The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
Of course, it is not just on Facebook etc., where grooming occurs. It is a common problem right across our culture, from Religion to Politics, from Populist Rhetoric to Misogynist and Racist Dog Whistles, from Ponzi Schemes to Phishing Emails.
To the Editor
An article on the Guardian, 7th January, 2023, about a teenage girl, Rhiannon Rudd, who was arrested on terrorism charges, which were dropped when it was shown that she had been groomed, tells a terrible story.
Someone knowingly targeted a vulnerable person, having studied that person's biases, lack of knowledge, fears and hopes, provided content designed to exacerbate the emotional dynamics of those vulnerabilities, in order to drive behavioural change that could then be exploited.
Tragically, Rhiannon Rudd committed suicide a year after this incident.
Anyone, at any age, can be subjected to such targeting. We can see the adverse impacts of this activity all around us. It's not simply a problem with social media, it is a problem within our culture.
This is quite clearly criminal behaviour, given the intent to manipulate others, in order to exploit them, wherever it happens, even if legislation does not exist to impose a criminal penalty.
We need legislation that clearly identifies this activity, that imposes a robust custodial sentence upon anyone or any entity proven to have engaged in such activity.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
Frances Haugen's testimony and evidence concerning Facebook and Instagram speaks volumes.
Media communications that target people’s cognitive biases, their insecurities, prejudices and worries, their misunderstandings, cultural conditioning and their fears, studying those conditions, aiming attenuated content that exacerbates those conditions at the targets,
And doing this with intent, in order to drive behavioural change - more on-line time extracted from users, to encouraging addictive behaviour, whilst allowing malign actors access to vulnerable people, inciting hatred, nudging target groups into voting or not voting based on emotional and irrational drivers, increasing sales: all of this is economically or politically exploitative.
This activity is psychological abuse. This activity is grooming.
If we had legislation identifying it, defining it and criminalising it, as psychologically abusive intentional action, then the media providers would be unable to allow such behaviour to be disseminated on their platforms as a revenue stream. Their AI algorithms would have to be written accordingly.
This would not be an inhibition of free speech. This would be protecting vulnerable people from predatory actors.
The asymmetry of power between the State, the Corporation and the individual human being is immense. Legislation is required to prevent bad actors exploiting that power disparity. This is a question of Health and Safety.
Free Speech is, on the citizens side, the responsibility to speak truthfully, publicly and it is also an admonishment to State and other institutional actors to never use their power to harass honest critics, witnesses, whistle-blowers and truth tellers - the State and other powerful institutions must listen to the honest citizen and hear the honest truth.
Frances Haugen is demonstrating the best practice of Free Speech. The Bi-Partisan response is demonstrating the best practice of the State as an ear for the truth.
Make grooming a criminal offence.
Yours Sincerely
Corneilius Crowley, London
open letter short version
To the Editor
Frances Haugen's testimony and evidence concerning Facebook and Instagram speaks volumes.
Media content that targets people’s cognitive biases, in order to drive behavioural change such as encouraging addictive behaviour, inciting hatred, nudging target groups into voting or not voting based on emotional or irrational drivers, increasing sales: all of this is economically or politically exploitative.
This activity is psychological abuse. This activity is grooming.
We need legislation that makes grooming a criminal offence.
This would not be an inhibition of free speech. This would be protecting vulnerable people from predatory actors.
Frances Haugen is demonstrating the best practice of Free Speech. The Bi-Partisan response of Congress is demonstrating the best practice of the State as an ear for the truth.
Make grooming a criminal offence.
Yours sincerely,
Corneilius Crowley London
To be fair and honest, Grooming was already a standard behavioural characteristic of our current system. Grooming is a core element in every hierarchy of wealth, power and violence culture.The online media environment has made it possible to direct grooming content to individuals on their own, exploiting their vulnerabilities, exacerbating fears to drive behavioural modification, which can be exploited politically or economically, whereas prior to the online media environment, propaganda was aimed at larger aggregate groups, and was to some degree more obvious and more cautious.
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
Head line : ‘It got vile very quickly’: how Alex Jones turned a tragedy into a battleground
"Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed spent four years following the circus created by the rightwing TV host after he claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting never happened.
There is a statistic dropped into the middle of the new HBO documentary about Alex Jones and his conspiracy-theory-laden campaign to deny the Sandy Hook school massacre that is so startling it changes the complexion of the film.
It’s tempting to see the blustering alt-right Infowars host as little more than a charlatan selling snake oil conspiracy theories to the fringes of American society.
But then The Truth vs Alex Jones tells us that one in four Americans believes Jones’s claim that the 2012 murder of 20 small children and six staff at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, never happened.
Within hours of the massacre, Jones was on air describing the killings as a “false flag” operation by the government to justify restrictions on gun ownership. The families grieving over unimaginable loss are made out to be actors. Their children are portrayed as imaginary or alive and well or anything but dead.
What followed for the families was a decade of torture on top of the horror of losing their children as ever more Americans said they were frauds. Some parents were recognised in the street and told to their faces that their grief was a lie. Jones and Infowars did more than anyone to push that fiction but it turned out that the victims were not as broken or powerless as he imagined.
The film-maker, Dan Reed, spent four years following two sets of parents who turned to the one place where most Americans still believe they might find truth – the courts. By the end of this fascinating and powerful documentary, the real Alex Jones is laid bare. A grifter who knows it’s all made up is left snivelling to the bereaved parents he has spent years torturing that he didn’t mean it, only to return to his monstrous ways when he is back behind the microphone."
~
These people who do this, Alex Jones, the Cognitive Warfare Industrial Complex, Disinformation and Misinformation peddlars always do this for profit, and as far as I am concerned they are criminal in mind, body, heart and action. Brexit is one of those operations. The failure of our Legislature to recognise this is deeply, deeply concerning.
We have laws that criminalise psychological abuse within Domestic Violence - I think there's a good case for a Law defining grooming as 'targeting known vulnerabilities in order to exacerbate emotional reactivity so as to position the target for exploitation' which amounts to psychological abuse on so many levels.
I think of the hormone cascades that flow from such interactions, and the adverse health impacts, I think of the rage, anger, sleeplessness, anxiety and then there's the impulse to act driven by such a state.
I see it as inherently cruel on three levels.
1. Once we know someone is vulnerable we are duty bound to protect them.
2. To exacerbate their vulnerability is cruelty, even if it is just for 'fun'... or kicks.
3. To then exploit that exacerbated state in any material way is repugnant and assuredly criminal and it is also cruelty because it maintains the vulnerability.
"This article characterises the nature of cognitive warfare and its use of disinformation and computational propaganda and its political and military purposes in war and in conflict short of war. It discusses both defensive and offensive measures to counter cognitive warfare and, in particular, measures that comply with relevant moral principles."
Cognitive warfare has been defined in various ways.
Here are a couple of influential definitions to give the flavour of what is meant by this term: “Cognitive Warfare is a strategy that focuses on altering how a target population thinks and through that how it acts” (Backes & Swab, 2019)
“the weaponization of public opinion, by an external entity, for the purpose of (1) influencing public and governmental policy and (2) destabilizing public institutions” (Bernal et al., 2020, p. 10)
example : encouraging a cohort of voters to not vote, convincing them not voting is cool, in order to give another group an advantage ; behavioural modification driven by online and real world grooming operations informed by harvested behavioural surplus data.
example : running a decades long mis and dis-information news media campaign slandering the EU
example : encouraging a cohort of voters that their lives are at risk unless the vote for a certain candidate
example : Brexit!
example : Covid masks are Muzzles!
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this blog post is about Brexit, and that have called the practice of political grooming.
~
behavioural surplus : data you are not aware that you provide, data which reveals more about your vulnerabilities, biases and psychological state than you yourself are aware of.
A rough and ready flow chart outlining the flow of behavioural, personal and situational data collected by the commercial surveillance systems, across the digital commons, a system that has given rise to Surveillance Capitalism, which is also being leveraged by entities intent upon manipulation and psychological grooming for adverse political, ideological and economic exploitation of the targeted populations.
In Brief, regarding Facebook (applicable to every online platform)
It's quite simple.
There are three data sets.
The general data set, that includes your insurance, your driving licence, your loans, mortgages, any court judgements, what cars you have owned, where you went to school university, what grades you got, what you buy on your debit card or credit car - these are external to Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, and can be bought by anyone with the funds to pay for it.
The data sets that Facebook has are two fold.
1. One part is the content you create. That is the bit you part own.
2. The other part is their records of our total online behaviour - everything we have liked, everything we have been angry at, or sad, or caring, those buttons. Every ad we responded to. Every ad on every other web page we responded to. How long it took us to respond. Every page we ever visited. How long we spent on each page, what time of the day. Where our eyes lingered on that page. everything we buy. everything we search for. how we react to content that is presented and represented in slightly different forms to see which one triggers a response or a reaction. Every quiz, survey or competition. Every game we played.
All this and more. Facebook owns it. You do not. You cannot access it, ever. You have no rights over any of it.
Facebook never sells that data. That's it's golden egg.
In essence they hold enough behavioural data to know our psychology better than we do and they hope that they can use that data to predict our future behaviour better than we ourselves could.
That is what they sell to their advertisers. That prediction. What you will do or buy, next, after they have targeted you with ads.
3. What Facebook sells is an advertising system that categorises all that information into thousands of data points that advertisers can aim at, and then gives the advertiser real time ability to tweak ad content, to test it to see what gets the best results.
Predicting behaviour is the game, modifying behaviour is the game, in order to make more sales from advertising more accurately.
4. The harsh part is that this is also exploited by entities with seriously malign intent. The political grooming gangsters on all sides.
Because there are no Laws defining grooming, it's the wild west.
"Is it ok to manipulate people to extract their money, just not for politics?
But there are also clear shortcomings. Focusing on disinformation itself as a target for regulation brings an obvious problem. By calling for interventions based on ‘harmful’ content, the report asks the Government to step into the dangerous territory of regulating lawful political conversations between people. Are private companies to be mandated to police these communications on the Government’s behalf? There are numerous good reasons why this is deeply undesirable (not to mention incompatible with human rights laws).
The biggest oversight, however, is in diagnosing disinformation as essentially a problem with Facebook, rather than a systemic issue emerging in part from the pollution of online spaces by the business model that Facebook shares with others: the surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit.
‘Surveillance capitalism’, as it’s known, involves gathering as much data as possible about as many people as possible doing as many things as possible from as many sources as possible. These huge datasets are then algorithmically analysed so as to spot patterns and correlations from which future behaviour can be predicted. A personalised, highly dynamic, and responsive form of behavioural nudging then seeks to influence that future behaviour to drive engagement and profit for platforms and advertisers. These targeted behaviour modification tools rely on triggering cognitive biases and known short-cuts in human decision-making. Platforms and advertisers extensively experiment to find the most effective way to influence behaviour."
Cambridge Analytica unapologetically laying out how they did it.
apt youtube comments: "F**ing amazing. She talks about mind-f**ing us as if it's the most normal thing."
and
"This is disturbingly Orwellian. And rather like Trump, sociopathic. Plus an example of business, I suspect, unaffected by ethics or principle."
Hence the relative ease with which Brexit was sold as a blow for English citizen's 'freedom', the relative ease with which Trump was portrayed as a Saviour who would clean out corruption, the relative ease with which Corbyn was painted as a communist terrorist loving economic disaster zone, the relative ease with which COVID portrayed as a hoax, and the manner in which Vaccination for COVID19 slandered as as a global sterilisation project, and much else besides.
These are all examples of deliberate grooming campaigns that were aimed at a small percentage of the population to trigger behavioural changes such as voting for Brexit, without understand the implications, or not voting at all, or refusing to wear a mask or wearing a yellow star and believing in each case that the person targeted was taking independent sovereign action that is political activism at it's best and highest.
Then those small groups are given prominence in media and used as scapegoats, and the rest of the population targets their dismay at those who were groomed, rather than turn on the groomers and their masters. I think that is a quite basic yet solid explanation of what is being done.
Here's a little more detail.
Influence and indoctrination has always been and will always remain a key component of all Hierarchy of Power and Violence Systems. A key task of all rulers is to habituate the populations being ruled to being ruled, to thwart emergence of an evidence based, critical analysis that grounds a popular solidarity that might be effective enough to dislodge the ruling class through occupying the available democratic legislatures and passing Laws that regulate Wealth and Industry, and that seek to prevent the harms they often cause.
The many are potentially more potent than the few.
The Wealth Party is a minority political and economic Hegemon that must habituate the much larger general population to accepting the dominant position of Wealth, without the population fully understanding what that really means. Indeed they must misunderstand the situation. I use the term 'grooming'' to define and outline this practice. This 20 minute video from a Channel 4 documentary explores some of the tactics of political grooming with real world examples.
Political grooming and sexual grooming, ideological and religious grooming, gang grooming, cult grooming - it is all the same activity, in different arenas. As a society seeking to build a genuinely healthy politic, we need to protect the groomed and confront and disarm the groomers.
Grooming is a tool that predators use to gain the trust of a target, and ultimately to manipulate that trust to gain sexual, monetary, political, emotional, psychological or other advantages.
Adults can and do groom other adults. Sometimes adults may use other adults to help them in their grooming. It is a much more common behaviour than most will admit.
Grooming almost always involves leveraging a power disparity. The target may or may not be aware of or perceive that power disparity.
Grooming usually involves the close study of existing vulnerabilities in the target. The groomer must understand in some detail the nature of the vulnerability, the ways in which the target behaves due to that vulnerability.
The groomer has to be able to trigger the vulnerability, and adjust the triggers according to the desired outcome. To do that the groomer must understand the target better than the target understands him or her self. That alone implies a power disparity.
Exacerbating or heightening fears, insecurities, lack of knowledge, hatreds is the second stage of the grooming process. The first is identifying people afflicted with any of these vulnerabilities.
This is doubly cruel - rather than help people recover, they worsen the condition in order to further exploit the person.
Other power disparities that come into play are wealth, reach, access to or control of resources, social position, position in an existing hierarchy, position within a group, command of a group of people.
We have seen in recent and not so recent history the techniques that what we call propaganda. Propaganda is political grooming, and it has operated via mass media, or pamphlets, where news papers publish opinion, with a twisted or spun narrative to distort, misinform, trigger or other wise mislead and manipulate whole demographic groups - the targeting was not individualised.
Now with digital media, the targeting can be much more focused, to a small group of individuals via smart phones and computers, in any given geographical area, even to a given individual, in ways the people being targeted cannot perceive. Individualised targeting.
The same people who operated global psychological micro targeting grooming operations in 100 elections, across 68 Democracies to bolster right wing political entities are directly involved in COVID19 misinformation and disinformation.
"The former lead psychologist of Cambridge Analytica – the notorious digital analytics firm which disseminated fake news on behalf of the Brexit and Donald Trump election campaigns – is advising some of the leading pandemic disinformation platforms in Britain and is connected to COVID-19 conspiracy theory groups in the US, South Africa and elsewhere, Byline Times can reveal.
Many of these platforms and groups have direct ties to hard-right politicians in the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Patrick Fagan, a behavioural and consumer psychologist, was head of psychology at Cambridge Analytica from October 2017 to May 2018. He worked on “local and presidential political campaigns in Europe, Africa and North America”, according to his own website.
He is currently the chief scientific officer for Capuchin Behavioural Science, which claims to “apply a range of scientific behavioural methods including psychometrics, implicit testing, eye-tracking, facial coding, EEG, and more to deliver measurable commercial results”.
This is organised, institutionalized psychological abuse - to exploit, exacerbate and maintain neurosis for political gain. There is no other way to describe it more accurately without delving in deeper, and looking at the evidence of how this dynamic operates.
"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."
Elements of grooming
Friendship-forming: The groomer will work to determine a target’s candidacy by asking questions about the target’s life and gauging their vulnerability, seeking contact information such as social media handles, email addresses or phone numbers.
The undertaking research, accessing any available data about the target in order to build a multi point profile of the target all form part of this stage - the object is to find points of interest to pretend to share and to then form bonds around that 'shared interest'. This is all designed to form a link into the target's psyche at some level.
Relationship-forming: The predator works to gain the targets trust, often through sharing interest, n concerns or by fulfilling an apparent need. The predator may also share information that “only the wise can know. The 'you are not a 'sheeple' play. "I know what others do not know, and now so do you. We are linked by what we know that others do not. We are special, you are special."
Getting the target to take some action is part of strengthening the relationship. Share this information, attend a meeting, spread the word and get positive feed back for doing so. Indeed the positive feedback can be manufactured to encourage the target to do more.
Threat-gauging: The predator will engage in a risk assessment to determine how accessible the victim truly is - the predator will check a target’s relationship strength with friends, family, and roommates, colleagues, associates and avoid overt contact where others might intervene, or alternatively to start to undermine those relationships. One of the difficulties of the digital domain is that an individuals feed can be tailored to exclude others who might be protective of the target. The echo chamber or bubble effect can come into play. Two people in the same room on different laptops seeing entirely different feeds of information or misinformation. The groomer might be able to see both laptops, aware of their differences and then be able to use that to drive them apart, or bring them closer together, which ever suits the groomers agenda.
Isolation: The predator will begin distancing the target from friends or family, from social groups, from previous affiliations. This can be done in multiple ways, including surprisingly positive methods such as compliments and favors. The predator may tell the intended victim that they feel an especially strong connection to them, or that they understand each other in a special way that no one else can get. Control is the predator’s intent. By appearing calm and concerning, the predator is seeking to increase their influence over the victim to advance their agenda. The use of 'shared fear' follows this pattern too. Presenting with false empathy is another tactic in this play book.
Exploitation: In this phase, the predator will start to use the target to meet their needs. Predators will solicit victims for money, will ask them to accomplish morally questionable things for the project, just to fill an emotional need, the political groomer will suggest the target might vote in a particular way, or engage in harassment of the opposition, to pile on to approved targets online. Predators can suggest meet-ups, and propose actions to be taken. Like mobbing a public building, or wearing a yellow star - the groomer will of course frame those as 'liberation activism', as an act of courage and commitment.
Maintenance: Once the victim is doing what the predator wants, the predator will work to keep them under control through various means. These methods can include gas-lighting (telling the victim their feelings are crazy or unreasonable), destroying the victim’s self-esteem, or continuing the isolate the victim from their loved ones.
Grooming is more common than most understand.
Grooming is a common tool for con-men, pedophiles, political leaders, cult leaders, and those with a narcissistic personality disorder. The results to a victim can be catastrophic, in terms of loss of self-esteem and personal safety, psychological trauma, and harm to the victim’s financial resources and personal wealth.
Groomers can also incite their targets to engage in harm causation behaviour. The Genocide in Rwanda is one extreme and horrific example. Groomers operating for extremist groups such as the KKK the British National Party or ISIS and all such extremist groups groom targets in order to use them for their activities and they call it 'recruitment.'
Emotional Hi-Jacking.
This is a simple example of what emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman calls an emotional hijacking (or hijack): a situation in which emotions overrule our typical thinking processes. Part of the tactical tool kit of the groomer is to trigger emotional hijacks, or amygdala hacks.
Someone bumps into me in a supermarket, spills me items on the floor and keeps moving on, and I react, angrily or someone makes a snide comment about my post on a thread I are following and I react, without thinking and fire off a nasty comment.
What happens is that the amygdala, a pair of almond shaped brain organs that sit between brain stem and cortex inhibit the cortext because they are triggered by a sense of threat, and they cause fight or flight hormonal cascades that ready the body for action.
We might liken the amygdala's action here to an emergency override of the mind, springing into action whenever we feel anxious or threatened and activating our fight, flight, or freeze response. As the amygdala is activated the person then interprets the event or trigger as a threat, and it stimulates a hormone cascade that prepares the body and brain for an immediate and aggressive reaction or a freezing reaction. Either way the reaction is quicker than thinking it out.
The reaction of the amygdala is not entirely innate - the default setting is trust - however it is profoundly influenced by experience, not least trauma; unresolved trauma has chronic influence, influence that may be life long until the person resolves the issue or learns to feel safe again.
Emotional hijacks can work to our advantage or disadvantage.
In the case of a real emergency, the amygdala response can produced a hormone cascade that will energise a person's body to present with the courage to defend loved ones against an attacker who's bigger or stronger - the effect of the cascade is to reduce thinking about the risks, increase immediate readiness to act, which means the thinking part of the brain goes offline, and a direct perception takes over that is much quicker than thought.
"I did not think about the risk, I just jumped into the situation and took the attacker down, and stopped the assault on my partner. It was only afterwards when I thought about it that I saw the risk, and then I felt shock and terror."
However, when it is being deliberately triggered by an agency that is grooming the target, it can also move the target to engage in risky, irrational, and even dangerous behavior in everyday situations.
An advertisement or piece of content that angers a person, or attracts them and stimulates them to press a provided link, often known as click bait, is an example of how amygdala hacking is often deployed in neural marketing.
How grooming happened in the Brexit Campaign
Here is a rather useful tweet that outlines some of the dynamics of the grooming operation what was run by Leave.EU, funded by Aaron Banks, and run by Cambridge Analytica and Aggregate IQ. I suggest you go read it through before continuing to read this piece. It is just one small part of the whole, and it serves as an indicator - extrapolate this activity to hundreds of thousands of people and one can see societally impactfull outcomes emerging.
1. Lots of people use social media -Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube and many others. Most people are linked to a number of friends, many people are linked to other accounts, some of which are real, some of which are bots through casual friend acquisition, adding, taking part in groups and so on. All these accounts are linked.
2. Anyone who wanted to gather data can do so by issuing an App that might be a questionnaire, a quiz, a game all offering a reward of some kind, where participation demands or implies an acceptance of Terms and Conditions - those terms and conditions contain permissions to gather data, the targets data and the data of the targets connections. Who ever reads the Ts & Cs? Nobody does.
And example : Targeting football enthusiasts:
This is a graphic from an app used to gather data from the target, and by the permissions the target did not read, it accessed the data from the targets connected accounts.
There are literally hundreds of ways to attract bees to the flower. Quizzes, competitions, games, surveys etc can all be used to scrape data from people's online accounts. Anything that asks for a click and acceptance of terms and conditions is potentially a data scraping tool.
3. The data gathered would be the name, images, likes, dislikes and various other activity data that can be linked to other external data sets that are available commercially, and when combined all these datasets can draw a portrait of any given social media user.
External datasets include credit scoring, credit purchases, marital status, DVLA data, Insurance Data, Health Data and lots more.
Data scraped from the app might include name, status, work/unemployed, likes football, does not like football, likes dog jokes, does not like cat jokes, posts about TV, posts about Environment, buys books online, buys clothes online and much else - pretty much everything that person does online is available.
Mixing the online data and external data and matching can build reliable profiles, user profile information, or UPI.
4. Then the data can be examined, sorted, categorised, and thus very specific characteristics to be targeted can be drawn up.
There is a psychometric or psychology type categorising system called OCEAN which is used to lay out a spectrum of behavioural characteristics around 5 broad categories.
Each of these represents a spectrum, thus openness can also describes lack of openness, as a minus scoring - or as a range between 0 and 10, with 5 being the median, 0 being the least open, 10 being the most open.
5. Now the more precise targeting can begin, and be refined to hit specific characteristic groupings which might be associated with various political or apolitical positions, including contradictions..
This tweet provides an example. It is the same tweet I posted above.
Vote leave overspent by £675 000. Aaron Banks contributed £8 million in money he can't account for.
The purpose of this thread though is more focused on the £675 000 as it's easier to show how this money was used.
6. In thinking about this one has to be aware that the organisations gathering data are huge corporations with near limitless budgets for computer power and man power to orchestrate their activity. They have every interest in protecting, enhancing and maintaining their revenue generating activities - giving advertisers precision tools to advertise at targeted groups with predictable outcomes - by harvesting and instrumentalising the targets behavioural characteristics and activity patterns as a resource, with which they gain the leverage to generate the tools to give to the advertisers to access our psyches in the pursuit of sales.
Immediately obvious is the power disparity between these media companies, the advertisers and you or I, the individual regular users.
7. They make their income not by selling the data we create or the behavioural data that they hold about us, but by giving advertisers powerful tools to target specified characteristics contained, itemised and cataegorised within that data they hold about us, that they hold about any sizeable group of people.
Those tools allow the advertisers to be able to watch in real time the effect of their content as it is sent out and is reacted to, and to be able to tweak that content and refine it so that they are getting better results all the time, until they can predict outcomes based on what they know.
8. Facebook or Google or Apple will never sell your data, that is their golden egg - but they will not allow you to protect that egg, or claim ownership of the contents of the egg, or even get rid of your specific egg, because the data is not the content that you create, it is what your activity indicates about your behavioural psychology, the behavioural trail and scent you leave as you use the platform. It was known as behavioural exhaust, a side dish from your online activity.
It includes a range of data, such as eye tracking, how quickly you respond//react to different content, what you searched for, what you did when you found what you searched for, how long you remained at that destination - all of which provides clues to your psychological and behavioural characteristics, which can be used to predict what you will do when presented with advertising content aimed at you.
Thus the current situation is that Facebook and other platforms allow grooming operations to function with ever greater precision because there is no legislation that protects you or I from grooming.
Facebook, Google etc are not necessarily the problem, but as things stand they are enabling the grooming, they are enabling advertisers to exacerbate vulnerabilities in people in order to modify behaviour in order to generate sales or voting pattern shifts.
This grooming is given a false protection behind 'Free Speech' - the grooming is defined as 'advertising' - which generates revenue for the social media platform, which funds the free usage by us the users, enabling our free speech rights.
It is not a genuine legal protection, it is a deliberately misleading argument.
Free Market Libertarians have used it to protect the 'rights of Corporations' since the late 1990s.
How to disarm the weapon
The best defence is two fold a) an audience that understands grooming and how it works, who can individually and collectively disarm the grooming and then b) legislation that defines grooming for exploitation that would prevent such activity on any platform.
Which brings us to this : the core problem, the problem that existed before Google and Facebook and the digital platforms arrived - organised, institutional grooming - was already a serious problem, dating back to the Bible, and probably further back.
The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Guardian or what ever News Media is in your region - there's a range of opinion, often reflecting established political polarities, and rarely wholly honest, and always selling advertising space.
Honesty sets us free. knowledge maintains freedom.
Here are a few web pages that I think are useful in helping to scope this domain out a bit more.
"Election hacking is perhaps the most topical example of what the combination of hostile information-technological and information-psychological activities can mean in the modern information environment. It has government officials asking whether malicious information activities targeting elections could be the new normal.
When the news about the French election hacking broke, many recognized the timing was due to French legislation. The leaks happened just moments before the legally enforceable election silence started, making it impossible for the media to report on, and for the campaign staff to correct any falsehoods and disinformation.
But last-minute election hackings and strategically timed document leaks are more than just a media game. In fact, the leaks during the election campaigns both in the U.S and in France are textbook examples of how psychological operations can be applied to serve not only warfare, but whatever we call those illegal, malicious and democracy-threatening information influence activities. This includes not just hacking and leaks, but how this information is used in addition to fake news and other forms of illegitimate manipulation.
Psychological operations generally have two purposes: to change people’s behavior and make them react, or to have them not react. These reactions are largely based on emotions, which have always been at the core of all information-psychological influence."
Grooming is a tool that predators use to gain the trust of a target, and ultimately manipulate that trust to gain sexual, monetary, or other advantages. You may have heard the term as it applies to children, but adults can also groom other adults. In fact, some adults may use other adults, and particularly women, to help them in their grooming.
As with other forms of manipulation, grooming is not a simple cut-and-dry technique. It plays on an individual’s insecurities and, even in a strong-minded person, can wreak havoc psychologically."
"Using unwarranted criticism and threats, the bully tries to control their target and subjugate them, without a thought for that persons’ contributions, reputation, well-being, health or self confidence. Sooner or later this person – the bully’s target – realises that they are not only being “managed” but bullied, and they will start to show signs of resistance to that. Often, anything said in the target’s self-defence will be distorted and used by the bully, too. Gaslighting involves attempts to either negate or redefine a target’s experiences, and abusers often use this method."
"I propose a legal definition of behaviour that we are all too familiar with.
Organised operations that target people’s cognitive biases, their social woundedness, their insecurities, prejudices and worries, their misunderstandings, cultural conditioning and fears, and do that through public and social media, through marketing, propaganda and media campaigns operating on an industrial scale, manipulating vulnerable people for ideological, religious, political or economic advantage.
This behaviour is grooming.
If we had legislation defining this and criminalising it, then media platforms would be unable to allow such behaviour to be allowed on their platforms as a revenue stream."
"Misinformation can also be intentionally suggested by “just asking questions”; a technique that allows
provocateurs to hint at falsehoods or conspiracies while maintaining a facade of respectability.
For example, in
one study, merely presenting questions that hinted at a conspiracy relating to the Zika virus induced significant
belief in the conspiracy .
Likewise, if you do not read past a headline such as “Are aliens amongst us?” you might
walk away with the wrong idea.
Where does misinformation come from?
Misinformation ranges from outdated news initially thought to be true and disseminated in good faith,
to technically-true but misleading half-truths, to entirely fabricated disinformation spread intentionally
to mislead or confuse the public.
People can even acquire misconceptions from obviously fictional
materials. Hyper-partisan news sources frequently produce misinformation, which is then circulated
by partisan networks. Misinformation has been shown to set the political agenda."
And yes, I have written a song about this.
"we know how to groom you" performed live, from my studio
also available on Reverbnation, as an .MP3 Download
Political Ideological Grooming Gangs are undermining our democracies, escalating social tensions, disrupting our communities, inciting hatred and fear, escalating political street violence.
Institutions of Commercial power adopt a defensive stance, they do not target the root cause.
Update
August 3 2024
Nigel Fearage just asking questions?
We know that there is very well organised ongoing, in-depth collection of surveillance data about entire populations. Surveillance Capitalism collects data on our psychology and behaviour, every day, all day long, all the time. The platforms collect data on c.4,000 data points for every active consumer. We know too that this data and the analysis of that data is being deployed by the platforms that collect it.
The sell an enhanced capability to target very specific traits, characteristics, locations, income range, age rang and much, much more, to offer enhanced marketing effectiveness to advertisers, increasing sales to advert ratios, offering more precision.
They call it micro-targeting, and it is fed by global data-mining.
Advertisers go to the platforms believing that micro-targeting advertising/influencing will be more effective in generating attention and sales. Influencers.
Ideological Marketing.
In marketing language then the objective of online political grooming is to locate and identify 'vulnerable' people who are then targeted with content that exploits sets of cognitive biases, insecurities, pain, fear, distress and concerns. The objective is to weaponise the targets 'heart and mind' in support of the groomers goals.
What do I think of the Southport Riots?
Targeting vulnerable people selected through studying their biases, insecurities, fears - psychological profiling, criminal intent
Disseminating content designed to exacerbate those vulnerabilities - incitement, criminal intent
Tweaking the content, increasing the tension and emotional charge to drive or nudge behaviour in a desired direction - manipulation, criminal intent
Providing mechanisms for multiple small groups to form to take actions designed to inflame public political discourse - undermining healthy democracy criminal intent
Vulnerable people are being exploited and their exploitation causes harm.
The people who incite and orchestrate this are the ultimate criminals - the rioters are not the cause, they are the symptom.
They have been groomed. Many willingly, admittedly. These are unhappy, violence prone people. Their emotional immaturity renders them exploitable.
By all means hold those who participate in violence to account.
But do not allow the people who cause this to go unaccountable.
Because it is dishonest, grooming, at any level, in any relationship or setting, is not Free Speech.
Because it is manipulative and causes emotional harm, it is psychological abuse.
Because it incites hatred and fear, aimed at marginalised identified groups, it is bullying.
Because it is designed to undermine healthy public debate on democratic governance it is political.
We need to legislate ideological grooming as the psychological abuse that it is, to recognise it as a criminal activity, to define it as an offence, with a custodial sentence as a rational reasonable preventative measure, more health and safety than punishment.
We already define psychological abuse within Domestic Violence.
The legal precedent of criminalising gaslighting, bullying and other forms of psychological abuse within a relationship, human to human, exists.
The relationship of human to human in this dynamic contains a Power Disparity, the more powerful party being the sponsors of the most public figure, the funders of the ‘research’, content creation, content dissemination compared to any of the vulnerable targets.
Preventative Legislation would mean the platforms would have to shut all that grooming down, which they could do. They have total control of the platforms. They would have to uphold that legislation in order to operate.
Protecting the vulnerable from avoidable harm is a fundamental duty of care.
"This article characterises the nature of cognitive warfare and its use of disinformation and computational propaganda and its political and military purposes in war and in conflict short of war. It discusses both defensive and offensive measures to counter cognitive warfare and, in particular, measures that comply with relevant moral principles."
Cognitive warfare has been defined in various ways.
Here are a couple of influential definitions to give the flavour of what is meant by this term: “Cognitive Warfare is a strategy that focuses on altering how a target population thinks and through that how it acts” (Backes & Swab, 2019)
“the weaponization of public opinion, by an external entity, for the purpose of (1) influencing public and governmental policy and (2) destabilizing public institutions” (Bernal et al., 2020, p. 10)
example : encouraging a cohort of voters to not vote, convincing them not voting is cool, in order to give another group an advantage ; behavioural modification driven by online and real world grooming operations informed by harvested behavioural surplus data.
example : running a decades long mis and dis-information news media campaign slandering the EU
example : encouraging a cohort of voters that their lives are at risk unless the vote for a certain candidate
example : Brexit!
example : Covid masks are Muzzles!
I respectfully suggest readers read the paper linked above, and then decide whether or not this piece is worth your time. The paper certainly is.
~ end of update ~
Facebook's 'apologia' is looking more like The Vatican's 'apology' with every passing day.
Knowing that abuse is happening, paying lip service to addressing the situation (even as the abuse continues with no meaningful remedial action being taken) in order to preserve public status, image and income is dysfunctional behaviour and it causes more harm.
Knowing that serial egregious abusers operate within its jurisdiction, causing harm to millions of wholly innocent people, and masking any responsibility for that behaviour within one's jurisdiction or institutional setting in order to maintain status and income.
I don't buy the apology, until I see behaviour that confronts the harms in full, openly and honestly.
Political Grooming Gangs are abusing Facebook and deliberately undermining our democracies, escalating social tensions and disrupting our communities with lies, manipulation, gaslighting, emotional hijacking, neuromarketing false narratives....
Apology is oft taken as meaning remorse, when in fact what we see with powerful institutions that it is a line of defence, a public relations exercise.
The etymology of the word 'apology' is revealing : "defense, justification," from L.L. apologia, from Gk. apologia "a speech in defense," from apologeisthai "to speak in one's defense," from apologos "an account, story," from apo- "from, off" (see apo-) + logos "speech".
The original English sense of "self-justification" yielded a meaning "frank expression of regret for wrong done," first recorded 1590's, but it was not the main sense until the 18th Century. The old sense tends to emerge in Latin form apologia (first attested 1784), especially since J.H. Newman's "Apologia pro Vita Sua" (1864).
Thus when The Church or The State apologises, it is most often adopting a position that defends it's current image, status and power. Truth and Reconciliation processes are likewise marred by competing institutional interests and the wish to avoid the most honest accounting of harms caused, the parties culpable seeking always to mitigate the costs of facing the truth, addressing the harms, accepting the punishment.
Make no mistake about this - powerful Institutions of all kinds understand the intent and the meaning of the words they use, for both State and Church and Corporation are the source of all legal language, and this language and it's use allows these and other institutions to continue to maintain their status and power. Apologies most often avoid the necessary full accounting of the consequences of their actions. Polluters pollute. get caught, are fined and continue business without ever fully confronting the externalised costs dynamics of their industries. The Vatican fights every case, yet withholds information on thousands of untried cases. Facebook was fined, and their stock rose.
Sorry, but not sorry: they paid the fine, it is a business expense.
We see this is so with the way both Church and State in Australia have responded to the emergence of living witness evidence with regard to Residential School Systems in which poor and Aboriginal children have been incarcerated by force and brutally harmed in systemic fashion, over long periods of time.
We see it in terms of Institutions defence of themselves against the interests of Survivors and the genuine demands for Justice within every State on Earth.
It is a pattern of behaviour.
Saying 'I am sorry' or 'We are sorry' has no meaning unless there is material action to back it up, unless there is a clear indication that whatever transgression occurred will not occur again and that any perpetrators will be made to account for the harms they have caused.
And in cases where the harm caused is beyond remediation, then corrective legal punitive measures against Institutions, and judicial incarceration of individuals who have caused harm must follow, to protect from any future harm and to provide a meaningful deterrent.
In the case of The Vatican, and Facebook, there has been no internal driven action to correct the situation where known abusers operate within and through their structures. They resist rather than putting their hands up, and admitting responsibility.
To be fair, they are not the only institutions feigning apology for allowing abusers to operate within their systems. It is a standard behavioural pattern within in every powerful institution, every gang, every dysfunctional family - to protect their status, image and ability to operate, at all costs.
Facebook, Masks, Brexit and Donald Trump
Facebook permits micro-targeting of content that absolutely has caused harm, is causing harm and will continue to cause harm - for example, the current issue of anti-maskwearing freedom conTheory content. We know that activists are using Facebook and other social media to organise protests and live events.
We know that military grade disinformation and disruption campaigns are being waged on Facebook, and that Facebook is earning billions from this activity.
"Emma Briant, a scholar of propaganda at Bard College who has spent years studying SCL, says the company’s mix of work demonstrates how military-funded psychological research can be exploited to wage domestic political warfare, establishing a dangerous template for political campaigning. During elections, tactics intended for battlefields could be used to foment division and extremism or discourage voters."
We know for certain that Brexit was in large part 'won' using these techniques against an unknowing population, a vulnerable population.
"Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings — now a special advisor to the UK prime minister — wrote in 2017 that the winning recipe for the leave campaign was data science. And, more specifically, spending 98% of its marketing budget on “nearly a billion targeted digital adverts”.
We know for certain that Trumps election in 2016 was in large part 'won' using these techniques against an unknowing population, a vulnerable population.
Facebook's position is similar to the Vatican knowing that pedophiles and adults who beat and bullied children were operating within their ranks, and yet it did all it could to preserve it's external image and income revenue stream.
2020 US Presidential Election
Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) was Nixon's baby. I remember reading Hunter S. Thompson's scathing writings on that odious little man and that disgusting campaign.
Nixon, Johnson and Trump are not too far apart in morality.
'Making the economy scream' so it hurts the people.
Now it is online micro-targeting and political grooming gangsterism. News media are part of the corruption.
Trumps re-election campaign has a $1 billion dollar 'advertising' budget just for Facebook in the coming months.
"Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.
I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.
What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise." What the writer is describing is grooming. Studying populations to source vulnerable people who are then targeted with content that exploits cognitive biases, insecurities, pain, fear, distress and concerns in order to exploit them at the ballot box, by triggering and re-inforcing those biases. Truly evil behaviour and activity. Zucked! and MindF*ck.
I have just finished reading two important books - Zucked! about Facebook and MindF*ck about Cambridge Analytica Here's a few pertinent quotes from Mindf*ck!
“In psychological warfare, the weak points are flaws in how people think. If you’re trying to hack a person’s mind, you need to identify cognitive biases and then exploit them.” and
“We were spying, pure and simple, with cover from Trinidadian leaders. It felt bizarre—unreal—to be observing what people were watching on a tiny, faraway island, somehow more like we were playing a video game than intruding on the private lives of actual people. Even today, thinking back on it, Trinidad seems more like a dream than something we actually did. But we did do it. The Trinidad project was the first time I got sucked into a situation that was grossly unethical, and, frankly, it triggered in me a state of denial” and
“perspecticide – the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception – you first have to understand on a deep level what motivates” So notice the terminology - psychological warfare, notice the anger and abuse that is being 'stimulated', notice the irrationality of the to and fro of online 'debate' - that is warfare!
When we have well funded, well organised entities observing people as they are manipulating content being broadcast to the people they are observing, and when they are refining the manipulation of that content in real time to better exploit the reactions of the targeted people, all the time actively working to undermine the perceptual dynamic of an entire population, person by person, intimacy at scale, in order to exploit the people for political advantage, we have a huge problem.
Even back then I was pretty on the money in terms of the dynamics, the influence, the covert nature of the manipulation.
Now I know a little bit more, I have some extra detail, I have some witness testimony and all I can say is this - our social systems and our democracies are being undermined and harmed by the most abusive grooming type behaviours imaginable and the grooming is operating at scale. To be fair, it's not like there were not problems before this micro-targeting emerged. The dynamic of propaganda is old. It is the way that the digital online tech has created intimate access to people's psyche at scale that is new, and extra harmful.
Zuckerberg and Sandberg are allowing this to happen on their Facebook platform, and Amazon and Google likewise and others - and I cannot say it is just for the cash, because if any of them took action to prevent this abuse happening (and they could) they would make immeasurable gains in reputation, and that would translate into long term business stability, and therefore I have my questions about why they are allowing this to happen.
I cannot see into their minds nor would I want to.
That they are allowing this to happen is a best feeble, greedy and arrogant and at worst, it is truly evil. Here's the thing, if you - the user - know and understand what is being done you can counter it.
If you do not know, then you can be adversely influenced by this activity.
At the collective level, across a society there needs to be regulation, and intense, legal or law enforcement level active opposition to political grooming gangster activity. We need both. Now.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
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