Were YOU Part Of The Secret Facebook Experiment?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Many years ago subliminal advertising was banned by law because it manipulated how people thought – brainwashed them to a degree. Since then the practice has been frowned upon, but, with the popularity of social media, are some people, particularly in some government agencies, trying to secretly manipulate us again?

In January 2012, Facebook ran a secret experiment on 689,000 of its users.

The purpose of that experiment was to see if the company could change those peoples’ moods by altering their news feeds.

The scary thing is that it worked.

The study found that by manipulating the News Feeds displayed to 689,003 Facebook users, it could affect the content which those users posted to Facebook. More negative News Feeds led to more negative status messages, and more positive News Feeds led to more positive statuses.

This means, as the report on the experiment stated, “that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” To put it another way, it is the manipulation of the herd, or zombie, mentality.

Such mass manipulation is only possible now with the immediacy and vast scale of social networks such as Facebook. Now, because of the numbers of people involved, even minor manipulations in how they think can have far reaching consequences.

One of the groups funding the experiment was the US Army which flags up big question marks over their motives and over Facebook’s place as an independent commercial operation.

The fact that government agencies are experimenting as to how they can influence people online has been known for some time, but you have to search for the evidence because they never tell you what they are up to.

The mass surveillance that whistleblower Edward Snowden highlighted is only the first step in a more sinister process. The big question everyone should be asking is, once the government and its agencies have gathered all of that information on us, what are they going to use it for? There must be some end goal. You can be sure that just leaving terrabytes of data languishing in remote computer server farms is not it.

The most obvious use of that information is to manipulate people, which is essentially what the Facebook experiment tells us. Only the moronically naïve or dumb would think otherwise.

In the commercial online world where everyone is used to free services paid for by advertising, information can be used to manipulate consumers into becoming indirect paying customers by simply turning their private information into cash. The more personal, detailed and intimate the data on you is, the more valuable it is to the company collecting and selling it, either directly, or indirectly via targeted advertising especially for you. Yes, what you see when you go to a Google search page is not what I see!

In the world of government control, some of their spy agencies will collect information just for the bureaucratic hell of it. Don’t believe that the NSA, that Snowden highlighted, is the only government data-thief. It may well be the biggest and best funded, but there are many others busy snooping away. And not just in the USA, but in Britain, China, Russia, and many other powerful countries too.

These groups will justify their unwanted intrusions into our private lives by hanging a ‘national security’ sign on it, it’s the excuse they always use. To an extent that is true at the moment since they use information collected by these snooping techniques to smear the reputations of what are deemed to be ‘enemies of the state’. They used to do much the same via planted news reports and information given to friendly newspaper journalists to disseminate. At the moment ‘enemies of the state’ are terrorist groups, particularly Islamic terrorists like ISIS. But in the future, who knows?

Increasingly government agencies will use the manipulation of social media to influence the general population and thereby bring about outcomes that suit their needs.

George Orwell had the right idea about what would happen. His only problem was that he chose the wrong title for his book. By 1984 technology had not caught up with the aspirations of those who wish to exert such control.

Now it is almost here.

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The Opportunity Of A Lifetime!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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How often have you seen “The Opportunity Of A Lifetime” pop up on the internet or in your email?

This time it’s different, though.

This time it’s true!

Well, sort of.

Because this is your chance to own what is possibly the stupidest dog in the world.

And it won’t cost you anything either, we’re giving him away to the first good home

FOR FREE!!!

If you are stupid, and you want a companion at least as stupid as you are, if not more so, this is the perfect dog for you.

His name is ‘Scotty’, (and, yes, I have asked to be “beamed up” several times), but don’t let the name put you off.

You can call him anything you like, ‘Rover’, ‘Patch’, ‘Lassie’, ‘Monday’, ‘Tuesday’, ‘Wednesday’, ‘November’, or whatever, because it’s all the same to him – this dog is so dumb he doesn’t even know his own name.

His lack of knowledge is on such a vast scale I’m astounded the known Universe is expanding rapidly enough to contain it.

He doesn’t know how to sit. He doesn’t know how to stay. He doesn’t know how to come, or to stop, or to heel, or anything you can teach a normal dog to do.

He just doesn’t know anything.

And you won’t have to waste your time and money training him either, because this dog just cannot learn. Believe me I have done my best!

He is painfully stupid in at least the four different languages we have tried. He doesn’t speak English, nor does he hablar español, he hasn’t a clue how to parler francais, and you might as well try to speak klingon as sprechen Deutsch to him.

A big plus is that he is small and won’t eat you out of house and home. All you have to remember to do is buy cat food and not dog food and you’ll be fine. The cat beats him up every time he eats her food, but he doesn’t learn from that either. I don’t think he even knows he’s a dog.

The only one thing he has learned, is not to shit in the house, but in truth I think this has more to do with the fact that every time he tried he discovered he couldn’t with my toe up his arse.

He barks at strangers, which is good. And if he left it at that we wouldn’t mind.

But he also barks at people he knows, or rather, people he should know if he had the brains to remember who they were, which he hasn’t.

And some of the time he barks at nothing at all. It can go on for ages because, when he does bark at nothing, he must hear his own bark, think it’s another dog, and off he goes. Sometimes you can look at his face and watch him trying to figure it out.

“Woof!”

“Who said that? Grrrrr.”

“Woof!”

“There it is again!”

“Woof! Snarl.”

“WTF?”

“Woof!  Woof! Woof!”

“There’s another dog here somewhere.”

“Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof!”

And on it goes for a while, until it stops for no reason, the same way it started.

He also doesn’t know his left back leg belongs to him. When he notices it is there, he attacks it as if it is another animal trying to insert itself into his leg socket. I’ve seen other dogs chasing their tail, but this is just ridiculous.

Finally, every time the front gate is opened, he has taken to running down the street after bicycles and motorbikes – that he doesn’t know how to ride – and after cars and other vehicles – that he doesn’t know how to drive. What he would do with them if he ever caught one I just don’t know! Neither does he, but he does it anyway.

Somehow, and I find this rather incredible – and disappointing – he has always managed to find his way back home. I think it’s because he tries every other house on the way back and we are the only one silly enough to let him back in. I’ve told everyone to pretend they don’t know him when he turns up and he’ll just move on to the next house and then next, but they won’t listen to me.

So come on good people of the blogsphere, which of you is going to take advantage of this incredible opportunity of a lifetime?

You know how much I love dogs, I’ve said so before on this blog, but please get in touch as soon as you can and take this stupid dog off our hands before I crack up completely!

My father gave me a lot of good advice, and one of the things he told me many years ago was never to get a dog whose arsehole was bigger than its brain.

I should have listened! 

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