Fake News? Where is this leading and why?

in #fakenews8 years ago (edited)


I'm not conspiracy minded. I see the hullabaloo right now is about Fake News , PizzaGate, North Dakota and all the other trending topics in the media. I see a pattern and I want to warn you about it because it's dangerous to your freedoms.

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Every one of these freedoms is under attack right now.
We have radical Islam (a very tiny subset of a very large faith group) being touted out and blamed for every attack by some crazed jack ass with a kitchen knife. And the government is now talking about restricting peoples movements based on religion and maybe setting up a registry.

We have the so called "Fake News" story circulating with a very serious undertone of "anything that isn't coming from the mainsteam media is fake". In the meantime you have this pizzagate thing everyone is talking about, which may be true or may not be. It's widely circulating though and if untrue would be slander and libel. all based on what the intelligence community would call "an amplified but unreliable signal".

We have the North Dakota pipeline protests showing the government's new slant towards peaceable assembly, including a young lady with grenade fragments in her body due to a police issued grenade, lobbed into her camp.

This is setting up for a dangerous show down, because the very next step is a law that will weaken freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Eventually it will require a "press credential" in order to be able to report the news.

The question here is why?

And as ridiculous as this sounds, it's probably your webbrowser, your phone and the echo chamber effect of automated curation by "deep learning" systems. It's effecting you and it's effecting the people who run the 6'oclock news.

As you search and move across the internet, you are tracked by a myriad of various little bots, scripts and web bugs. These things are constantly comparing your movements to the movements of others and suddenly you're seeing what they're seeing. Google is curating your search, facebook is curating your newsfeed and twitter is curating your list.

Everyone keeps using these services despite the low quality that results from these services sourcing data from the 50% of people who are well below the median average IQ.

But it's more than that. No matter how tiny you think you are, you have a very loud voice with a very far reach. The more you follow a topic, the more you research it, the more it raises the profile of the items you spend page time on with others. Not only others in your direct social group, but others who are socially similar to yourself. This social similarity indexing is going on every time you look at a site on the web and allow it track you.

You're going to find that roughly 20% of the people in the world share common interests with you.
That's a crapton of people you share at least something socially with!

This also means that you're not special, none of us are. We're not that different from anyone else and by this, I mean ANYONE else, Trump, Clinton, Bernie Sanders, hell even Colonel Sanders. We exist within a shared matrix of information and the machines filtering and prioritizing this information for us are causing a feedback loop and compartmentalizing us ever tighter into a tiny handful of "slots" defined by the most extreme among us on every topic.

We're building bubbles we can't break out of.

So now you only see what others see, they only see what you see. A whisper in a crowded hall is nothing, but that's how the screeching feedback starts. A tiny little bit of input gets amplified over and over and eventually it's an overwhelming screech! Until someone is able to think clearly and unplug the damned mic.

So that's what I'm advising you to do. Stop feeding the damned bots please, you're allowing yourself to be manipulated for advertising dollars. Cut the herd wiring and break out of your faceback loop.


Put the clickbait down and walk away.

It's a pain, but delete the cookies and cache in your browser. Install adblock plus and ghostery and noscript (or just disable javascript by default if using chrome) then make sure to make those settings stick in incognito mode.

Log out of all your social media and stay out for a few weeks, switch to signal for communications, encourage your friends to do the same.

Stop using facebook, twitter, google, yahoo, bing, even duck, duck go. Set startpage.com to your home page.

Now surf the internet as per normal, but do so in "incognito mode".

Watch as this huge faceback loop you're caught in, dies down and the world returns to the pre-ai era when we had to search out the stuff we were interested in rather than having it rammed down our throats.

Why? Because there is no grand conspiracy, but someone IS going to do something soon, if we don't take steps to shut off the feedback loop right now!

When they do this it will be your freedoms that will be abridged and it will probably be barely noticeable. It will be a simple change to the law that leaves website owners liable for the postings of their users and lowers the standard for cases of slander and libel. The only exceptions will be credentialed media. Eventually you'll only be able to get news from mainstream media.

Break the cycle now, stop the faceback loop by unplugging the mic and walking away.

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This is one reason I suggested an archive of #fakemainstreamnews on the blockchain...

I hope you don't mind... (I'll remove link if you prefer.)

https://steemit.com/fakemainstreamnews/@inphiknit/help-to-create-a-fakemainstreamnews-tag-and-a-permanent-uncensored-archive-on-the-steemit-blockchain

It's fine. I encourage people to link things they feel are related in my blogs. The cross linking raises the profile for both of us.

and come here to steem and post it where the admins can't redact it :)

Pretty much exactly this yes. By being censorship resistant we place ourselves in a firehose of information. We just need to make sure that when we drink from that hose we have our critical thinking skills on overdrive.

It will be a good stress test for the system too. An influx of this kind of thing will also entail a proportion of outright disinfo. If the peer review system works it will be very interesting to see how it affects things. Soon more gates into the blockchain are opening... Probably someone will do a steem news branch.

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Thanks for sharing. Upvoted and shared on Twitter✔ for my followers to read. Stephen

Wow! Thanks for retweeting it! One thing I forgot to mention. If a site has an RSS feed, a good RSS feed reader is an awesome way to browse the content in a way that doesn't really get tracked. RSS feeds tend to be devoid of web bugs for now.

StephenPKendal Stephen P Kendal tweeted @ 30 Nov 2016 - 09:04 UTC

Fake News? Where is this leading and why? #BLOCKCHAIN @Steemit steemit.com/fakenews/@will…

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Great post William

Thank you ianstrat! I appreciate that!

I have read about as much of your post as I have of Daniel Kahneman's book - I am on page 71

Thinking, Fast and Slow

I do not need to read much more of either to grasp the importance and power and weakness of conditioned automated thinking.

We may not know it but we are totally in control of our managed thinking processes - we can switch off the automatic responses if we choose to. We just have to think about it - no need to go into hibernation - just train the mind to stop being automatic. Just keep asking "what did they mean?".

Great post

Good Points! Thank you!

Great points. Our reality is at least in part shaped by our perception. Our own technology is now reaching the point where it controls our sensory input and is starting to define the parameters of that perception. It is a dangerous feedback loop that will imprison us within a narrow range of possibilities and amplify certain types of "groupthink" in a way that was previously impossible.

That is an excellent summary, may I borrow it for my next post on the topic?
Thanks!

Thanks - absolutely:)

I am resteeming this. I also posted a blog response to @littlescribe's post about fake news.

Thank you for the resteem! I'll drop by your blog in a minute and check it out. Thanks for letting me know.

Good insights, resteemed.

Thank you so much for that!

Great ideas thank you for sharing. I don't follow the clock bait traps. Even if I like the link I go search it out myself.

Thanks, that's pretty much what I do too.

In the meantime you have this pizzagate thing everyone is talking about, which truth or not, is bordering on slander and libel

Slander and libel are specifically untrue claims. If it's true, it may be damaging, and it could certainly violate norms to circulate such information. But it could not be slander or libel.

Either way it misses the point. I'm explaining all sides of the discussion on the topic. There are people calling it slander and libel and others claiming it is truth.

This is a binary. These claims either are true, in which case they are not slander or libel, or they are untrue in which case they are slander or libel or perhaps both.

I'm not taking a stance, I'm explaining that it's a viral topic and the virulence is due to what I'm calling a "faceback" bubble.

The algorithms that are weighting this information and making decisions about what to curate and what not to curate are doing so based not on the veracity of the claims, nor the integrity of the authors, but on the potential to make money from eyeballs and page views.

This is the problem I'm calling out and the only one that I'm really addressing. The way to solve this is to unplug the mic. Agreed though that I worded it strangely and it could be read in a couple of ways.

Fixed it, see if it reads better now.

looks good :)

Thanks for giving it another read!

Hitlery and Chump are not like us. A psychopath is not like normal people.

The first thing that people on this planet need to realize is that there is a human predator and we call it a psychopath (or more specifically a narcissist).

I am not talking about what people usually think of. That someone is acting vain an narcissistic when they have a grand ego, overly high self esteem or are a jerk. Yes, many people are acting very narcissitically right now. However, a narcissist is someone who literally cannot empathize with your emotions.

A narcissist will kill people in their way and have no remorse. The reason most of them don't is because it is such a mess to clean up (and they might get caught). They will sell you out whenever it is convenient for them. They will destroy the world around them just to inflict pain on you.

The psychopaths always look for places of power. They are especially attracted to religions like satanism, where they are offered power for selling their soul (they weren't using it anyway). They not only rape little children, they first build them up with sickly sweet, then plunge them into the darkest dark (betrayal, torture, rape and often murder).

Pizza-gate is just the outrage about one little group. This shit has been happening all over. And no one has wanted to look at until now.

So do not say that I am similar to Chump or Hitlery.
(and yes, you should leave less digital footprints, but everything you said to do is pretty much useless for your designated goal)

The satanist line is touted out once or twice every generation. These people aren't satanists, hell even self proclaimed satanists don't actually worship satan. For proof check out the welcome I gave to the leader of the church of satan when he came onboard steemit.

The minute someone starts touting satanism, you know there is something severely wrong with their thinking process. They are scared of something and clinging to religion because that's what they've been taught and it gives them comfort.

People trapped in that bubble can't really comprehend that most people who have undergone these kinds of abuse do so at the hands of their "first circle", i.e. immediate family and more often than not, their religious clergy.

The number of pedo priests has continually boggled my mind. People claim to follow Christ and then do these sorts of horrors on the side. That's the part that gets missed but to my mind it's the most vital part. People get busted for abuse all the time and yes it's horrific. But when you read about things like child prostitution busts you find that the definition of child in most cases is very different from anything you or I would call child. 15 to 20 year olds in most cases, and in many cases these victims are of legal age of consent in the country they are in. Most are lured away from their families with promises of marriage and a steady income.

I'm not standing up for the people who participate in this. I have daughters myself and frankly any person who touches any of them would find themselves on the side of a milk carton before he had the chance to finish.

But there is a huge difference between an 18 year old and a 9 year old. One is a child, the other is not. Yet when you read the police reports, read the court reports. When you dig deep and don't buy into the sensationalism you find that in the vast majority of these cases, these so called children are in fact young adults and a century ago no one would have batted an eye at their age.

This does not excuse it. Human trafficking is horrible, there is real physical and sexual abuse that goes on. It's just not at the scope and scale you assume it is.

But perhaps more importantly, running around yelling about it isn't solving the problem. If you want to do something about it, twitter, facebook etc aren't going to change it. If you want to solve the problem, you need to seek out the groups that are participating in these sorts of things and bring them to justice. Connect with RAINN and ICAC and bring the issue to them and while you're at it check out what they have to say and find out what support you can lend them.

You can use the energy you are wasting on fears of satanic cults and conspiracies, to maybe save the life of a little kid.

So I ask you, which is the better use of your time?

But perhaps more importantly, running around yelling about it isn't solving the problem. If you want to do something about it, twitter, facebook etc aren't going to change it.

When the police guard the buildings where horrifying rituals happen...
When the police and the DA will not look into it, even with a truckload of evidence...
When those involved are above prosecution...
When the media will not report on the story, even with a truckload of evidence...

Then you go to twitter, facebook etc. Because what you need is societal support.
The only other option is vigilante justice.

Have you actually being in the buildings where these horrifying rituals took place? Did you see something yourself?

Have you looked at the actual evidence yourself, with your own eyes or where did this information come from?

What was their motive in releasing it to the public, instead of getting the police to look into it?

I keep hearing that floating around with no actual evidence proffered.
If there is a claim that the police saw "truckloads of evidence" and failed to investigate I'd be highly suspicious of that claim.

Police have never shown an ounce of caution in taking down powerful people especially for sex crimes. In fact the opposite is true. Generally when someone wants to discredit someone, all they have to do is tout out the "sexual deviant" tag and the police will be at that person's house like they were having a 50% off sale on donuts.

Sex abuse claims are how the most powerful people do fall, whether those claims have any foundation or basis in reality.

I'd honestly like to see the police report number that was filed when this person submitted the evidence to the police. I'd like to hear the DA's reasoning for not bringing it to a grand jury.

The absolute lack of anything, even a police blotter about it tells me you're being manipulated for ad dollars.

You're sending a message that is rooted in someone else's schizophrenic paranoid delusions , or you're sending a message that is intended to bring advertising revenues, possibly both.

Either way, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Post some please here on the blockchain where it cannot be censored or deleted. So we can see actual evidence. Something, has to have convinced you that these are real true facts and not the result of being manipulated because I know you're stronger mentally than that. I just want to see what this clear and convincing proof is. I've searched the internet and frankly I don't see any, so you must know something I don't.

If you can convince me this isn't fear peddling and manipulation of the lowest order, I promise to join you in cannon blasting this so loudly no one on earth will miss it.

If you can convince me this isn't fear peddling and manipulation of the lowest order, I promise to join you in cannon blasting this so loudly no one on earth will miss it.

What has generally happened, is the person becomes a wimpering mess and hides under a rock for several years.

So the claim is that there is a global elite satanic pedo ring that has been running for decades?

Except we know satanists don't do these things and don't even believe in Satan. Christian ministers are frequently found to be engaging in these acts though, so let's not lay this one at Satan's feet. Let's just lay it at the feet of people who have a serious predilection. This lowers the burden to only trying to demonstrate that there is a pedo ring operating at the elite global level.

Now your own words where that

There is a "truckload of evidence".

Except that in that truckload of evidence is a distinct lack of anyone stepping forward with claims of actually being a victim? Even someone being cast as mentally unbalanced? I still have yet to see anything resembling a truck load of evidence. In fact I have yet to see anyone present ANYTHING except completely unsubstantiated claims. Show me something, anything which has you convinced because you are my friend and I know you are not weak minded like this.

All I'm asking for is a chance to review something that resembles evidence.
Because without evidence all you have are unsubstantiated claims but this is worse than that.

I see claims floating on the internet and being relayed with no critical thought being applied. No sources, literally no police reports that anyone has filed nor claims by the person who filed the police report. Just "police reports have been ignored". Police don't ignore these things no matter who they traceback to. Pedo is the easiest shot in police work, they routinely bust even high ranking people for it. Which is why I have no problems assuming that high level government officials did these things. However those claims are first hand accounts by the victims, or stings by the police.

Yet seems to me that you're repeating unsubstantiated claims being made by people who by their own admission claim to have never been there, never been involved and do not actually know any of the victims, nor are they victims themselves. They strongly suspect, based on some form of third or fourth level inference from an email leak that may or may not be tampered with.

Isn't there a word for this?

A much better use of your time is to join the organizations that really are trying to free children from this horrific abuse. There is abuse that goes on all the time, but all these people investigating pizzagate could be helping track down real children that are missing or abused. Please give your efforts to RAINN, ICAC and NCMEC. You could really make a difference with this energy and maybe save the life of a real child.

You are not conspiracy minded and yet you say THEY will be pushing to change the law to hold website owners liable and only credentialed media will be allowed. Sounds legit;-)

And yes I have been in a building where child rituals and satanic abuse happened. The Assembly of God Church in my hometown. In fact I just spoke to my 6th grade teacher that had the horror of her daughters being at the hands of this. Her and her husband (my 7th and 12th grade English teacher) who were not members of the church but took their two daughters to the daycare while they taught school. The new preacher who my mom just loved drove the Noah's Ark Sunday school bus every week, he used to stare at me in the large rear view mirror, and the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. I avoided him at all costs. My spidey sense is pretty good, I don't always know why I feel the way I do but I am rarely wrong about a person. You know what he did? He dressed up like Satan and was molesting the kids in daycare, he told them that he could see them at all times and if they told their parents...he would kill them. My teachers oldest daughter Heather did tell her parents and my best friend's mom the postmaster was on the jury. AND THEY WERE CHILDREN NOT TEENAGERS. Believe what you want but I know differently because I have researched into this for years and the only way the gruesome shit that has gone on within the Dark Web and in real life is because there are powerful people that have kept the alphabet soup agencies away. Here is the recent arrest of the former Speaker of the House. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/04/27/ex-speaker-dennis-hastert-faces-sentencing-chicago/83584440/

You are not conspiracy minded and yet you say THEY will be pushing to change the law to hold website owners liable and only credentialed media will be allowed. Sounds legit;-)

It's not a conspiracy it's how these things tend to go. People are predictable, it doesn't mean they're planning on it together.

My spidey sense is pretty good, I don't always know why I feel the way I do but I am rarely wrong about a person. You know what he did?

That's some terrible shit that happened. Drives home my point though. This church wasn't satanic. It wasn't a widespread conspiracy in your community. It was a single pedo and he was in a position of religious authority. Christian religious authority.

That's the point I'm making. There aren't secret satanic cabals, doing shit like this. There are fucked up people , and they are for the most part christian and use the shield of their religious authority to pull this off. This jackass wasn't molesting strangers, he wasn't providing child prostitutes to visiting dignitaries.

If it had been one of my kids he touched though, his picture would be on the side of a milk carton.

I don't deny at all there is some creepy freaky shit on the dark web. But don't think for a second that the dark web is any way dark and scary. It just means that connections are peer to peer instead of running through a centralized server. It's dark in the intelligence sense of "going dark", meaning you're not leaking meta data about your actions to the entire world. This emboldens some people. They think the same people that made this stuff don't know exactly how to break it.

FBI has brought down operator after operator and used parallel construction in their warrants to do so, because if people knew how badly the encryption is broken for things like TOR they wouldn't use it. But our government are the ones who made this tool. They made it so our intelligence operatives could communicate in hostile territory without fear of being tracked.

Fact is you can't do anything without it being tracked or known about.

Dennis Hastert proves my point about the powerful falling from this just as easily as anyone else. He was speaker of the house and for awhile he was also chairman of the intelligence committee. He is part of this powerful elite. If your theory were correct he would have been protected because he was all the way at the top. But he wasn't. It doesn't help matters that even though the article you linked calls him a pedophile, he is most certainly not one. He's a closeted gay man attracted what would be called grown men even a generation ago. These weren't little boys or girls, they were 17 and 18 year old men. They were men because they had reached the legal age of consent. This is what I'm talking about. You hear about these horrible despicable acts of human trafficking and they are horrible and despicable acts. But this isn't children, these people are old enough that in most cases they are being lured away from their families with promises of marriage.

So yeah I think the energy and effort being wasted on things like pizzagate could be better spent tracking down victims and reuniting them with their families. I'm going to use my sounding board for that call, because to me it doesn't matter one bit if the perp is the speaker of the house, president of the USA or some homeless dude living under a bridge. What matters is we find these kids and their world safer.
Start here, http://www.missingkids.com/search