20 years of mislead, divide and rule

20 years of mislead, divide and rule:
social media fuelling narcissism

 

Work in progress - initial release  06july22 
update 20oct22 0v6

Is anyone in government really aware of the full extent of the manipulation of users and messages by social media? We assume the spooks are?

The online safety bill needs to start with the basics of identity verification and accessibility. Maybe that's all it should do?

It obviously suits the blob that their woke champions are at the top of the newsfeeds. And those who question and counter the narrative, delayed and hidden away.

Is there a way to enable and promote alternative counterbiased news and commentary and a whois service that provides a quick lookup and summary of social media user profiles - using data scrapes, plus contributions from other identified and verified users. 

With options for the positively identified users to respond and add their own commentary.

I am particularly annoyed by people like Gary Lineker and Deborah Meaden who have been gifted platforms at the BBC licence fee payers expense they use as political soap boxes with very little accountability or responsibility.

The internet has given a lot of folks the impression they have a voice and influence in the great "global online debate". Wrong! 

Whatever you think, the reality is that your voice is strictly limited by what the new overlords of opinion - the oligarchs of tech in various forms of unnerving collusion with governments - are willing to permit you (and everyone else) to do and say.  Your opinions will only ever be allowed to appear be if they promote, sustain and otherwise support the purpose of the platform owners. To avoid being arbitrarily cancelled, those opinions and ideas must not fall foul of the imperiously imposed "community standards" as established by the kangaroo courts that are held in secret, and whose decisions may occasionally be challenged after a huge amount of time-wasting, chasing around automated procedures designed to sap your will to live. No communication you will receive is likely to include a "reply address" and the message will generally include platitudinous references to web links where the community standards will be explained. Badly.

If you post a comment that displeases the AI analyser bots and/or censor committees, you will be summarily sent to the naughty step for periods ranging from a day to "forever". There are squads of woke busybody users patrolling Twitter and Facebook, doing their very best to be offended, and eagerly reporting other users they regard as "off message" for any imagined abuse in the finest traditions of the Stasi and secret police everywhere.

You may be invited to contest the decision in case some simple mistake has been made that a bot without any ability to discern context has missed. But if that simple objection is rejected, then if you try to make contact and contest any decision, you will be given a massive run-around until you lose the will to live, and give up. Facebook in particular will pile on the agony by sending you round in recursive circles until you give up; knowing that after you have served your penance, you will be sufficiently chastened and eager to avoid a repeat trip to the naughty step that you will be careful to comply.

Here is an example of Twitter at work on Alex Berenson...

Everything "social" is offered for free (at least initially) - and just as a drug dealer waits for their clients to become addicted, so the dealers and pushers of social media wait for unmistakable signs of dependence and narcissist syndrome to emerge, as their victims become bathed in the endorphins of peer approbation.  Abraham Lincoln saw it coming in his Lyceum Address...

And thus the Pavlovian process of conformance and compliance through punishment for wrongthink - and reward by issuing peer "likes" has changed the world's mindset in under a generation.  The "unnatural" woke mindset of the kids running social media has been installed and imposed on those unwilling to stand up for freedom of expression and tell Facebook and Twitter where to shove their propaganda and mind control tactics. 

The Microsoft LinkedIn business network has eventually scraped together a repuation as more useful than Facebook for professionals - but it remains a hangout for recruiters and all manner of tiresome professional services salespeople. But is is the de-facto go-to directory - with an effort to filter out the worst spammers... but it's not oplace for discussion or debate of issues that have cause controversy. 

Does Bill, the great Vaccine Meister Gates, still have influence at the company where sales of barely functional PC software - until Windows 7 eventually provided a passably  stable desktop platform - that made him richer than Croesus, I wonder?

Let's recall that the animal rights movement established the gold standard for activist protest back in the 1970s - it established the damage that extreme protest could quickly do to commercial interests by mobilizing opinion directed against an individual, organization or company – and since Facebook makes money by selling users' data to advertisers, the protestors quickly worked out the tactic of harassing advertisers on the basis that their adverts were helping to fund content that did not suit their causes or match their views and opinions. 

Companies that used animals for medical testing in the 70s were fire-bombed for displeasing activists. Today's advertisers didn’t need the aggravation of being twitter and mail-bombed by the awkward activist squads, and commercial pressures drove the cancellation of all designated wrong-think. Buoyed by success, cancellation tactics became positive affirmation of what they were assured was enlightened social policy; the age of woke had arrived.  Advertisers (whose marketing departments are now mostly run by social-media aware millennials, believed that it was in their interests to pander to the activists - and once-sensible companies began to actively promote the assumptions of the woke activism. 

There is barely a TV commercial that does not now tick a range of boxes concerning diversity and inclusivity - presenting a misleading impression of the nation that substantially over-represents minorities.

This is an interesting reflection on the tolerance of British society, where ... 67.081 million United Kingdom (June 2020 est.) White 87.2%, Black/African/Caribbean/black British 3%, Asian/Asian British: Indian 2.3%, Asian/Asian British: Pakistani 1.9%, mixed 2%, other 3.7% (2011 est.)

Even police forces have abandoned catching burglars to spend their time painting their vehicles with rainbows - and watching social media for signs of wrong think.

Also, an estimated 2.7% of the UK population aged 16 years and over identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) in 2019, an increase from 2.2% in 2018. Between 2018 and 2019, the number of men identifying as LGB increased from 2.5% to 2.9% and women identifying as LGB increased from 2.0% to 2.5%. as at 27 May 2021

So is there anything you can do to complain to the operators of social media platforms that so tirelessly manage to convey a distorted impression of the core demographics of UK society? Remember, you paid nothing to participate in their platforms; you clicked loads of buttons saying that you agreed to the terms and conditions set by the platform operator - so there is no "classic contract", and you cannot easily sue the platform operator for any imagined loss. Even if they persuaded you to spend 70% of your advertising budget wooing the 10% of their fêted minorities.

The payment is of course your personal data that defines you as a target for advertising - and as the saying goes, if you are not paying for use of the platform's services then you are "the product" being sold. A rather gory analogy being that cattle do not pay to be let into an abattoir.

The world of online has moved the goalposts of the law as it relates to free speech and the imperious behaviour of the  inestimably wealthy, smug and arrogant controllers of the global social agenda. This world exists because of the entirely new currency created by the industry: welcome to the attention economy! Also accurately described as the "surveillance economy". Behind this imposition of unwanted and wholly negative intrusion lies the insidious notion that if you object to being sniffed, probed and shaken down to provide a demographic profile for sale to advertisers, then why are you objecting? ...and ultimately the implication is that "what indiscretions, picadillos, naughtiness and potentially reputation destroying secrets have you got to hide?"

This is video is a particularly interesting point of view discussing some of the less obvious consequences of our  social media addiction, delivered by a very bright girl... "Liv" Boeree is a British science communicator, television presenter and former professional poker player." Liv is an objective science based observer with no axe to grind.

Aside from these clear and obvious dangers to personal freedoms and rights, the "blob media" in the US has been assisting the Biden administration to redefine the US Constitution.

Tucker Carlson and Fox News are doing their best to try and prevent the most flagrant abuses - but the quite astonishingly brazen "Washington swamp" is not really bothered ... It seems Nancy Pelosi is making up a new US Constitution off the top of her head to fit the fluid narrative...

One of this blog's followers suggests...

"In my view, the root cause of the social media endorphins-generating polarisation is narcissism. An indispensable human trait that works well as an essential ingredient for survival, and historically has been kept in check and neutralised by daily survival battles of most humans.

Those daily battles of attrition that kept the excesses of narcissism at bay are no longer needed. The society now includes and feeds large numbers of people who do nothing much else but nurture and cultivate their narcissism, via new, previously unavailable outlets for parading and signalling their admirable looks and virtues, on fashionable issues, real, imagined or otherwise contrived and manufactured. 

Manufactured issues are preferrable because their parameters can be better optimised to suit a narcissist’s mindset which requires maximising the amount of generated attention and admiration while minimising the amount of actual work needed. Previously, maximum amounts of endorphins achievable by narcissistic individuals were available mostly only via actual human interaction and one would have to become a dictator in order to reach the pinnacles of narcissism’s ultimate rewards. Today, it is possible to become a widely admired social justice (or climate action, etc.) warrior by technology-aided pretence on social networks, with millions -strong audiences eager to partake in endorphin-feeding frenzies of mutual admiration and the feeling of superiority resulting from belonging to the “righteous” group worshipping prepackaged dogmas. 

Facts are the antithesis of dogmas and people who insist on facts are naturally perceived as enemies and dangerous extremists because they have the potential to stop the flow of endorphins that a narcissist requires in order to thrive, by toppling the carefully constructed coulisses of the artificial stage on which a narcissist performs, and where he (or she) receives applause from admirers..."

work in progress....