Weaponized Social Media is driving the Explosion of Fascism

“Weaponized Social Media is driving the Explosion of Fascism”
“Social media platforms give governments, extremists, haters and propagandists the ability to excite and incite hate amplified by algorithms.”
“ISIS didn’t invent the strategy of weaponizing social media. Perhaps that credit goes to the Israeli military, which had been trolling social media since at least 2008. In 2012, they took their game to the next level, live tweeting and uploading a snuff video…By the end of 2012, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was running a global social media propaganda unit executing operations on every major platform. Today, hip young Israeli soldiers complete their mandatory military service as part of the IDF’s International Social Media Desk, trolling, for example, American college students supporting Palestinian rights movements such as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.”
“Sockpuppets, Botnets and Trolls
By 2016, sophisticated propagandists utilizing artificial intelligence algorithms driven by a seemingly limitless trove of data points on damn near every internet user, revolutionized social media-based psych-ops campaigns. And we got some new vocabulary words, like “sockpuppet.” That’s a human internet warrior purporting to be all sorts of folk they ain’t — like the sockpuppet operating out of St. Petersburg, Russia, who formed and facilitated the Twitter group…spread misinformation memes and incendiary stories, including 3,107 of its own psych-ops messages, while amassing and identifying 136,000 followers to use as viral vectors, retweeting the St. Petersburg messages 1,213,505 times.”
“One famous sockpuppet persona, the fictitious Jenna Abrams, became an American mainstream media fave. Described by The Guardian as an “all-American, Trump-loving, segregation-supporting, Confederate-defending Twitter star [who] does not really exist,” Jenna appears to be another St. Petersburg creation. As such, “she” was quoted by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, USA Today, BET, The New York Daily News and a host of others. Once established as a lovable, personable, witty, trusted young Twitter star, “her” repertoire turned socially toxic, empowering millions of other racist haters on social media. Then there are bots, which are robotic versions of sockpuppets. They come complete with fabricated identities,..”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2017/nov/03/jenna-abrams-the-trump-loving-twitter-star-who-never-really-existed
“Powered by artificial intelligence, bots like Angee successfully engaged with human trolls. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump quoted such bots 150 times…”
“When Bots Tweet
Since a bot is just an algorithm residing on a computer server, it’s easier to replicate. In fact, they can be tasked with replicating themselves. Once established as a network, or “botnet,” they can almost instantly propel any tweet or post into mega-virality by robotically seeding a seemingly organic viral orgy of reposting — enough to trick social media site algorithms into seeing the messages as naturally trending, and thus, make them actually trend into millions of news and social feeds…”
“State actors on the World War F battlefields — like Russia, Israel and China — tend to dominate our national discussion of online propaganda. They’re the virtual elephants — lumbering giants that you just can’t miss. The Israelis used glossy ads to recruit social media commandos, while the Russians, for all of their sophistication, just didn’t hide themselves well, with a bunch of Russian sockpuppets cluing investigative journalists in to their whereabouts by keeping bankers’ hours in Russian time zones. We certainly can’t claim any moral high ground against the Russians, however, as whatever they’re accused of doing, we did it to them first and exponentially more successfully using old-school tech in the 1980s, then shamelessly gloated for two decades after the U.S.S.R. came apart. ..”
“Major world powers have historically targeted each other with propaganda — and it’s easy to spot. The Russians are also suspected of using their army of sockpuppets…”
“Researchers at the Oxford University Computational Propaganda Research Project argue that while governments do target the internal politics of other nations, authoritarian regimes primarily focus on targeting their own populations, with bots controlling, for example, 45 percent of Twitter activity in Russia. Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction to complaints about Facebook propaganda is to call for more government control over the internet. Appeasing governments in this way would, not coincidently, keep global markets open for Facebook, while strengthening the propaganda power of governments and preventing any more nasty outbreaks of democracy, such as the Arab Spring.”
“Fear Yourselves
While authoritarians use social media propaganda campaigns to target their own populations, the Oxford researchers argue, “almost every democracy in this sample has organized social media campaigns that target foreign publics,” while leaving the targeting of their own populations to “political-party‐supported campaigns.”
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“Our myopic focus on Russia’s obnoxious sockpuppets led us to take our eyes off the larger faster harder ball on the field. World War F is global, but if you really want to fear someone, fear your fellow Americans. Fear yourselves.
State-to-state disinformation battles are not the major threat in World War F. States, almost by definition, are inherently corrupt. They jockey for leverage and advantage and are always willing to compromise their stated values or buy each other off, because they have too much vested in maintaining an orderly status quo of trade and banking. At the end of the day, they generally don’t want to blow the world up.”
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“..U.S., leaving economically disenfranchised communities populated by angry people poisoned by despair, and vulnerable to authoritarian and fascist leaders skilled at deploying precision propaganda to channel such anger. Unfortunately, this is what social media does best.
People are more likely to both share and react viscerally to things that anger or frighten them, as opposed to things that inspire them or give them hope. Propagandists know this. And despite decrying their own roles in spreading hate and fascism, social media executives also understand that their business model is based on clicks — and haters are the most voracious clickers. Social media executives seem remiss to mess with this metric — unless their hands are forced. Perhaps that’s why it took Facebook until March 2019 to ban white nationalism — 70 years after the end of the Nuremburg trials.”
“A Fascist War on Empirical Reality
Social media now gives the assholes who used to live in seething isolation the ability to create community — online, as futurists promised. Nurtured by community, haters empower each other and make hate part of mainstream discourse. Algorithm-driven social media silos curate customized worlds where hate festers among people who all spend their lives spreading it. From Islamophobes to white supremacists to “incels” (self-described “involuntary celibate” misogynists who believe they have a right to sex with women) to ISIS — social media amplifies the ugliest voices, delivering them to your children’s bedrooms. This is World War F.”
[Conspiracy Revelation: 7.4.2019: F stands probably for Furious. The Page Owner is another CLOUD14 Hoster..suspicious, we all know by now, at least if you follow me and my stormy, indepth, tireless , nonstop revelations, that it´s a major shadow gov empire hoster…]

“But above everything else, World War F is about bullshit. More Americans now claim to get their news on Facebook than from any other venue. During the 2016 election season, fraudulent sites and fascist posts got more Facebook reads than the top 19 news sites reporting verifiable reality put together.
Falsehoods are the currency of fascism. For corrupt authoritarian regimes, truth is the enemy: Truth is the weapon that, when wielded, will cut them down. For authoritarians, first and foremost, truth has to be destroyed. This is at the core of World War F.
World War F is a war on empirical reality. Unconstrained by any pretenses to accuracy, weaponized memes are engineered to excite and incite while poisoning democracies with disinformation. Algorithmic targeting coupled with data-mining and data analytics allows liars to micro-target individuals with propaganda psycho-engineered just for you. And they can micro-target the people most likely to believe their lies.
Without a shared reality, we can no longer engage in the reasoned discussions and deliberations that sustain democracy. When reason gives way to rage, people navigate solely by emotion, and too many start to speak the language of fascism.
This is World War F. It’s a false reality fueled by Facebook, fascism and fraud. It’s entered our homes, it’s glowing in our palms, it gave us Donald Trump..Viktor Orbán and Alex Jones, and it tells us we’re fucked. This is World War F. If it conquers reality, we have nowhere left to fight.”
Source: https://truthout.org/articles/weaponized-social-media-is-driving-the-explosion-of-fascism/