone displays a coupon for that very pizza shop. Wow! Imagine the power of combining location with all the treasure trove of big-data-mining about little old me!
Here"s a credit card purchase from three years ago for a pizza shop--this guy is a pizza fan, no doubt about it. This advert is a statistical winner.
Nice, except that 1) I rarely eat pizza, and when I do, it"s generally at home; 2) I never buy meals on impulse, since that ruins my diet/fitness regime (and I"m too thrifty to buy meals on impulse anyway) and 3) my phone is often not with me, off or otherwise disabled.
What this tired narrative never includes is my dismissal of the advert as a matter of habit, and the possibility the advert alienates me in longlasting ways. Most of us never look at ads, and the more you make them intrusive, the more we hate the website, the advertiser and whatever product/service is being pitched.
Advertisers may have unwittingly poisoned themselves and their product/service. The net result of the data-mined, contextual, statistically targeted advert may well be a consumer who blacklists the pizza shop from then on.
This alienation is of course completely opaque to the data-mining software: there are no data traces left by blacklists/ alienation.
But the flaws in data-mining-yields-advertising-success are much, much deeper than this: human behavior is contingent on events that have yet to happen, and the decision process is completely invisible to data mining and algorithms.
Here"s some examples from my recent purchase history.
I recently bought an airline ticket to Switzerland. Whatever inferences the data-mining software might extract from this will necessarily be false, as the motivation was completely contingent and unpredictable: my brother was in a motorcycle accident, and he needed my help as his wife was hundreds of kilometers away caring for the grandkids.
Whatever inferences the data-mining software extracted from the meal I purchased at an Italian cafe a week later would also be intrinsically useless/ false as the only reason we went to that cafe was it was the only restaurant my brother could reach on foot with his cast and cane.
What inference could any software extract from this that would be useful because it was accurate? None. The situation, the motivation, every single part of the decision was intrinsically opaque to any data-mining software.
As for what else I bought in town--groceries, paid in cash--another zero for the data-mining software.
The only item of any value that I did buy, I bought through my brother"s account--another layer no software could possibly penetrate. Software will wrongly attribute the purchase to his profile, not mine, a totally false projection.
Virtually every inference that automated software attempted to extract from my spending would be worse than useless, as it would be misleading. The only inferences with a shred of accuracy--here is a consumer who randomly buys an airline ticket to Europe--is utterly useless to advertisers.
The only adverts that have any chance of working are the traditional variety that assume only one in 10,000 people will have a contingency-based need or desire for the product or service being advertised. So the adverts attempt to reach 1 million people in the hopes that a hundred might be interested and a handful might proceed further.
What advertisers who are shaking themselves out of the online-advert trance are discovering is that the data-mining advert Emperor has no clothes. The industry as it stands can"t identify which clicks are fraudulent or accidental, which ads actually trigger a sale, or which ads actually alienate potential customers.
When a big advertiser pulls its online adverts and its sales remain unchanged, that tells everyone who"s paying attention something important: the industry isn"t doing a very good job for the billions it"s being paid.
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College graduates and other young Americans are increasingly clustering in urban centers like New York City, Chicago and Boston. And now, American companies are starting to follow them. Companies looking to appeal to, and be near, young professionals versed in the world of e-commerce, software analytics, digital engineering, marketing and finance are flocking to cities. But in many cases, they’re leaving their former suburban homes to face significant financial difficulties, according to the Washington Post.
Earlier this summer, health-insurer Aetna said it would move its executives, plus most of technology-focused employees to New York City from Hartford, Conn., the city where the company was founded, and where it prospered for more than 150 years. GE said last year it would leave its Fairfield, Conn., campus for a new global headquarters in Boston. Marriott International is moving from an emptying Maryland office park into the center of Bethesda.
Meanwhile, Caterpillar is moving many of its executives and non-manufacturing employees to Deerfield, Ill. from Peoria, Ill., the manufacturing hub that CAT has long called home. And McDonald’s is leaving its longtime home in Oak Brook, Ill. for a new corporate campus in Chicago.
“Visitors to the McDonald’s wooded corporate campus enter on a driveway named for the late chief executive Ray Kroc, then turn onto Ronald Lane before reaching Hamburger University, where more than 80,000 people have been trained as fast-food managers.
Surrounded by quiet neighborhoods and easy highway connections, this 86-acre suburban compound adorned with walking paths and duck ponds was for four decades considered the ideal place to attract top executives as the company rose to global dominance.
Now its leafy environs are considered a liability. Locked in a battle with companies of all stripes to woo top tech workers and young professionals, McDonald’s executives announced last year that they were putting the property up for sale and moving to the West Loop of Chicago where “L” trains arrive every few minutes and construction cranes dot the skyline.”
The migration to urban centers, according to WaPo, threatens the prosperity outlying suburbs have long enjoyed, bringing a dose of pain felt by rural communities and exacerbating stark gaps in earnings and wealth that Donald Trump capitalized on in winning the presidency.
Many of these itinerant companies aren’t really moving – or at least not entirely. Some, like Caterpillar, are only moving executives, along with workers involved in technology and marketing work, while other employees remain behind.
“Machinery giant Caterpillar said this year that it was moving its headquarters from Peoria to Deerfield, which is closer to Chicago. It said it would keep about 12,000 manufacturing, engineering and research jobs in its original home town. But top-paying office jobs — the type that Caterpillar’s higher-ups enjoy — are being lost, and the company is canceling plans for a 3,200-person headquarters aimed at revitalizing Peoria’s downtown.”
Big corporate moves can be seriously disruptive for a cohort of smaller enterprises that feed on their proximity to big companies, from restaurants and janitorial operations to other subcontractors who located nearby. Plus, the cancellation of the new headquarters was a serious blow. Not to mention the rollback in public investment.
“It was really hard. I mean, you know that $800 million headquarters translated into hundreds and hundreds of good construction jobs over a number of years,” Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis (R) said.
For the village of Oak Brook, being the home of McDonald’s has always been a point of pride. Over the year’s the town’s brand has become closely intertwined with the company’s. But as McDonald’s came under pressure to update its offerings for the Internet age, it opened an office in San Francisco and a year later moved additional digital operations to downtown Chicago, strategically near tech incubators as well as digital outposts of companies that included Yelp and eBay. That precipitated the much larger move it is now planning to make.
“The village of Oak Brook and McDonald’s sort of grew up together. So, when the news came, it was a jolt from the blue — we were really not expecting it,” said Gopal G. Lalmalani, a cardiologist who also serves as the village president.
Lalmalani is no stranger to the desire of young professionals to live in cities: His adult daughters, a lawyer and an actress, live in Chicago. When McDonald’s arrived in Oak Brook, in 1971, many Americans were migrating in the opposite direction, away from the city. In the years since, the tiny village’s identity became closely linked with the fast-food chain as McDonald’s forged a brand that spread across postwar suburbia one Happy Meal at a time.
“It was fun to be traveling and tell someone you’re from Oak Brook and have them say, ‘Well, I never heard of that,’ and then tell them, ‘Yes, you have. Look at the back of the ketchup package from McDonald’s,’ ” said former village president Karen Bushy. Her son held his wedding reception at the hotel on campus, sometimes called McLodge.
The village showed its gratitude — there is no property tax — and McDonald’s reciprocated with donations such as $100,000 annually for the Fourth of July fireworks display and with an outsize status for a town of fewer than 8,000 people.”
Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary who is now a McDonald’s executive vice president, said the company had decided that it needed to be closer not just to workers who build e-commerce tools but also to the customers who use them.
“The decision is really grounded in getting closer to our customers,” Gibbs said.
Some in Oak Brook have begun to invent conspiracy theories about why McDonald’s is moving, including one theory that the company is trying to shake off its lifetime employees in Oak Brook in favor of hiring cheaper and younger urban workers.
“The site of the new headquarters, being built in place of the studio where Oprah Winfrey’s show was filmed, is in Fulton Market, a bustling neighborhood filled with new apartments and some of the city’s most highly rated new restaurants.
Bushy and others in Oak Brook wondered aloud if part of the reasoning for the relocation was to effectively get rid of the employees who have built lives around commuting to Oak Brook and may not follow the company downtown. Gibbs said that was not the intention.
‘Our assumption is not that some amount [of our staff] will not come. Some may not. In some ways that’s probably some personal decision. I think we’ve got a workforce that’s actually quite excited with the move,’ he said.”
Despite Chicago’s rapidly rising murder rate and one would think its reputation as an indebted, crime-ridden metropolis would repel companies looking for a new location for their headquarters. But crime and violence rarely penetrate Chicago’s tony neighborhoods like the Loop, where most corporate office space is located.
“Chicago’s arrival as a magnet for corporations belies statistics that would normally give corporate movers pause. High homicide rates and concerns about the police department have eroded Emanuel’s popularity locally, but those issues seem confined to other parts of the city as young professionals crowd into the Loop, Chicago’s lively central business district.
Chicago has been ranked the No. 1 city in the United States for corporate investment for the past four years by Site Selection Magazine, a real estate trade publication.
Emanuel said crime is not something executives scouting new offices routinely express concerns about. Rather, he touts data points such as 140,000 — the number of new graduates local colleges produce every year.
“Corporations tell me the number one concern that they have — workforce,” he said."
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the old model, where executives chose locations near where they wanted to live has been upturned by the growing influence of technology in nearly every industry. Years ago, IT operations were an afterthought. Now, people with such expertise are driving top-level corporate decisions, and many of them prefer to live in cities.
“It used to be the IT division was in a back office somewhere,” Emanuel said. “The IT division and software, computer and data mining, et cetera, is now next to the CEO. Otherwise, that company is gone.”
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by such science fiction writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move.
Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.”
Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report which was released 15 years ago—we are now trapped into a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
Minority Report is set in the year 2054, but it could just as well have taken place in 2017.
Seemingly taking its cue from science fiction, technology has moved so fast in the short time since Minority Report premiered in 2002 that what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Both worlds—our present-day reality and Spielberg’s celluloid vision of the future—are characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
All of this has come about with little more than a whimper from a clueless American populace largely comprised of nonreaders and television and internet zombies. But we have been warned about such an ominous future in novels and movies for years.
The following films may be the best representation of what we now face as a society.
Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel, this film depicts a futuristic society in which books are banned and serves as an adept metaphor for our obsessively politically correct society where virtually everyone now pre-censors speech.
THX 1138 (1970). This is a somber view of a dehumanized society totally controlled by a police state. The people are force-fed drugs to keep them passive, and they no longer have names but only letter/number combinations such as THX 1138. Any citizen who steps out of line is quickly brought into compliance by robotic police equipped with “pain prods”—electro-shock batons.
Soylent Green (1973). Set in a futuristic overpopulated New York City, the people depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation. The theme is chaos where the world is ruled by ruthless corporations whose only goal is greed and profit.
Blade Runner (1982). In a 21st century Los Angeles, human life is cheap, and anyone can be exterminated at will by the police (or blade runners). Based upon a Philip K. Dick novel, this exquisite Ridley Scott film questions what it means to be human in an inhuman world.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The best adaptation of Orwell’s dark tale, this film visualizes the total loss of freedom in a world dominated by technology and its misuse, and the crushing inhumanity of an omniscient state.
They Live (1988). John Carpenter’s bizarre sci-fi social satire action film makes an effective political point about the underclass—that is, everyone except those in power—the point being that we, the prisoners of our devices, are too busy sucking up the entertainment trivia beamed into our brains and attacking each other up to start an effective resistance movement.
The Matrix (1999). Humanity is at war against technology which has taken the form of intelligent beings, and computer programmer Thomas A. Anderson, secretly a hacker known by the alias “Neo,” is actually living in The Matrix, an illusionary world that appears to be set in the present in order to keep the humans docile and under control.
Minority Report (2002). This film poses the danger of technology operating autonomously. Before long, we all may be mere extensions or appendages of the police state—all suspects in a world commandeered by machines.
V for Vendetta (2006). This film depicts a society ruled by a corrupt and totalitarian government where everything is run by an abusive secret police. The subtext here is that authoritarian regimes through repression create their own enemies—that is, terrorists—forcing government agents and terrorists into a recurring cycle of violence.
Land of the Blind (2006). This dark political satire is based on several historical incidents in which tyrannical rulers were overthrown by new leaders who proved just as evil as their predecessors.
All of these films—and the writers who inspired them—understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan, flag-waving, zombified states, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.
Eventually, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, even the sleepwalking masses (who remain convinced that all of the bad things happening in the police state—the police shootings, the police beatings, the raids, the roadside strip searches—are happening to other people) will have to wake up.
Sooner or later, the things happening to other people will start happening to us and our loved ones.
When that painful reality sinks in, it will hit with the force of a SWAT team crashing through your door, a taser being aimed at your stomach, and a gun pointed at your head. And there will be no channel to change, no reality to alter, and no manufactured farce to hide behind.
As George Orwell warned, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.”
Submitted by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
Here is the first problem with modern political discourse - too many people want to “win” arguments instead of getting to the greater truth of the matter. Discussions become brinkmanship. Opponents launch into immediate attacks instead of simply asking valid questions. They assert immediately that their position is the only valid position without verification. When confronted with rational responses and ample evidence, they dismiss everything instead of pondering what you have handed them. After this line is crossed, there is no point in continuing the debate. It will go on forever.
This is one of the great tragedies of the Saul Alinsky method of political confrontation; it has bred entire generations of people who now believe that there is no objective truth. They think everything is relative. Because of this belief, they assume that there is no wrong or right side, no wrong or right goal. Instead, there are only goals that are MORE right than the goals of others. Everything boils down to a “lesser of two evils” mentality, and the ends therefore justify the means. Using dishonest measures to win the fight becomes acceptable.
In the end, ideological combat actually prevents people from learning rather than helping them get to the root of the issue. We live in a world where truth is superfluous to the overall narrative. The only thing that is important is destroying your rivals.
A classic strategy of dishonest debate and disinformation is to use every method possible to avoid confronting your ideological opponents legitimate arguments and to attack him personally. If you can’t beat him on fair ground using reason and evidence, then why not undermine his character so that the public will be influenced to avoid listening to him at all. This is sometimes called “inoculation.”
At first glance, this is what the entire “fake news” meme supported by the mainstream media seems to be about.
The MSM has proven itself utterly ineffective against the rise of the alternative media. And as I have explained in recent articles, there is a very good and obvious reason for this. The alternative media is the closest thing to a “free market” of ideas that the world has had in a very long time. Before web media, the public was strictly limited to a handful of corporate outlets that dictated information flow with an iron fist. If you wanted to learn anything beyond the mainstream narrative, you had to data mine at the library in an infinitely slower fashion, or try to personally seek out people who represented sources and witnesses.
Today, data mining happens at light speed. Facts and evidence are uncovered in real time. Video interviews and transcripts can be achieved as quickly as a phone call. They can be examined and witnesses can be cited without traveling across the country. The prevalence of visual media also makes it difficult for witnesses to lie about their original claims later down the road.
Beyond this, the alternative media offers something the masses have rarely ever had — choice. People can now look at all sides of an issue and all available evidence and decide for themselves what conclusions make the most sense. The mainstream media has only ever offered one side, with highly regulated information and cherry-picked evidence.
The mainstream media’s purpose has never been to convey the unfettered “news.” Rather, their purpose has always been to manipulate public opinion, and we saw this revealed undeniably during the 2016 election as Wikileaks exposed journalist after journalist using their position of public trust as a weapon to influence the election outcome.
Instead of admitting wrongdoing after this embarrassment, the MSM has decided to double down and escalate the accusation that the alternative media is “fake news.” Meaning, the MSM wants people to believe that we are liars and amateurs, that they are the “professionals,” and that the public should ignore everything the alternative media has to say from now on. I have to point out, though, that the narrative of mainstream news versus “fake news” seems a little thin to me.
Meaning, I believe there is more going on here than the MSM simply trying to save itself.
Call me a “conspiracy theorist,” but the elitist controlled mainstream media does little to help itself through this strategy. Think about it; the MSM is already clearly dying if one looks at the ever shrinking size of their audience and the loss of younger viewers and readers. They have been deteriorating for years, while the alternative media has been exploding in influence. The promotion of the fake news meme requires these mainstream media outlets to actually LIST which sources they believe represent fake news. This is what the Washington Post did with their promotion of liberal professor Melissa Zimdar’s list.
So, forgive me if I am making too much of a leap here, but it seems that this tactic will only bring MORE web traffic to the sites listed, because the list does not really include any specific examples of “fake news” trespasses. People who are curious will be compelled to then visit the alternative sites to see what all the fuss is about. Perhaps many of them will find something they like, rather than something they hate. To me, the entire set-up of the fake news meme hurts the mainstream news more than it helps them.
The next major story linked to fake news has been the assertion by some in government (including the CIA) that the alternative media is actually a front for Russian hacking and propaganda. I predicted this development two years ago in my article "When War Erupts Patriots Will Be Accused Of Aiding “The Enemy.”"
In that article, I argued that a war is being engineered between Eastern and Western powers (Russia and China vs. the U.S. and parts of Europe), and that this war will likely be an economic war. I also pointed out that such a conflict might be used by the elites in the West to rout out the alternative media as agents of Russian propaganda. Here’s a quote:
“Another aspect of this plan, I believe, involves the hijacking of the image of the liberty movement. The liberty movement is essentially the most dangerous unknown element on the elite’s global chessboard. In fact, because we understand that international financiers and central bankers are the real enemy, we have the ability to leave the chessboard entirely and play by our own rules. Widespread economic or military conflict provides an opportunity to neutralize liberty activists who might turn revolutionary.
Recently, I came across an article from The Atlantic titled Russia And The Menace Of Unreality. Now, some alternative analysts would read this article and immediately shrug it off as yet another attempt by the Western media machine to propagandize against Russia. Though their motivations are genuine, these analysts would be cementing the delusion that Russia is the “good guy” and the U.S. is the ever present “bad guy.” The Atlantic piece is a far more intricate manipulation than they would be giving credit for...”
“…This was not as pressing an issue two years ago, when conflict with Russia was a ridiculous notion for many people. But today, conflict with Russia, at the very least on an economic scale, is an inevitability. If you read in full the linked Atlantic article, the narrative that is being constructed is clear — the establishment hopes to rewrite the history and image of the liberty movement by painting us as dupes radicalized by Russian propaganda, rather than being the originators of our own grassroots movement with our own philosophy and methodology. Through this, they take away our ownership of our own cause.”
It would appear that everything I warned about two years ago is now happening. That said, I would amend my original viewpoint to include a new dynamic.
The coming economic war will be based on a false paradigm — the false East/West paradigm. Over the years I have outlined in great detail the evidence that Eastern nations are just as controlled by central banking elites and globalist interests as Western nations, including evidence that Vladimir Putin is an avid supporter of the International Monetary Fund’s push for a single global currency system using the Special Drawing Rights basket as a bridge. He is also now suddenly a supporter of the UN’s climate change and carbon taxation agenda.
I consistently warned analysts within the liberty movement to be careful about cheerleading too much for Russia and Putin, not only because he is controlled opposition, but because eventually we would be caught up in a media war that would label us as enemy conspirators. Remaining (rightly) critical of Putin was the best way to avoid being labeled as a member of the “fake news,” or a purveyor of Russian propaganda.
It was my original belief that the elitist media would use the alternative media’s love affair with Putin as a means to undermine our credibility. However, today I would say that in a strange kind of way, the opposite is taking place.
Confusing? Yes. Look at it this way; with the predominantly leftist mainstream media dying in an irreversible way, no amount of whining about “fake news” is going to save them. The rise of the “populists” is at hand, and as I have warned for the past year, this is by design. Just as conservative anti-establishment movements are rising in geopolitical influence, so to is the anti-establishment media. We are sort of a package deal.
My belief is that conservative movements and the alternative media are being allowed into a position of cultural authority. The globalists are stepping out of the way (for now) as we grow in power. They are doing this in preparation for the final stage of an economic collapse they have been gestating since at least 2008. They are doing this because their goal is to set us up as scapegoats for a global disaster that will be remembered for centuries to come. I was able to predict the success of the Brexit Referendum, Donald Trump’s election win and the latest Federal Reserve rate hike based on this theory and I believe it will continue to prove itself.
The globalists know that at this stage the fake news meme will only HELP US, rather than hurt us. That is to say, the elites are throwing the leftist media to the wolves and the Russian propaganda claims will only make the MSM look more ridiculous. The globalists see the writing on the wall — in fact, with the level of web analytics at their disposal, they can read and predict shifts in social consciousness before almost anyone else is aware of them.
Instead of trying to obstruct us or fight us directly, I believe the elites plan to co-opt us or co-opt our image. That is to say, they will let us grow in apparent influence, trigger a crisis, and either use certain alternative outlets as the new mainstream, or simply paint all of us as complicit in the failures of conservative governments and nationalism.
The end game here is to destroy the underlying principles of liberty movements; to make future generations reel in horror at the very mention of conservatives and national sovereignty. The elites are playing a very complex strategy of fourth-generation warfare. Nothing you see is exactly what it seems. The fake news label is not meant to disrupt the alternative media. In fact it will help us rise to a position in which we can be blamed for negative global influence.
Some people will say I am reading too much into the situation, or that I am giving the elites “too much credit,” or attributing too much “omnipotence” to their position. They will probably reference the recent passage of the "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act" and claim that this is clearly meant to take down the alternative media.
I would ask these people to consider a question, though — who will really have control over this legislation in the near future? If I am right, and Trump enters the White House in January with a Republican majority in Congress and the Senate, will it not be Trump that most benefits from the legal framework? How then will it serve to undermine the alternative and conservative media?
I predict, in fact, that conservatives are being given enough rope to hang themselves with. I predict that Trump will utilize this legislation to go after the mainstream media, not the alternative media, and that many conservatives will support him even though questions of constitutionality will increase. I believe the fake news meme will backfire and that the MSM will die off as a result.
I believe that this is all part of a carefully crafted narrative in which the right wing gains unprecedented political sway, only to be met with economic and social disaster. I believe that the game is far from over in the fight between globalists and sovereignty activists. I believe they cannot defeat us directly, so they now hope to defeat us indirectly, or, trick us into defeating ourselves. In reality, the game is just beginning.
