Facebook: Colonialism 2.0
by Tony Cartalucci
New Eastern Outlook
24.12.2014
The Western media has attempted to portray Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious plan to get every human being online as altruistic at first, but later revealed as simply what could be called “profitable empathy.” In reality however, the truth is much more sinister, with Facebook already revealed to be much more than a mere corporation run by Zuckerberg and his “ideas”.
Facebook is the pinnacle of social engineering, an online operant conditioning chamber – also known as a Skinner box – that is being used to track, trace, document, and manipulate half of the entire online population. Despite users attempting to utilize Facebook to connect and communicate with individuals and organizations of interest, Facebook has turned its features against users, insidiously manipulating their timelines to show selected posts and updates while “soft censoring” others to manage public perception.
“Studies” have even been published proving the effectiveness of Facebook’s unethical social engineering. In one study, the emotions of users were successfully manipulated by selectively posting only negative or only positive posts from individuals or organizations on users’ contact lists.
A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” stated in its abstract that (emphasis added):
We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues. Not only are the findings troubling – illustrating that Facebook possesses the ability to influence the emotions of its users unwittingly through careful manipulation of their news feeds – but the invasive, unethical methods by which Facebook conducted the experiment are troubling as well.
In another experiment Facebook manipulated the news feed of some 2 million Americans in 2012 in order to increase public participation during that year’s US presidential election.
Facebook was also an official sponsor of the US State Department’s training program preparing political subversion across North Africa and the Middle East years before the so-called “Arab Spring” unfolded. The very activists audiences around the world were told “spontaneously” sprung up across North Africa and the Middle East were in fact trained, funded, and equipped by the US State Department and various corporations including tech giants Google and Facebook years beforehand.
5 Reasons Police Body Cameras Are a Terrible Idea
by Activist Post
Dec 26, 2014
Police abuse is a major problem not because of a few bad apples but because of the training, equipment, and tactics.
The establishment wants the public arguing about who the victims are of police brutality instead of focusing on the actions police routinely get away with. And they get away with it because it’s protocol, or standard operating procedure.
Police are somehow anointed with special privileges that regular citizens do not have. They are allowed to break into people’s homes, spy on them, harass them in the street, confiscate suspicious cash, and murder citizens if they do not comply with their demands.
These actions are obviously wrong and illegal if anyone except “authorities” carries them out. If 2014 proved anything, it’s that police can get away with murder while average citizens can’t exchange cigarettes without a license.
This has caused protests and riots throughout the country and the solution being offered is not to change the laws to remove these absurd privileges from cops, but to put a camera on every single officer.
On the surface, cameras seem like they’ll add a layer of accountability to the system. However, civil liberties groups who advocate this approach seem to be shortsighted.
Here are 5 reasons to oppose body cameras for cops:
Video didn’t matter in publicized cases: In the case of Eric Garner, the NY man who was choked to death for selling loose cigarettes, clear video footage did not matter. In the court’s eyes disobeying officers is grounds for using lethal force. Case closed, at least until laws are changed.
Privacy, facial recognition: Technology already exists for cameras to be equipped with facial recognition software that could immediately identify anyone the cop comes in contact with. And with new threat level analysis of social media and other “watch list” mechanisms, cops will be motivated to stop someone without actual probable cause. This is extremely dangerous for liberty. This alone should halt your support for mandatory police cameras.
Boondoggle – Just like Michael Chertoff cashed in on naked body scanners following the sketchy underwear bomber, several cronies will make big bucks outfitting all police with these cameras and for providing supposed oversight.
Ends being let off with a warning: Remember the good cops who let you off on warnings for minor infractions? Say goodbye to that. Police cameras will be used to hold police accountable to their bosses more than to the public.
Cops can turn them off: Cops can easily turn the cameras off, and precincts can delete or edit footage in their favor. Cameras are as good as useless if people don’t trust the system to preserve and use the footage wisely.
Cameras may prevent some good cops from acting like complete thugs; however, when thuggish behavior is not just tolerated but legal in the eyes of the system, does it really matter if we have that behavior on video or not?
How to Identify and Remove Facebook Trolls, Gang-Stalkers, and Disinfo Agents
How to Identify and Remove Facebook Trolls, Gang-Stalkers, and Disinfo Agents
By Jan Irvin
Dec. 16, 2014
Have you ever had someone post on a thread you created who is mean to everyone trying to have a conversation – name calling and ridiculing, or just plain lying about the information? Have you ever had someone who contacts everyone on your friends list and tells them lies about you? Have you ever had someone who just about every time you post a new thread they’re the first to reply – posting nonsense, or attacks? Have you ever had someone make repeated comments to a thread while never seeming to stay on topic?
If you can say yes to any of the above questions, you’re likely a victim of paid online cyber-bullying: trolls, gang-stalkers, and counterintelligence agents.
After going through many hundreds of friend requests each month on Facebook I’ve learned to spot many, not all, but many paid cyber-trolls, gang-stalkers, and counterintelligence agents. I’ve decided to share this information the public to help you identify them as well, if you too are experiencing the problem. Even if you aren’t, the tools here will be useful to you and your friends to help identify these potentially unsavory types in the future.
The more Facebook and internet users learn to identify paid trolls, gang-stalkers and counterintelligence agents, the less we all have to deal with them.
By exposing and sharing their methods we make them impotent and ineffectual.
In this day and age of high technology it’s important that we all realize the reality of, and learn to identify, expose, and stop, cyber-bullies, trolls and counterintelligence – for many reasons:
Trolls, cyber-bullies and counterintelligence agents waste billions of your tax dollars to intentionally mislead you on serious public matters.
Trolls, cyber-bullies and counterintelligence agents waste huge amounts of your time in productivity, etc.
Learning to identify trolls, cyber-bullies and counterintelligence agents, and expose them, we lessen their cost and impact on the rest of society.
By exposing trolls, cyber-bullies, and counterintelligence agents, we also expose their misinformation and attempts to mislead us where correct information for proper decision making is of great importance to everyone.
While this article focuses specifically with Facebook, many of the tools provided here will be relevant across the internet: on Youtube, Twitter, internet forums, news feeds, etc. Please share this article with everyone you know so that we may all benefit and prosper by the identification, and especially removal, of these counterintelligence infestations.
At the end of this short article I provide additional study materials on trolls, gang-stalkers, and counterintelligence agents, et al., for your continued study.
Dotcom wants ‘to kill Skype’ with MegaChat, his encrypted video calling service
RT News
Published time: January 22, 2015 18:46
Kim Dotcom (Reuters / Nigel Marple)
Kim Dotcom has launched a public beta version of his latest project, with which he aims to wipe out Skype. The video calling service called MegaChat is to be encrypted to ensure secure communications for all its users.
The program will be introduced “starting with video calling today,” the German born entrepreneur said on Twitter on Thursday. The new program registered half a million calls in just a matter of hours.
Dotcom has says the new product, which has been developed by the Mega “Conspiracy Team” will be a “Skype killer,” and hopes to end the domination of the Microsoft based product.
#Mega has over 15 million registered users now. I think #MegaChat could elevate us to 100+ million users by the end of 2015. #Prediction
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) January 22, 2015
MegaChat’s main selling point is that it is encrypted from both ends. The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made revelations that Skype had co-operated with America’s spy agency to allow communications to be monitored – something that would not happen with Dotcom’s new product.
The entrepreneur also mentioned that he soon hopes to release a messaging service and a video conference call service in the near future.
Smartphone Use Can Alter The Brain
by The Sleuth Journal
Jan 1, 2015
By: Janice Wood | Psych Central –
The finger movements we use to control our smartphones can actually change brain activity, according to a new Swiss study.
Researchers at the University of Zurich teamed with colleagues at the University of Fribourg to research the day-to-day plasticity of the human brain based on smartphone usage.
The phones provide a fertile source of data, said Dr. Arko Ghosh from the Institute of Neuroinformatics of the University of Zurich.
“Smartphones offer us an opportunity to understand how normal life shapes the brains of ordinary people,” he said.
The researchers studied the activation in the sensorimotor cortex, which is triggered by finger movements.
They used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the cortical brain activity in 37 right-handed people, including 26 who were touchscreen smartphone users and 11 who had old cellphones. The researchers placed 62 electrodes on the test subject’s heads to record activity based on thumb, forefinger, and middle finger movements on the phones.
The results revealed that the cortical representation in touchscreen smartphone users was different compared to people with conventional cellphones.
Ghosh said he also was able to demonstrate that the frequency of smartphone usage influences cortical activity. The more a smartphone had been used in the previous 10 days, the greater the signal in the brain, he noted.
This correlation was the strongest in the area that represented the thumb, he added.
“At first glance, this discovery seems comparable to what happens in violinists,” he said.
The researchers were able to draw two distinctions: First, how long smartphone users have owned and used a device does not play a role. In the case of violinists, however, the activity in the brain depended on the age at which they started playing.
Secondly, there is a linear connection between the activation in the brain and the most recent use of a smartphone, while there was no evidence of this for violinists in earlier studies, the researchers noted.
“The digital technology we use on a daily basis shapes the sensory processing in our brains − and on a scale that surprised us,” Ghosh said.
Source: University of Zurich
The article Smartphone Use Can Alter The Brain published by TheSleuthJournal – Real News Without Synthetics
Source: http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/smartphone-use-can-alter-brain/
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