Chomsky on Propaganda, Public Relations & Mind Control Great historical context on democracy, class-warfare and protection of the 'opulent class' aka 'smart money' references Edward Bernay's classic "Propaganda"
Edward Bernays of “Propaganda” fame his “Save the Trees” legacy “ “Save The Trees”—1968, Edward Bernays last “campaign”. —- In the 1970s began the influence of a group of plastic companies that produced “university studies” (paid for by the plastic industry) to support “environmental” groups (donations by the plastic industry) to demonize paper grocery bags that allowed for billions of new trees. Thusly billions of trees that would have been planted and replanted 100s of times, stopped. A generation was taught “save the trees” (started by the plastics industry) and manipulated as one of the last personal projects of Edward Bernays. The industry and Edward perfectly knew that plastics would never break down (micro plastics is not a breakdown) and the recycling sham would be an acceptable “popular” way for all parties to feel less guilty by selling and using plastics. Now you have forever microplastics in your brain ( sciencealert.com/microplastics-… ) and less trees, a lot less. So watch who “they” want you to hate when they point out how some things are not really good for anyone’s health. —- publicintegrity.org/environment/po… “
Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 Word of the Year was “Post-Truth” aka ‘Age of Lies’ “Decision-making in a Post-Truth culture shifts away from and less on facts, data, evidence and drifts more toward feeling, preference, emotion, loyalty, tribe, grievance.” From Center for Strategic & International Studies Schieffer Series: Russian Active Measures: Past, Present, and Future https://www.youtube.com/live/3bP-1kBKCAU
"The Art of Controversy" SCHOPENHAUER'S 38 STRATAGEMS, OR 38 WAYS TO WIN AN ARGUMENT Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896. Schopenhauer's 38 ways to win an argument are: Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent's statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. The more restricted and narrow his or her propositions remain, the easier they are to defend by him or her. Use different meanings of your opponent's words to refute his or her argument. Ignore your opponent's proposition, which was intended to refer to a particular thing. Rather, understand it in some quite different sense, and then refute it. Attack something different than that which was asserted. Hide your conclusion from your opponent till the end. Mingle your premises here and there in your talk. Get your opponent to agree to them in no definite order. By this circuitious route you conceal your game until you have obtained all the admissions that are necessary to reach your goal. Use your opponent's beliefs against him. If the opponent refuses to accept your premises, use his own premises to your advantage. Another plan is to confuse the issue by changing your opponent's words or what he or she seeks to prove. State your proposition and show the truth of it by asking the opponent many questions. By asking many wide-reaching questions at once, you may hide what you want to get admitted. Then you quickly propound the argument resulting from the opponent's admissions. Make your opponent angry. An angry person is less capable of using judgement or perceiving where his or her advantage lies. Use your opponent's answers to your questions to reach different or even opposite conclusions. If your opponent answers all your questions negatively and refuses to grant any points, ask him or her to concede the opposite of your premises. This may confuse the opponent as to which point you actually seek them to concede. If the opponent grants you the truth of some of your premises, refrain from asking him or her to agree to your conclusion. Later, introduce your conclusion as a settled and admitted fact. Your opponent may come to believe that your conclusion was admitted. If the argument turns upon general ideas with no particular names, you must use language or a metaphor that is favorable in your proposition. To make your opponent accept a proposition, you must give him or her an opposite, counter-proposition as well. If the contrast is glaring, the opponent will accept your proposition to avoid being paradoxical. Try to bluff your opponent. If he or she has answered several of your questions without the answers turning out in favor of your conclusion, advance your conclusion triumphantly, even if it does not follow. If your opponent is shy or stupid, and you yourself possess a great deal of impudence and a good voice, the trick may easily succeed. If you wish to advance a proposition that is difficult to prove, put it aside for the moment. Instead, submit for your opponent's acceptance or rejection some true poposition, as thoug you wished to draw your proof from it. Should the opponent reject it because he or she suspects a trick, you can obtain your triumph by showing how absurd the opponent is to reject a true proposition. Should the opponent accept it, you now have reason on your own for the moment. You can either try to prove your original proposition or maintain that your original proposition is proved by what the opponent accepted. For this, an extreme degree of impudence is required. When your opponent puts forth a proposition, find it inconsistent with his or her other statements, beliefs, actions, or lack of action. If your opponent presses you with a counter proof, you will often be able to save yourself by advancing some subtle distinction. Try to find a second meaning or an ambiguous sense for your opponent's idea. If your opponent has taken up a line of argument that will end in your defeat, you must not allow him or her to carry it to its conclusion. Interrupt the dispute, break it off altogether, or lead the opponent to a different subject. Should your opponent expressly challenge you to produce any objection to some definite point in his or her argument, and you have nothing much to say, try to make the argument less specific. If your opponent has admitted to all or most of your premises, do not ask him or her directly to accept your conclusion. Rather draw the conclusion yourself as if it too had been admitted. When your opponent uses an argument that is superficial, refute it by setting forth its superficial character. But it is better to meet the opponent with a counter argument that is just as superficial, and so dispose of him or her. For it is with victory that your are concerned, and not with truth. If your opponent asks you to admit something from which the point in dispute will immediately follow, you must refuse to do so, declaring that it begs the question. Contradiction and contention irritate a person into exaggerating his or her statements. By contractiong your opponent you may drive him or her into extending the statement beyond its natural limit. When you then contradict the exaggerated form of it, you look as though you had refuted the orginal statement your opponent tries to extend your own statement further than you intended, redefine your statement's limits. This trick consists in stating a false syllogism. Your opponent makes a proposition and by false inference and distortion of his or her ideas you force from the proposition other propositions that are not intended and that appear absurd. It then appears the opponent's proposition gave rise to these inconsistencies, and so appears to be indirectly refuted. If your opponent is making a generalization, find an instance to the contrary. Only one valid contradiciton is needed to overthrow the opponent's proposition. A brilliant move is to turn the tables and use your opponent's arguments against him or herself. Should your opponent surprise you by becoming particularly angry at an argument, you must urge it with all the more zeal. Not only will this make the opponent angry, it may be presumed that you put your finger on the weak side of his or her case, and that the opponent is more open to attack on this point than you expected. This trick is chiefly practicable in a dispute if there is an audience who is not an expert on the subject. You make an invalid objection to your opponent who seems to be defeated in the eyes of the audience. This strategy is particularly effective if your objection makes the opponent look ridiculous or if the audience laughs. If the opponent must make a long, complicated explanation to correct you, the audience will not be disposed to listen. If you find that you are being beaten, you can create a diversion that is, you can suddenly begin to talk of something else, as though it had bearing on the matter in dispose. This may be done without presumption if the diversion has some general bearing on the matter. Make an appeal to authority rather than reason. If your opponent respects an authority or an expert, quote that authority to further your case. If needed, quote what the authority said in some other sense or circumstance. Authorities that your opponent fails to understand are those which he or she generally admires the most. You may also, should it be necessary, not only twist your authorities, but actually falsify them, or quote something that you have invented entirely yourself. If you know that you have no reply to an argument that your opponent advances, you may, by a fine stroke of irony, declare yourself to be an incompetent judge. A quick way of getting rid of an opponent's assertion, or throwing suspicion on it, is by putting it into some odious category. You admit your opponent's premises but deny the conclusion. When you state a question or an argument, and your opponent gives you no direct answer, or evades it with a counter question, or tries to change the subject, it is a sure sign you have touched a weak spot, sometimes without knowing it. You have as it were, reduced the opponent to silence. You must, therefore, urge the point all the more, and not let your opponent evade it, even when you do not know where the weakness that you have hit upon really lies. This trick makes all unnecessary if it works. Instead of working on an opponent's intellect, work on his or her motive. If you succeed in making your opponent's opinion, should it prove true, seem distinctly to his or her own interest, the opponenent will drop it like a hot potato. You may also puzzle and bewilder your opponent by mere bombast. If the opponent is weak or does not wish to appear as ife he or she has no idea what you are talking about, you can easily impose upon him or her some argument that sounds very deep or learned, or that sounds indisputable. Should your opponent be in the right but, luckily for you, choose a faulty proof, you can easily refute it and then claim that you have refuted the whole position. This is the way which bad advocates lose a good case. If no accurate proof occurs to the opponent or the bystanders, you have won the day. A last trick is to become personal, insulting and rude as soon as you perceive that your opponent has the upper hand. In becoming personal you leave the subject altogether, and turn your attack on the person by remarks of an offensive and spiteful character. This is a very popular trick, because everyone is able to carry it into effect. (abstracted from the book:Numerical Lists You Never Knew or Once Knew and Probably Forget, by: John Boswell and Dan Starer)
No doubt that some referendums or elections in the last 10 years have been won thanks to misinformation. The problem is how you fight it. Governments are traditionally slow to catch up. Until such time there is a way to combat misinformation (which as of now is way on the rise), we as society will be prey to it.
What Does a Bot Farm look like? These cyber farms have been hugely active in war and politics James Marinero, MSc, MBA Cyber Police bot farm searches (Ukraine’s Cyber Police) Ukraine cyber-security forces recently captured a ‘bot farm’ and 150,000 sim cards but what’s the background and what does this cyber-agricultural unit look like? Some bot farms serve constructive functions, such as automating customer service responses or gathering data. I recently had a long and ultimately successful interaction with a bot while trying solve a problem with my bank account — the bot gave up and called a human! However, other bot farms engage in deceptive practices, such as spreading misinformation, manipulating social media interactions, and participating in fraudulent activities. Bot farms do not necessarily need cellphones to operate, but if the aim is to operate on leading social media platforms (as opposed to email scams and website interference), then cellphones or, essentially, sim cards are usually necessary for account validation. Bot farm or click farm? A click farm is where people gather and interact over a website through which they collect “clicks” to help a client’s product, service, or website reach a larger audience. Website owners may hire people to do the task remotely using PTC (paid-to-click) sites or create a bot farm account to complete the job for a natural person. This whole activity is carried out behind closed doors. So, a bot farm and a click farm are not different. Bot farms are a type of click farm as both generate fake clicks leading to ad fraud and click fraud. Or worse. But if somebody wants massive scaling, then hiring people (PTC) is not efficient to scale and it has weak security (people=leaks). It has been estimated that as much as 50% of worldwide web traffic was bot-generated in 2014. By 2022, that figure was down to 53%, with 17% of ‘good bot’ and 30% ‘bad-bot’ on top of that (statista.com). Bot farm usage: the dark side The black side of bot farms is realised through the creation of artificial influence and the amplification of specific agendas. These agendas can be relatively innocuous but when it comes to interference in elections, geopolitical influence or actual war such as Russia’s attack on the very existence of Ukraine, then the effects can be profound and result in the deaths of people. Social media platforms With their vast user bases and potential for viral content, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have become prime targets for bot farm operators, as well as messaging apps such as WhatsApp and FaceTime. The bot farmers may use bots to inflate the number of followers, likes, and shares on particular accounts, creating a false appearance of popularity. This manipulation can sway public opinion, influence political discourse, and even affect financial markets. One of the most memorable cases of the dark side was the social media influence of bots in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Putin’s ex-chef and former ally Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted running a bot (troll) farm operation in St Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) and interfering in the election process. It was called ‘Internet Research Agency’. Misinformation Bot farms are notorious for disseminating misinformation on a large scale. By creating a network of bots that push false narratives and amplify conspiracy theories, malicious actors can sow confusion and discord among online communities. This poses a significant challenge for platforms striving to maintain trust and authenticity. There is an ongoing battle to filter out bot activity. Elon Musk stuttered in his $44Billion acquisition of Twitter because he became concerned that the actual number of ‘real users’ was much less than the company claimed, with numbers inflated by bots. On Tuesday [ed: 16 May2023], Musk said his deal to buy Twitter can’t move forward unless it provides public proof that less than 5% of its accounts are fake or spam, as the company reported in a May 2 regulatory filing. — cbsnews ADDoS (advanced distributed denial of service) Bot farms can also be used for ADDoS (advanced distributed denial of service) attacks. Large scale protection systems such as Cloudflare can be defeated by bot farms using a number of methods including DNS amplification, HTTP amplification, by bypassing rate limits and exploiting firewall bypasses. Also, attackers might leverage Cloudflare’s reverse proxy service to hide the real IP addresses of the attacking machines. By doing so, they make it harder for defenders to trace the source of the attack and block it effectively. If you want to know more, then Cloudflare explains in a little more depth here. Use of bot farms in this way does not require sim cards or cell phones. Sim card usage in creating bot accounts Traditionally, creating bot accounts on websites and social media platforms required individual effort to set up multiple email addresses and register accounts manually. This can be automated relatively easily using simple software which is easy to build and deploy. You can do it yourself — just ask an AI system to write the code for you, although you will have to be clever in the way you construct your AI prompts to get around the AI’s ‘safety net’. Cellphones have complicated this process. With cellphone verification becoming a standard security measure for many online services, bot farm operators had to adapt their operations to work with this verification system. It’s a relatively simple matter to leave out the actual cell phone and ‘rack’ the sim cards as in the headline picture. By using a large number of sim cards bot farm operators can create accounts en masse. They simulate genuine user behavior, deceiving platforms that rely on phone verification to differentiate between human users and bots. Consequently, detecting and mitigating bot farms has become more challenging for platform administrators and this has been made even more tricky to police since the explosion of AI applications which came to public attention in late 2022. Without sim cards As internet security measures have evolved, bot farm operators are quick to find loopholes. To bypass phone verification, some criminals (and state actors) have developed sophisticated software to automate the creation of bot accounts without the need for cellphones and sim cards. These AI-driven software solutions emulate human-like interactions and defeat security measures designed to prevent mass account creation. These tools exploit vulnerabilities in captcha systems, IP masking, and other verification processes. Two-factor authorisation was a step forward, but can now be easily defeated. Combating Bot Farms The battle against bot farms is an ongoing and complex struggle. From 2022: Ukraine has traced a Russian propaganda operation to a bot farm that was secretly operating in the country’s own capital of Kyiv. The bot farm was using 5,000 SIM cards and 200 proxy servers to spread the propaganda online, according to the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) The farm operated more than 1 million bot accounts, which helped the propaganda operation build an audience of over 400,000 users on social media, according to the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU). On Tuesday, the SSU announced it had dismantled the bot farm, which belonged to an unnamed Russian citizen in Kyiv who positioned himself as a “political expert.” — PCMag, August 4, 2022 Ukraine bot farm. Credit: Ukraine Security Service This was just one of several successful raids in Ukraine in 2022. But it’s happening worldwide. Russia and China are big in this, with secret state backing for groups such as Cozy Bear in Russia and Storm-558 in China. And let’s not kid ourselves that the ‘West’ is clean on this. Social media platforms and online service providers invest significant resources in developing AI-powered tools to detect and remove suspicious accounts. This is an expensive process, even using AI. These platforms rely on user behavior analysis, anomaly detection, and pattern recognition to identify and shut down bot accounts systematically. Collaborative efforts between platforms, cybersecurity experts, and policymakers are essential to combat the threats posed by bot farms effectively. Stricter regulations and increased transparency can also play a part in reducing the incentives for malicious bot farm operators. Scale could be a problem for bot farmers and I’m speculating that by careful automated data analysis of tech purchasing patterns then security services (at least in Ukraine) could identify bad actors even when network data analysis is masked. The methods by which security services crack the systems and physically locate the farms are not usually disclosed. Recent Ukrainian success In the raid of July 2023, cyber police and units of the Ukrainian National Police carried out 21 search operations in Vinnytsia, Zaporizhzhia, and Lvivand. The bots were used to push Russian propaganda justifying Russia’s war in Ukraine, to disseminate illegal content and personal information, and in various other fraudulent activities. They seized computer equipment, mobile phones, over 250 GSM gateways, and roughly 150,000 SIM cards of multiple mobile operators. — bleepingcomputer.com Conclusion The war is ongoing, but strangely, when I recently opened a Mastodon account, the process was relatively straightforward and did not require cellphone verification, just email. I was surprised, but I guess that newer platforms don’t want to make it too difficult for new users to join up. The use of captcha systems added a layer of complexity but with the advent of AI for pattern recognition and solving simple arithmetic puzzles the effective use of captcha has, I think, had its day. I’ve already had a problem with Facebook and had to upload a passport image to regain access to my account. I’m concerned that the time will come when we’ll have to provide bio-data to join a social network. But no bio-data for me. I’ve had enough of new platforms, and I will definitely not be ‘Threading’. And I’m reading my existing social media feeds with care. -- repost from
[[Big Think]] In 1954, early on in the Cold War, the Soviet Union created the Committee for State Security, more commonly known in the West as the KGB. The group came to oversee the Soviet Union’s internal security, secret police, and domestic and foreign intelligence operations. Across the world, the KGB did whatever it could to thwart pro-Western and anti-Soviet political movements and figures. The group would assassinate political leaders with cyanide and other weapons. It would fund and arm leftist groups, especially those in developing nations. And the KGB successfully established moles in U.S. intelligence agencies, though the exact number still isn’t — and may never be — known for sure. Also unclear were the group’s long-term plans involving the U.S. One glimpse, however, comes from a former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, who defected to Canada in 1970. He claimed to know details of a Soviet plan to undermine the U.S., not on the battlefield but in the psyche of the American public. In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin from which much can be learned today. His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization.” It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit. Bezmenov made the point that the work of the KGB mainly does not involve espionage, despite what our popular culture may tell us. Most of the work,85%of it, was “a slow process which we call either [[ideological subversion]] , [[active measures]] , or [[psychological warfare]] .” What does that mean? Bezmenov explained that the most striking thing about ideological subversion is that it happens in the open as a legitimate process. “You can see it with your own eyes,” he said. The American media would be able to see it, if it just focused on it. Here’s how he further defined ideological subversion: “What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.” Bezmenov described this process as “a great brainwashing” that has four basic stages. The first stage is called “demoralization” which takes from 15 to 20 years to achieve. According to the former KGB agent, that is the minimum number of years it takes to re-educate one generation of students that is normally exposed to the ideology of its country — in other words, the time it takes to change what the people are thinking. He used the examples of 1960s hippies coming to positions of power in the 1980s in the government and businesses of America. Bezmenov claimed this generation was already “contaminated” by Marxist-Leninist values. Of course, this claim that many baby boomers are somehow espousing KGB-tainted ideas is hard to believe but Bezmenov’s larger point addressed why people who have been gradually “demoralized” are unable to understand that this has happened to them. Referring to such people, Bezmenov said: “They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.” Demoralization is a process that is “irreversible.” Bezmenov actually thought (back in 1984) that the process of demoralizing America was already completed. It would take another generation and another couple of decades to get the people to think differently and return to their patriotic American values, claimed the agent. In what is perhaps a most striking passage in the interview, here’s how Bezmenov described the state of a “demoralized” person: “As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.” It’s hard not to see in that the state of many modern Americans. We have become a society of polarized tribes, with some people flat out rejecting facts in favor of narratives and opinions. Once demoralization is completed, the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization”. During this two-to-five-year period, asserted Bezmenov, what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. Basically, the subverter (Russia) would look to destabilize every one of those areas in the United States, considerably weakening it. The third stage would be “crisis.” It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov. The crisis would bring “a violent change of power, structure, and economy” and will be followed by the last stage, “normalization.” That’s when your country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality. This will happen to America unless it gets rid of people who will bring it to a crisis, warned Bezmenov. What’s more “if people will fail to grasp the impending danger of that development, nothing ever can help [the] United States,” adding, “You may kiss goodbye to your freedom.” It bears saying that when he made this statement, he was warning about baby boomers and Democrats of the time. In another somewhat terrifying excerpt, here’s what Bezmenov had to say about what is really happening in the United States: It may think it is living in peace, but it has been actively at war with Russia, and for some time: “Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime,” said the former KGB agent. “False. United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system.” You can watch the full interview here: Big Think article quoted above https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/#rebelltitem3