Anti-Social Media and Propaganda

I’ve been thinking a lot about the verbal “war” taking place on anti-social media. I’m a fan of history and some of the things I’m seeing have also happened in the past but usually by governments, not individuals. I’m not going to call it “social media” but rather anti-social media, a phrase coined several years ago. One particularly good book written on the topic was written by Siva Vaidhyanathan entitled “Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy”. “It’s a story”, writes Siva Vaidhyanathan in this excellent critique, “of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it’s an indictment of how social media has fostered the deterioration of democratic and intellectual culture around the world.” ” People use it for all kinds of things, many of them innocuous, but some of them absolutely pernicious: disseminating hate speech that leads to ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, for example; spreading white supremacist propaganda in the US or Islamophobic or antisemitic messages in innumerable countries, and so on. People also use it to try to influence democratic elections, to threaten and harass others, to spread fake news, publish revenge porn and perform a host of other antisocial acts.” Very interesting and disturbing. A good read you can get here:

I think that the creation of “smartphones” , Facebook , Twitter, Instagram, etc. have also actually made people ANTI SOCIAL. How many times have you seen groups of people at a dinner table, walking down the street, in a bar all STARING AT THEIR PHONES? They literally have “friends” right there in front of them and they are ABSENT and certainly not socializing like humans HAD done for 5000 years. But people are addicted to their phones and what better venue to spread propaganda in immeasurable volume? Let’s look a little at what “propaganda” is. Propaganda is defined as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” Good description! Currently we have a “social war” literally taking place on FaceBook. Several encampments…..the Mask vs. NO Mask groups, the Covid Hoax people vs. the “science” Covid group, Black Lives Matter vs. All Lives Matter, the “Vaxers vs. the Anti-Vaxers” , gun control vs. no gun control. It has literally become a war zone with lifelong friends “unfriending”! What a terrific arena to manipulate people through propaganda!! I found this article that looks at what it would have been like during Nazi Germany if Goebbels had Facebook! “If the Nazis were in power today, during the digital revolution, they would rule the world, says Dr. Yaniv Levyatan, an expert in psychological warfare” Kind of disturbing don’t you think? Here’s the full article if you’d like to read it.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-just-think-what-goebbels-could-have-done-with-facebook-1.7308812

So what is psychological warfare? Three elements are required to create high-quality messages of psychological warfare: identifying distress, proposing a solution, and moving into action. Well we’ve certainly managed the DISTRESS part on FaceBook….can you say COVID?  A solution?  of course….”wear your masks!”  “Don’t wear your masks!”  Facebook is excellent for psychological warfare, because they’re constantly collecting information about us.  They also have been able to turn “friend against friend”.  Our behavior in the social networks has become an instrument through which we can be influenced via manipulative techniques.  Just look at the dubious conspiracy theories that grab hold with primarily propaganda posts that have no validity…….Bill Gates killing thousands of children in Africa, the Rothchilds (whoever they are), Covid being simply an exercise to see how much we’re willing to give up our freedom.  The list goes on and on.  Whoever has access to big data controls both the media and the public. Whoever has the ability to control these tools can generate insane developments on a historic scale.

So what happened to the TRUTH?   In a nutshell …it’s  BORING….it’s sometimes UNPLEASANT.   FaceBook and other Anti-Social media says you don’t HAVE to know the truth…..let’s make it EXCITING!  The public prefers to bury its head in the sand and choose the media channels that offer the truth that’s appropriate to them. Everyone chooses the venue that matches THEIR TRUTH.  

The same people that constantly talk about the “New World Order” are actually helping move it along…..if it does exist.  They continue to ignore science, data, facts and sometimes common sense to post things that fit their reality.  I cite George Orwell’s prophetic novel “1984” often because this really is “groupthink”.  Get it here for the price of a MicroBrew.

So wake up people. Those of you battling each other on Anti-Social Media are simply the pawns in a much bigger plan. “The truth will set you free” John 8:32 Yup….a quote from the Bible…..I often wonder how much of that was propaganda.