Social Media Platforms & Google are turning us into a Banana Republic
Wikipedia describes Manipulation (psychology) as the action of manipulating someone in a clever or unscrupulous way Crowd manipulation — the use of crowd psychology to direct the behavior of a crowd toward a specific action Internet manipulation — the co-opting of digital technology (algorithms, automated scripts) for commercial, social, or political purpose. So you have to ask the question, is this happening in our country today, how bad is it and how long has it been going on?
According to a recent interview on Rumble by Glenn Greenwald with Larry Sager Wikipedia’s founder, manipulation of Wikipedia has been going on since around 2006 when we saw the establishment take exception to and become dismissive of the relative value of eastern/natural medicine compared to today’s establishment science. They also exploited the scientific relevance of Climate Change which today we acknowledge has become a mainstream reality to many Americans. Larry offered a conspiracy theory that the left very deliberately seeks out to control this “Gray Area” of information which the establishment had discovered as early as 2005/6 and has been using to their advantage since then. It was Virgil Griffith a hacker who discovered back around 2007/8 that the CIA and FBI had found ways to manipulate through their computer’s information on Wikipedia to their advantage.
Does anyone really think they have stopped doing that, especially after the recent revelations about our federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies using social media platforms to censor information? Every time they intervene, they are shredding our 1st amendment rights but it appears that establishment Washington is perfectly ok with that. They have been censoring us for years and manipulating information on social media platforms for over a decade.
Wikipedia’s original neutrality policy has been totally abandoned in favor of biased establishment rhetoric. They now take their ques and content information from such leftist media organizations as CNN, MSNBC, and the N.Y. Times. What most people don’t understand is that Wikipedia has declared that it is now their policy that 80% of the major sources of news on the right are viewed as unreliable. There are those who are willing to acknowledge that no other encyclopedia has become as biased as Wikipedia to the point where it is no longer a reliable resource for the truth. It has literally been taken over by the establishment view on just about everything they write, especially scientific research information. We know that a huge amount of information warfare is conducted online, and Wikipedia is no exception and in fact may now be the rule. Google has been a strong supporter of Wikipedia and has given them millions of dollars over the years. Do you think that this generous support hasn’t been without influence and reciprocation in the form of doing Google’s bidding in promoting certain types of information flow? Google realized long ago the value of Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information and has taken full advantage of it. They have been a strong influence in what Wikipedia publishes on its site.
Mr. Sager has been developing alternatives to Wikipedia and there are now several sites that you can go to find open-source information that is not tainted with the mark of establishment propaganda that is so prominent in our current social media and web-based information services. Here are a few sites you can visit to find more accurate and less tainted information. Encycloresearch.org: https://encyclosearch.org/ or Encycloreader.org https://encycloreader.org/ and Ballotpedia.org https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page which all offer good alternatives to Wikipedia.
While the problems with Wikipedia and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are now exposed as having been infiltrated and influenced by the establishment the real elephant in the room is Google. It has pretty much become a monopoly when it comes to the most frequently used search engines by the public. Their influence has been growing exponentially for well over a decade and if you don’t think they have a say in who gets elected and who doesn’t you need to do some research. A 2015 article in The Week Publication stated in a Dec. 23, 2015 article by Bonnie Kristian that “Manipulating search engine results can sway undecided voters by 20 percent or more, according to a study from Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Roberston at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
See the Article about this research report here: https://theweek.com/speedreads/595945/googles-algorithm-sway-undecided-voters-by-more-than-20-percent
Understand that The Week is considered a left-leaning publication but according to the way the “Factual” Rates news sources The Week scored an average Factual Grade of 70.7%, placing it in the 85th percentile of their dataset. You can read about this here: https://www.thefactual.com/blog/how-reliable-is-the-week/
Politico another left-leaning publication also did a similar article on this research which you can read here: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548/
Americans have been influenced by this search engine and social media platforms for over a decade and are bombarded every day with more propaganda and manipulative information than they can handle. Why does it seem that most of them are okay with it? This is one of the reasons we have this dichotomy of left and right ideas that is tearing our nation apart. We have been and still are manipulated by the very organizations that we frequent with no apprehension that they have been controlled and influenced by our establishment government agencies. Americans have been and still are living under a propaganda umbrella that is run by our government and financed by our tax dollars and for some reason it doesn’t seem to bother them.
If indeed we don’t wake up soon you can bet that the Constitution that was written by our forefathers will be turned into an epitaph for the America, we once knew as the establishment slowly turns us into a socialist entity with our help. Even Twitter which Elon Musk has said is no longer influenced by government agencies has to be questioned as there are several government investigations into his operations at Tesla and even Twitter that could bring about pressure for him to acquiesce to more government influence once again. We must wonder just how much pressure and how many investigations it will take for the government to get Elon to do their bidding. If you think for a minute that the bureaucrats that have been running this country for decades are going to just give up and go away, you are kidding yourselves. If we don’t get a president in 2024 that will clean out this infestation of elitist neocons in Washington, you can bet that our constitutional rights will continue to be abrogated by the very people we pay to protect them. The only one who seems to be willing to fight this battle for our rights is Donald Trump so if he doesn’t win, we will all be eating lots of bananas in our new Banana Republic.
If you are interested in reading more about Wikipedia and how it has changed, please go to this site by Dr. Mercola and listen to the video and read the article. This is what gave me the imputes to write this.
“We Get the Government We Deserve!”
One reply on “The Manipulation of America”
Bob:
You didn’t bother to proofread your article. The Wikipedia guy is Larry Sanger, not Larry Sager. And it’s cues, not ques. Also, the Wikipedia page on Manipulation (psychology) says it is a: “subterfuge designed to influence or control another, usually in a manner which facilitates one’s personal aims.” You instead quoted their more generic page on Manipulation.
But the huge problem is that Joe Mercola is a notorious jerk, and he always should be ignored. There is a page about him at the Encyclopedia of American Loons way back on December 31, 2011. That’s not a good sign. And the page about him at RationalWiki begins by stating that:
“Joseph Mercola (1954-) is an American anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorist, pseudoscience promoter and absolute quack, best known for making false and misleading health claims.” One of those claims cost him millions of dollars. There is a press release from the Federal Trade Commission on April 14, 2016 titled Marketers of Indoor Tanning Systems to Pay Refunds to Consumers. More recently there is an article by David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine on July 28, 2021 titled Joe Mercola: An antivaccine quack tycoon pivots effortlessly to profit from spreading COVID-19 misinformation. There also is another article by Joe Schwarcz at the Montreal Gazette on August 20, 2021 titled The Right Chemistry: Beware of these examples of COVID quackery.