Twitter Files- From Edward Bernays and Operation Mockingbird to Operation Earnest Voice and Cognitive Warfare
The Twitter Files Part VI was a bit more than the nothing burger that the early Twitter Files releases were.
It pretty much lays out how FBI and DHS (and no doubt behind the scenes the CIA, NSA, DoD) were influencing content on Twitter going back to 2020.
I will argue in another post that is too long for email that its been going on long before 2020, and it goes far beyond just Twitter, but most of you probably already know that. Still, it doesn’t hurt to lay it all out, at least, that which we know
Here is Trumps CEO of Truth Social
The social media coordination between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI isn’t limited to Twitter, former Congressman and current CEO of President Trump’s Truth Social, Devin Nunes, alleged in an interview that aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Dec. 14.
But, the most concerning revelation in the Twitter Files, according to Nunes, is that the DOJ and the FBI had informants—whether paid or volunteers—that put forward a specific directive to Twitter, and that is likely happening on other social media platforms.
“The coordination that the Department of Justice and the FBI clearly had with Twitter? I don’t think it stops there,” Nunes stated.
“It seems like they were either running informants, or had paid informants, or had volunteers, where they were actively sending information on behalf of the government on who to look into, or who to ban, and that sort of thing.
“The bigger issue is, Twitter is one thing, but what about Facebook? What about Instagram?”
And while Nunes further stated that he’d recently discussed the Twitter File drops with Trump—and in general, Trump is glad Musk purchased Twitter—Trump still believes Musk needs to release all of the Twitter Files to the public and not go through cherry-picked journalists.
“What [do] we really need from Elon Musk and Twitter at this point? Just release all the files. Don’t just have selective journalists look at it. Release all the files so everyone can begin to evaluate them. You never know what you’re going to find [with more people looking at the files].”
Nunes said he believes that by releasing all the files, even more will be uncovered by citizen journalists and by Congress. He added he’s not alone in the belief that Musk should release all files and noted that Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO and founder, also called on Musk to release the Twitter Files to the public.
This is a bit of a Limited Hangout, at least what Nunes calls for as a solution is. The government itself going back to Trumps and Obamas administration has files. There should be a call for an investigation with all such files obtained and reviewed and anyone involved including Obama, Trump and Biden and their agencies Directors called to testify under oath. But we know that wont happen. Criminals cant really investigate themselves and when they try its just a sham investigation.
Over the years they have committed many crimes and the files they classify document these crimes. We never get to see those files, or if they are released they are heavily redacted
JFK Files are a perfect example. Everyone involved from 1963 are dead but still they say we cant see all of them.
Carlson believes he knows why the JFK files were not released in 2017, however. He said he talked with someone who has access to and familiarity with the still-secret Kennedy documentation, and asked, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of [President] John F. Kennedy?” According to Carlson, the insider replied, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.” Carlson admitted that the response was “jarring,” but insisted the unnamed source is no “conspiracy theorist … this is someone with direct knowledge of the information
Carlson invited viewers, regardless of their feelings about the JFK assassination and his own new report, to consider the ramifications of what his source said. Based on what Carlson’s source stated, there are forces inside the U.S. government entirely beyond the control of the electorate (which in fact is true, simply because America has so many unelected bureaucrats). Carlson explained his understanding of the situation: “These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president. In other words, they can do pretty much anything they want. They constitute a government within a government.”
But lets come back to the near present. Consider this April 6, 2018 DHS Job Request
The successful contracting company will have “24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.”
2.0 SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS/TASKS
2.1 Tasks One: Online & Social Media Monitoring
Ability to track global online sources for coverage relevant to Washington and the six media hubs:
• Ability to track > 290,000 global news sources
• Ability to track online, print, broadcast, cable, radio, trade and industry publications, local sources, national/international outlets, traditional news sources, and social media
• Ability to track media coverage in > 100 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Translation function to instantly translate these articles to English.
• Ability to create up to 20 searches with each unlimited keywords
• Unlimited coverage per search (no cap on coverage)
• Ability to change the searches at keywords at any given time
• Ability to create unlimited data tracking, statistical breakdown, and graphical analyses on any coverage on an ad-hoc basis
2.2 Task Two: Media Intelligence and Benchmarking Dashboard Platform
24/7 Access to a password protected, online platform for users to access:
• Overview of search results in terms of online articles and social media conversations
• Customized and Interactive Dashboard that provide real-time monitoring, analysis, and benchmark of media coverage.
• Ability to analyze the media coverage in terms of content, volume, sentiment, geographical spread, top publications, media channels, reach, AVE, top posters, influencers, languages, momentum, circulation.
• Ability to select time-period of analysis: per day, week, month, and selected dates
• Ability to build media lists based on beat, location, outlet type/size, and journalist role
• Automated weekly overview of these dashboards sent via email
2.3 Task Three: Email Alerts
Daily email alerts with new search results:
• Ability to customize these email alerts per user
2.4 Task Four: Access to Mobile app
24/7 Access to a password protected, mobile app for users to access:
• Overview of search results in terms of online articles and social media conversations
• Ability to view coverage written in Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Ability to access English translation of this coverage within the mobile app.
• Ability to set up push notifications to be alerted of new search results
• Ability to forward media coverage via email, sms or what’s app
2.5 Task Five: Media Engagement
24/7 Access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.
• Ability to browse the database based on location, beat and type of influencer
• Ability to perform ad-hoc searches on the database based on keywords, concepts, or using Boolean search terms
• Ability to perform searches in other languages including Arabic, Chinese and Russian, in order to find influencers that publish in these languages.
• For each influencer found, present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer
• Ability to create unlimited media lists for specific topics
• Ability to export the contact details of the media influencers per media list.
• Ability to send out unlimited press releases via the platform and to monitor the open-rate of the press releases send out.
• Ability to manage contacts
So clearly, starting from 2018 (at least) they built an infrastructure that allowed them to monitor social and media influencers and organizations content , create a database of contacts with the intention to manage these contacts
But where oh where did such ideas come from?
In 2008, Cass Sunstein, a law professor who would go on to become Obama's information "czar," co-authored a paper entitled "Conspiracy Theories," in which he wrote that the "best response" to online "conspiracy theories" is what he calls "cognitive infiltration" of groups spreading these ideas.
"Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action. In one variant, government agents would openly proclaim, or at least make no effort to conceal, their institutional affiliations. [...] In another variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even with false identities."
Now, a decade on from Sunstein's proposal, we know that military psyops agents, political lobbyists, corporate shills and government propagandists are spending vast sums of money and employing entire armies of keyboard warriors, leaving comments and shaping conversations to change the public's opinions, influence their behaviour, and even alter their mood. And they are helped along in this quest by the very same technology that allows the public to connect on a scale never before possible.
https://www.corbettreport.com/socialmedia/
Perhaps those signature reduction forces are involved in this Cognitive Warfare.
https://nypost.com/2021/05/18/pentagon-reportedly-running-secret-global-army-of-60000/
A 2020 NATO-sponsored study of this new form of warfare clearly explained,
While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.
https://mronline.org/2021/10/13/behind-natos-cognitive-warfare-battle-for-your-brain-waged-by-western-militaries/
Cognitive warfare has universal reach, from the individual to states and multinational organisations. It feeds on the techniques of disinformation and propaganda aimed at psychologically exhausting the receptors of information. Everyone contributes to it, to varying degrees, consciously or sub consciously and it provides invaluable knowledge on society, especially open societies, such as those in the West. This knowledge can then be easily weaponised. It offers NATO’s adversaries a means of bypassing the traditional battlefield with significant strategic results, which may be utilised to radically transform Western societies.
[Don’t be fooled by the Projection. This is directed against you to transform society so you will accept the Technofascist Transhumanist Digital Gulag they are building ]
https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/20210122_CW%20Final.pdf
“The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.”
Here is a bit of a Timeline since Cass Sunstein made his proposal 10 years before the DHS put out the job notice mentioned earlier
2011 CENTCOM awarded a $2.8 million contract to a company, Ntrepid, for the purpose of creating “sockpuppets” to spread pro-American propaganda on social media networks. Fifty users – ten sockpuppets per user with the following protections in place:
Special secure VPN that camouflages ability to locate source
Static IP addresses to protect government entities from being identified
Nine private servers to randomly route attempts to locate the source, and
Virtual machine environment whereby the posts are automatically deleted at a given point to protect against hacks
By definition, a sockpuppet is one who uses a fictitious online identity for the purposes of deception. By contrast, a BOT is an automated account that repeatedly makes the same statement. These types of accounts are now universal and encompass governments, corporations, NGO’s, and ‘nonintelligent’ intelligence agencies…
Ntrepid is based in Herndon Virginia – the CIA gauntlet – although registered in Florida. It’s CEO and Founder originally came from the CIA. It’s President is formerly DoD. It’s chief tech came from the FBI and then Microsoft. Without divulging who or which, Ntrepid claims to work with 50 different global governments. They have no board of directors.
Operation Earnest Voice was the brainchild of General Patraeus who claimed that it was ‘an effort to counter extremist ideology and propaganda’. Given that this is illegal in the United States, Patraeus pinky swore it would only be utilized outside of the country in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and ‘other Middle east countries. And CENTCOM as always stressed they never ever in a million years would do anything ‘against the law’.
When Mad Dog Mattis inherited this operation he decided to extend it to ‘regional bloggers’ targeting moderate voices – whipping them up and then flagging them as being hostile with corrosive content so that they would be removed by the media platform.
In the UK the website Operation Earnest Voice claims they: “specialise in engineering consent and influencing the public opinion”.
They list their services as:
Deep Deception
Production of News Websites With Automated Content
Personalized Propaganda
Clone Audiences
Look-a-like audiences
Mobilization & distribution of fake accounts for fake traffic, fake metrics, message amplification
Information Warfare
Initially created as a psyche operation, in essence, Operation Earnest Voice are the global information ‘distorters’.
Facebook estimates Sockpuppets account for roughly 27% of their online accounts. But that would be a FB definition – which is obviously faulted subject to its own affiliation with the sockpuppeteers, CIA and MI6. Accounts They Cannot Delete.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
https://helenaglass.net/2022/03/05/centcom-disinformation-propaganda/
2012-Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on 689,003 users, manipulating their news feeds to assess the effects on their emotions. The details of the experiment were published in an article entitled “Experimental Evidence Of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
2013, Obama signed legislation that changed the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, also known as the Smith-Mundt Act. The amendment made it possible for some materials created by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the nation’s foreign broadcasting agency, to be disseminated in the U.S.
2014-The Trust Project is a complex international consortium involving approximately 120 news organizations working towards greater transparency and accountability in the global news industry, including The Economist, Folha de São Paulo, The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review, Mic, Italy's La Repubblica, Il Sole 24 OREand La Stampa. The Project was started in 2014 by Sally Lehrman, a journalist and former director of Santa Clara University's journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and launched in November 2017. Richard Gingras, head of Google News is a co-founder. The Project is funded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s Philanthropic Fund, Google, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Markkula Foundationand Facebook.
The Trust Project was created to "strengthen public confidence in the news through accountability and transparency". It is a consortium of news companies working collectively to develop and implement transparency standards that for users can see and machines can read in order to increase accountability in journalism.
2015-The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) is a forum for fact-checkers worldwide hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. It launched in September 2015, in recognition of the fact that a booming crop of fact-checking initiatives could benefit from an organization that promotes best practices and exchanges in this field.
These organizations fact-check statements by public figures, major institutions and other widely circulated claims of interest to society.
Among other things, the IFCN:
Monitors trends and formats in fact-checking worldwide, publishing regular articles on the dedicated Poynter.org channel.
Provides training resources for fact-checkers.
Supports collaborative efforts in international fact-checking, including fellowships.
Convenes a yearly conference (Global Fact).
Is the home of the fact-checkers’ code of principles
The IFCN is led by Alexios Mantzarlis, who joined Poynter after co-founding and editing Pagella Politica, an
Italian political fact-checking website.
Poynter’s IFCN has received funding from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the Duke Reporters’ Lab, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations and the Park Foundation.
2016-Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 signed as Obama prepared to leave office. This marks a further curtailment of press freedom and another avenue to stultify avenues of accurate information. Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger (R) and Ted Lieu (D), H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”
Also called the Countering Information Warfare Act of 2016 (S. 2692), when introduced in March by Sen. Rob Portman (R), the legislation represents a dramatic return to Cold War-era government propaganda battles. “These countries spend vast sums of money on advanced broadcast and digital media capabilities, targeted campaigns, funding of foreign political movements, and other efforts to influence key audiences and populations,” Portman explained, adding that while the US spends a relatively small amount on its Voice of America, the Kremlin provides enormous funding for its news organization, RT.
“Surprisingly,” Portman continued, “there is currently no single US governmental agency or department charged with the national level development, integration and synchronization of whole-of-government strategies to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.”
Long before the "fake news" meme became a daily topic of extensive conversation on such discredited mainstream portals as CNN and WaPo, H.R. 5181 would task the Secretary of State with coordinating the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “establish a Center for Information Analysis and Response,” which will pinpoint sources of disinformation, analyze data, and — in true dystopic manner — ‘develop and disseminate’ “fact-based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.
In short, long before "fake news" became a major media topic, the US government was already planning its legally-backed crackdown on anything it would eventually label "fake news."
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2016/december/26/obama-quietly-signs-the-countering-disinformation-and-propaganda-act-into-law/
2016-November, Prop or not goes online. Promoted by National Media. A weapon subsequently used by social media for censorship
On November 30, 2016, PropOrNot published a list of some 200 websites they classify as Russian propaganda based on "a combination of manual and automated analysis, including analysis of content, timing, technical indicators, and other reporting".
The group's list includes Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism, the Ron Paul Institute, Black Agenda Report, Truthout, Truthdig, antiwar.com, and many others, which the group suggests are "consistently, uncritically, and one-sidedly echoing, repeating, being used by, and redirecting their audiences to Russian official and semi-official state media".
PropOrNot has said there was a Russian propaganda effort involved in propagating fake news during the 2016 United States presidential election. PropOrNot has said it analyzed data from Twitter and Facebook and tracked propaganda from a disinformation campaign by Russia that had a national reach of 15 million people within the United States.
PropOrNot concluded that accounts belonging to both Russia Today and Sputnik Newspromoted "false and misleading stories in their reports," and additionally magnified other false articles found on the Internet to support their propaganda effort.
The purpose of PropOrNot has been to trick people into demanding that freedom of speech be rolled back. This was/is to be done by destroying fact-based media. If you read further, the entire plan is laid out starting from 2015 when it started coming together.
These people want reality shaped on what the perceived majority (louder) group believes to be true, regardless of what the facts are. Perception based reality is only a Facebook like away from killing one person or elevating another to hero status regardless of what they have done
People staffing PropOrNot are tied to The Interpreter Mag which is a product of the Atlantic Council. The Digital Forensics Research Lab has been carrying the weight in Ukrainian-Russian affairs for the Atlantic Council. Fellows working with the Atlantic Council in this area include:
Bellingcat – Aric Toler and Eliot Higgins- This linked article shows how an underwear salesman became one of the most important faces of the deep state. Don’t laugh, the image is really appropriate. Higgins’ insecurity runs so deep because of his failures that Higgins tries to get publications censured that question his author-i-tie.
Anne Applebaum – who has argued that Facebook should take responsibility for spreading fake news and help “undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media to democratic debate and civilized discussion all over the world.”
StopFake – Irena Chalupa – Chalupa is the sister to the same Alexandra Chalupa that brought the term Russian hacking to worldwide attention. Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent at RFE/RL, where she has worked for more than twenty years. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council, where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor for Ukraine’s propaganda channel Stopfake.org She is a Ukrainian Diaspora leader. The Chalupas are the first family of Ukrainian propaganda. She works with and for Ukrainian Intelligence through the Atlantic Council, Stopfake.org, and her sisters Andrea (EuromaidanPR) and Alexandra.
Dimitry Alperovich – CEO of Crowdstrike and the person who consulted a Ouija board and guessed Russia may have hacked something, somewhere, sometime.
The strand that ties this crew together is they all work for Ukrainian Intelligence. If you hit the links, the ties are documented very clearly. We’ll get to that point again shortly, but let’s go further:
PropOrNot -> Atlantic Council -> Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG)
Who are the BBG? The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is an independent agency of the United States government. According to its website, its mission is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” Its projects include Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcast Networks.
The BBG’s bipartisan board was eliminated and replaced with a single appointed chief executive officer as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, which was passed in December 2016.
On January 1, 2016, the Interpreter became a special project of RFE/RL and under the oversight of the BBG. The Secretary of State had a seat on the board of the BBG until December 2016. Why the change?
During the 2016 election, the BBG developed a major conflict of interest. At least two BBG board members worked actively for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. These government officials were working against the president-elect after the election. It looks like it didn’t go unnoticed. In the following linked article, it shows that they should be investigated for their part in an attempted coup.
Bellingcat works directly for Ukrainian Intel and works with them and the Atlantic Council. Stopfake.org is a product of Irena Chalupa who works for RFE/RL, the Atlantic Council and the Ukrainian government. Stopfake.org works directly with them and is a product of the Ukrainian government. Crowdstrike has an ongoing relationship with Ukrainian Intel and these particular hackers. Is it possible that Crowdstrike conjured up Fancy Bear, the “hacker(s)” responsible for divulging internal Democratic Party emails that supposedly tipped the 2016 election in Trump’s favor? (“Fancy Bear,” by the way, is technically a set of tools, not a person.)
If so, this would mean that approval was given at the highest levels – presumably former Secretary of State John Kerry – for Ukrainian intelligence hackers to have access to servers inside a U.S. Government Agency because of PropOrNot and the Atlantic Council’s reliance on the hackers.
How are the Ukrainian hackers tied into PropOrNot at any level? James Miller isn’t shy about using their work. PropOrNot relies on the work of the Atlantic Council, Aric Toler, Aaron Weisburd, Clint Watts, and Joel Harding. The Ukrainian hackers work directly with InformNapalm and are the go-to resource for most of the people involved and all of the people just named.
As James Miller wrote at the Interpreter, “Below we have assessed the details of the reports from InformNapalm, and have expanded on their investigation.”
Who does the Atlantic Council work for? It’s the same people who staff RFE/RL and works closely with the Ukrainian World Congress, as explained here:
“On 29 January 2016 in Washington, U.S.A., Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) President Eugene Czolij and Atlantic Council President and CEO Frederick Kempe officially signed a Memorandum of Agreement to renew the cooperation between the UWC and the Atlantic Council, which began in September 2014.
“In accordance with this Memorandum, the UWC will continue its cooperation with the Atlantic Council on implementing the “Ukraine in Europe Initiative”, which aims to galvanize international support for an independent, sovereign and territorially integral Ukraine, including Crimea. This initiative is also intended to support reforms in Ukraine and its EuroAtlantic integration, and to counter Russian disinformation.”
The Ukrainian World Congress is represented in the U.S. Congress by the Ukrainian Caucus headed up by ISIS supporter and Nazi cheerleader Marcy Kaptur. Her Ukrainian Caucus represents people with political positions that scared Adolf Hitler in WWII.
In early March 2015, Ukrainian Information Policy designer Joel Harding laid out what to expect going forward in the following statements: “In military IIO [Inform and Influence Operations] center on the ability to influence foreign audiences, US, and global audiences, and adversely affect enemy decision making through an integrated approach. Even current event news is released in this fashion. Each portal is given messages that follow the same themes because it is an across the board mainstream effort that fills the information space entirely when it is working correctly.”
The purpose of “Inform and Influence Operations” is not to provide a perspective, opinion, or lay out a policy. It is defined as the ability to make audiences “think and act” in a manner favorable to the mission objectives. This is done through applying perception management techniques which target the audience’s emotions, motives, and reasoning.
These techniques are not geared for debate. It is to overwhelm and change the target psyche.
Using these techniques information sources can be manipulated and those that write, speak, or think counter to the objective are relegated as propaganda, ill-informed, or irrelevant.
While the above sounds gloriously overoptimistic, Harding, along with his little band of Kremlin Troll hunters personally started developing the idea of organizations capable of blackballing journalists and publications in a way that could not be construed as censorship.
From another March 2015 article – A “Disinformation Charter” for Media and Bloggers: “Top-down censorship should be avoided. But rival media, from Al-Jazeera to the BBC, Fox and beyond, need to get together to create a charter of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Vigorous debate and disagreement are, of course, to be encouraged – but media organizations that practice conscious deception should be excluded from the community. A similar code can be accepted by bloggers and other online influencers.”
This “Disinformation Charter” for responsible behavior (Ministry of Truth?) he describes is to fight “conscious deception” can only be weighed against how he describes Propaganda. “The word is frequently used to describe any news emerging one’s opponent,” according to Harding.
Journalists who need to be excluded are those “our side” label as propagandists or active measure agents.”
Harding’s connections in media are huge. Through his friend Matthew Armstrong, Harding had access to and the ear of the board of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, staffed by a who’s who of network and radio broadcast, print media and shortwave CEOs and heavy hitters. They are the ones behind RFE/RL.
On the other end of this in 2015, Joel Harding was assembling a group of miscreants to attack the social networks of different journalist and publications. The crude logic behind a direct assault was that by developing, training, and overseeing vast troll networks they could speak over their opposition (people that their employers wanted to be silenced) and subdue dissident online conversation and control the information.
Where this wasn’t feasible, they set up hack and harass attacks at various publications to get them to stop publishing hard-hitting journalists. This still hasn’t been entirely effective because it caused publishers to dig in and harden their internet properties instead.
The softer more indirect approach Harding pushed in March 2015 quickly developed into the unified media strategy he wanted for the U.S. and Europe. Control the information and don’t allow contradicting information or news into the media stream. When it does get in, call it propaganda.
Enter PropOrNot.
2017-, 45 percent of Americans were getting news from Facebook, making it by far the largest social media news source in the country. A handful of executives could now offer governments (including our own) a devil’s bargain: increased control over information flow in exchange for free rein to do their booming eyeball-selling business.
2017-Google made tweaks to its normal, non-Chinese search engine in April 2017. Dubbed “Project Owl,” the changes were designed to prevent fake news — Holocaust-denial sites were cited as an example — from scoring too high in search results.
After Google revised its search tool a range of alternative news operations — from the Intercept to Common Dreams to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! — began experiencing precipitous drops in traffic.
2017- DoD partners with Twitter
2018-The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a sub-committee within the DHS that is responsible for “routing disinformation concerns” to private platforms, which can take the form of sending emails to platforms like Twitter to take certain accounts under “consideration,” and is a key part of the agency’s quiet efforts to curb speech it finds problematic, according to The Intercept.
It was established on November 16, 2018, when President Donald Trump signed into law the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018
Gadde sat on an advisory committee, known as the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, that drafted a June report encouraging the agency to take an active role in combating the spread of misinformation, arguing that the agency needed to “proactively provide informational resources” to educate the public and provide “financial support to external partners” that collaborated with CISA.
CISA and DHS emails that call attention to certain posts or accounts contain disclaimers that stress that the agency “neither has the nor seeks the ability to remove or edit what information is made available on social media platforms,” The Intercept reported. However, the nature of such messages is essentially an act of “collusion” between the government and the company involved, Adam Candeub, a law professor at Michigan State University, told The Intercept.
“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” former president of the American Civil Liberties Union Nadine Strossen told the Intercept, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”
https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/31/musk-twitter-dhs-censorship/
2018-On May 17th, Facebook announced it would be working with the Atlantic Council.
Often described by critics as the unofficial lobby group of NATO, the council is a bipartisan rogues’ gallery of senior military leaders, neocons and ex-spies. Former heads of the CIA on its board include Michael Hayden, R. James Woolsey, Leon Panetta and Michael Morell, who was in line to be Hillary Clinton’s CIA chief.
The council is backed financially by weapons-makers like Raytheon, energy titans like Exxon-Mobil and banks like JPMorgan Chase. It also accepts funds from multiple foreign countries, some of them with less-than-sterling reputations for human rights and — notably — press freedoms.
2018-The Atlantic Council in September put out a paper insisting media producers had a “duty of care” to not “carry the virus” of misinformation. Noting bitterly “the democratization of technology has given individuals capabilities on par with corporations,” the council warned that even domestic content that lacked “context” or “undermines beliefs” could threaten “sovereignty.”
2018 Aug 23-FireEye, a cybersecurity company that has been involved in a number of prominent investigations, including the 2016 attack on the Democratic National Committee, alerted Facebook in July that it had a problem.
Security analysts at the company noticed a cluster of inauthentic accounts and pages on Facebook that were sharing content from a site called Liberty Front Press. It looked like a news site, but most of its content was stolen from outlets like Politico and CNN. The small amount of original material was written in choppy English.
FireEye’s tip eventually led Facebook to remove 652 fake accounts and pages. And Liberty Front Press, the common thread among much of that sham activity, was linked to state media in Iran, Facebook said on Tuesday.
Facebook’s latest purge of disinformation from its platforms highlighted the key role that cybersecurity outfits are playing in policing the pages of giant social media platforms. For all of their wealth and well-staffed security teams, companies like Facebook often rely on outside firms and researchers for their expertise.
The discovery of the disinformation campaign also represented a shift in the bad behavior that independent security companies are on the lookout for. Long in the business of discovering and fending off hacking attempts and all sorts of malware, security companies have expanded their focus to the disinformation campaigns that have plagued Facebook and other social media for the past few years.
Founded in 2004 in Milpitas, Calif., FireEye has a work force of about 3,000 people, a fraction of Facebook’s. But it employs security analysts with particular skills, including employees who are fluent in English, Arabic, Russian, French and Italian, helping them to identify and track misinformation around the world.
Lee Foster, the manager of FireEye’s information operations analysis team, described in an interview with The New York Times how his company spotted the Iranian disinformation campaign. He declined to say whether his research into the Iranian campaign was on behalf of a particular client because FireEye has a policy against naming who it is working with.
“It started with a single social media account or a small set of accounts that were pushing this political-themed content that didn’t necessarily seem in line with the personas that the accounts had adopted,” said Mr. Foster. Many of the fake accounts, which sprawled across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit, shared content from Liberty Front Press.
2018-Facebook’s October 11th sweep, which quickly became known as “the Purge” in alternative-media circles. After more minor sweeps of ostensibly fake foreign accounts over the summer, the October 11th deletions represented something new: the removal of demonstrably real American media figures with significant followings.
Another round of such sites would be removed in the days before the midterms, this time without an announcement. Many of these sites would also be removed from other platforms like Twitter virtually simultaneously.
The sites were all over the map politically. Some, like the Trump-supporting Nation in Distress, had claimed Obama would declare martial law if Trump won in 2016. Others, like Reverb and Blue State Daily, were straight-up, Democrat-talking-point sites that ripped Trump and cheered the blues.
Many others, like the L.A.-based Free Thought Project and Anti-Media, were anti-war, focused on police brutality or drug laws, and dismissive of establishment politics in general. Targeting the latter sites to prevent election meddling seemed odd, since they were openly disinterested in elections. “If anything, we try to get people to think beyond the two parties,” says Jason Bassler, a 37-year-old activist who runs the Free Thought Project.
2019, Poynter used various "fake news" databases (including those curated by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Merrimack College, PolitiFact, and Snopes) to compile a list of over 515 news websites that it labeled "unreliable." Poynter called on advertisers to "blacklist" the sites on the list. The list included conservative news websites such as the Washington Examiner, The Washington Free Beacon, and The Daily Signal. After backlash, Poynter retracted the list, citing "weaknesses in the methodology."Poynter issued a statement, saying: "We regret that we failed to ensure that the data was rigorous before publication, and apologize for the confusion and agitation caused by its publication."
2019 May 30, -The FBI stated in an internal memo "conspiracy theories" were motivating some domestic terror threats and a series of questionable academic studies link "conspiracy theorists" to mental illnesses.
2020 Homeland Security Threat Assessment Findings of Note
Cyber threats to the Homeland from both nation-states and non-state actors will remain acute – and will likely grow;
The COVID-19 pandemic is creating new opportunities for the United States’ economic competitors to exploit the American people;
China, Russia, and Iran may seek to use cyber capabilities to compromise or disrupt critical infrastructure used to support the 2020 elections and may also use influence measures in an attempt to sway the preferences and perceptions of U.S. voters;
Ideologically motivated lone offenders and small groups will pose the greatest terrorist threat to the Homeland, with Domestic Violent Extremists presenting the most persistent and lethal threat;
In September 2019 DHS published our Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence which identified that the Department would produce an annual report on threats facing the homeland to inform government and private sector partners, as well as the general public
[Twitter a likely considered a private sector partner]
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/10/06/department-homeland-security-releases-homeland-threat-assessment
Of course, some of the information control is quite overt. Every night you see ex-intelligent officials working with MSM to explain what is happening. And most people believe them because they are experts. Lol
I have a few more but substack isn’t letting me add more for some reason. There are lots of them though
Media Consolidation
Another factor in the lack of diversity in media news is the concentrations of media ownership along with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 .
In 1983 there were 50 dominant media corporations. Today there are five. These five conglomerates own about 90 percent of the media in the United States, including newspapers, magazines, book publishers, motion picture studios and radio and television stations. As of 2020, the five media giants are AT&T (Time Warner, CNN, HBO), Comcast (NBC Universal, Telemundo, Universal Pictures), Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel Studios), News Corp (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post) and ViacomCBS (CBS, Paramount Pictures).
https://miscellanynews.org/2021/04/29/opinions/the-unprecedented-consolidation-of-the-modern-media-industry-has-severe-consequences/
Social Media is dominated by 3 companies- which are Facebook/Instagram, Googles You Tube and Twitter with smaller competitors that compete for the censored minority’s business.
This makes it easier for government to control Media since they have to deal with fewer actors and the lack of competition means these companies do not fear a major loss of business.
Plus government has become a great source of revenue either directly (advertisement during COVID) and indirectly (revenue from government contractors paying for social media data)
The Biden Administration, as FOIA documents revealed, paid hundreds of millions to major news networks in return for favorable press coverage on COVID-19 vaccination
Perhaps government contractors for DHS in that 2018 job poster funnel money to contacts (media influencers) as part of their managing of them to produce the desired content
SOCIAL MEDIA Influencers
And why do you think your favorite Social Media Star or Sub Stacker is trustworthy. Do you know how much money some of them are making?. Do you wonder if those “Contacts” in the DHS database aren’t getting some Dark Money to reward them for
Disinformation and Propaganda.
The global public relations market grew from $92.55 billion in 2021 to $100.73 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.8%
https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/public-relations-global-market-report
Now not all of that goes to media influencers the global influencer marketing market size has more than doubled since 2019. In 2022, the market was valued at a record 16.4 billion U.S. dollars. While much of this is no doubt corporate, political lobbies or philanthropic no doubt governments propaganda agencies are contributing
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092819/global-influencer-market-size/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1275239/effectiveness-influencers-worldwide/
1. Influencer Marketing Industry to Reach $16.4B in 2022
There’s no denying that influencer marketing is lucrative. The market grew from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $9.7 billion in 2020. In 2021, it soared to $13.8 billion, indicating a steady growth. This year, the market is projected to expand to a whopping $16.4 billion industry.
This growth is attributed to the increasing popularity of short video formats on platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, the effect of the global pandemic on consumers, which catalyzed social media consumption, and the optimization of data collection, which marketers used for social media ads.
Once considered as something that’s just nice to have, influencer marketing is fast becoming an essential component in a brand’s marketing arsenal. 93% of marketers have used influencer marketing in their campaigns, and it’s now considered as a key advertising strategy.
12. Micro-Influencers Are Poised to Make a Big Impact in 2022
In 2022, micro-influencers are expected to play a bigger role. While they may have fewer followers compared to mega and macro-influencers, their audiences tend to be more engaged and are more likely to take action.
The market share of micro-influencers continues to grow. From an 89% share in 2020, it grew to 91% in 2021.
13. More Brands Will Leverage Micro-Influencers in Their Campaigns
Micro-influencers can help minimize a campaign’s advertising cost per action while still widening a brand’s reach. While their follower base may not be as big as that of celebrity influencers, they can generate more impact per impression made. It’s expected that micro-influencer marketing will grow faster compared to traditional influencer marketing.
Furthermore, working with nano- and micro-influencers is relatively more affordable. These influencers tend to charge less compared to their more famous counterparts. Someone with 1,000 to 10,000 followers can charge up to $100 per post, while mega-influencers with over a million followers are likely to charge upwards: $10,000 per Instagram post.
In 2014, each person had approximately 4.8 social media accounts. In 2020, there were 8.4 accounts per person. As social platforms and usage continue to increase, it’s imperative for brands to embrace a cross-channel approach when it comes to implementing their marketing campaigns.
While some platforms share similarities, they’re not necessarily the same. For example, TikTok content speaks to a different audience—users who most likely want to start or ride on trends, while Instagram Stories is more appealing to those who prefer interactive content.
For brands to stay relevant, they should be able to generate content that’s tailored for each type of social media platform. They should work with influencers who specialize in each channel and who are capable of engaging their target audience within these digital spaces.
16. Tech Developments Will Play a Big Role in Influencer Marketing
With the surge of technological innovations, traditional methods of influencer marketing will likely be affected by the advent of artificial intelligence.
Brands are adopting AI and machine learning, and they need to integrate this into how they approach influencer marketing. They can leverage tech to identify new trends and strengthen collaborations with influencers. They can also use it to derive meaning and context from conversations with consumers.
21. Marketers Will Increase Their Spending on Influencers by 2023
By next year, influencer marketing expenditure is projected to reach $4.6 billion in the US alone. In 2022, spending is expected to grow to $4.14 billion, compared to 2021’s $3.69 billion
https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-statistics/
23. Consumers Are More Likely to Follow Influencers Who Look Like “Everyday People”
Contrary to popular belief, a majority of consumers prefer following influencers who look and act like us, instead of celebrities, contributing to companies’ preference of partnering with nano- and micro-influencers.
24. Brand Ambassadorships Will Dominate the Influencer Marketing Sphere
Brand ambassadorships are begining to take center stage in 2022. More companies are embracing an always-on approach when it comes to influencer marketing, which helps establish a brand’s consistent presence on different social media platforms.
By establishing a strong, long-term relationship with influencers, marketers can turn these opinion leaders into true brand advocates. They can work with individuals who know their brand and their audience well.
25. Personalization Will Change the Face of Influencer Marketing Campaigns in 2022
Personalization is crucial in implementing successful influencer campaigns.
Influencers should be able to engage their audiences on a more human level or through a down-to-earth approach. Consumers are more likely to respond to people they find relatable.
To ensure success, it’s also important for marketers to work with influencers who are aligned with their brand’s values and personality.
31. A Significant Number of People Will Identify Themselves as Content Creators
It’s estimated that one billion individuals will self-identify as content creators. As the creator economy grows and as the influencer marketing industry continues to change, experts anticipate the democratization of content creation.
Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram are already making it easier for users to become content creators. These platforms are easy to use, widely accessible, and have features that essentially simplify the process of content production.
33. Influencers in the US Receive the Most Deals, Followed by Those in Canada, the UK, and Australia
The US boasts a large number of influencers, which is attributed to the size of its consumer market. In North America, cities that have the most influencers include Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Miami, and Chicago.
34. Brands Spend More Than $100 per Influencer-Generated Content
On average, brands spend around $174 for each piece of content that an influencer generates. With influencer marketing expenditure projected to rise in the coming years, you can also expect this average spending price to grow.
35. A Majority of Brands (59%) have a Standalone Budget for Content Marketing, and 75% of Them Intend to Dedicate a Significant Budget to Influencer Marketing in 2022
Since our 2020 survey, the percentage of brands that have a separate budget for content marketing has increased by 4% to 59%. Given how HubSpot reports that 70% of brands use content marketing, this number seems a bit low, though it's possible that the difference just means that some brands don't separate their marketing budget into different types of marketing.
38. Brands Paying Influencers With Money Is as Common as Brands Paying Them With Free Product Samples
There has been an increase in the number of brands paying money to influencers. 34.5% now pay influencers in money, with an equal amount (34.5%) paying influencers with product samples. In addition, 25% of brands gave influencers discounts on products and a much smaller percentage (5.9%) prefer giveaways as a payment method.
42. 4 out of 5 Brands Use Instagram for Influencer Marketing
Instagram is the network of choice for influencer marketing campaigns, with 79% of brands considering it the most important platform for them. This is an increase from 68% in 2020.
43. Brands Still Use Other Social Media Platforms for Influencer Marketing
Facebook use has increased—7% to 50%. TikTok remained relatively steady, increasing to 46% from 45%, and YouTube also saw an increase to 44%, up from 36% in 2020.
44. 67% of Brands Are Concerned About Influencer Fraud
We've all heard the horror stories about influencer fraud. From fake followers to bots to phishing, fraudulent influencers are costing brands a loss of $300 per post. Fortunately, there are tons of tools that can help detect fraudulent influencer activity and reduce the effects of influencer fraud. Because of these tools, there are fewer influencer accounts that are impacted by fraud.
50. Successful YouTubers Can Earn Millions From Their Videos
We’ve curated a list of the top earners on YouTube in 2021, along with their estimated earnings:
Ryan Kaji (Ryan’s World) - $29.5 million
Jimmy Donaldson (Mr. Beast) - $24 million
Dude Perfect - $14 million
Mark Edward Fischbach (Markiplier) - $12.5 million
Logan Paul - $12.5 million
Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (PewDiePie) - $12.5 million
Jake Paul - $11.5 million
Daniel Middleton (DanTDM) - $11 million
Smosh - $11 million
Lilly Singh - $10.5 million
51. Brands Should Give More Creative Liberty to Influencers
Influencers are asking for more creative control and 83% regard it as their first priority, according to a whitepaper by The Drum. Allowing influencers more creative control over their content boosts the validity of their post by making it more authentic.
53. 69.4% of Influencers Chose to be Influencers so They Could Earn Revenue
TapInfluence and Altimeter joined forces to produce a study on the state of influencer marketing, interviewing influencers. When asked to provide reasons for their participation in this form of marketing, nearly 70% admitted that their main inspiration was to earn some money. 57.5% also claimed that they engaged as influencers to make an impact or cause a change.
61. There Are Five Types of Influencers: Celebrity (Mega) Influencers, Macro Influencers, Mid-Tier Influencers, Micro-Influencers, and Nano-Influencers
Influencer marketing does not focus on celebrity endorsement. Micro-influencers perform the bulk of successful influencer marketing (at least 90% of it). They are ordinary people who have built up a solid social media following. While there are no strict definitions of follower numbers, a general guide to the types is:
Mega-influencers – social superstars with more than a million followers. These are often celebrities
Macro-influencers – influencers with between 100,000 and 1 million followers
Micro-influencers - someone who has between 1,000 and 100,000 followers. While their following may be small(ish), their authenticity is high
Nano-influencers – somebody with fewer than 1,000 followers who has immense influence with a comparatively narrow niche.
64. 53% of Micro-Influencers Have Never Paid to Promote a Post
The majority of influencers have managed to achieve their influential status without paying for promotion. Less than 10% have paid for Instagram native ads, despite their love for this platform. Of course, brands can gain extra reach when they choose to pay for boosted/promoted posts.
67. Nearly 40% of Twitter Users Say They’ve Made a Purchase as a Direct Result of a Tweet From an Influencer
According to USP Solutions, research by the Twitter team found that nearly 40% of Twitter users have made a purchase as a direct result of a Tweet by an influencer, and purchase intent increased 5.2 times when users were exposed to brand and influencer Tweets, It is clear that Twitter influencers have built a sufficiently high level of trust for people to be confident enough to spend money on their recommendations.
https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-statistics/
April 2022
Paid subscriptions to its hundreds of thousands of newsletters exploded to more than one million late last year (2021) from 50,000 in mid-2019. (The company won’t disclose the number of free subscribers.)
Publishing on Substack is free, but writers who charge for subscriptions pay 10 percent of their revenue to Substack and 3 percent to its payment processor, Stripe.
Subscribers pay more than $20 million a year to read Substack’s top 10 writers. The most successful is the history professor Heather Cox Richardson, who has more than a million paid and unpaid subscribers. Other notable writers include the knighted novelist Salman Rushdie, the punk poet laureate Patti Smith and the Eisner-winning comic book writer James Tynion IV.
Emily Oster, an author and economics professor at Brown University who has offered divisive advice on handling the pandemic with children, joined Substack in 2020 after Mr. McKenzie recruited her. Her newsletter, ParentData, has more than 100,000 subscribers, including more than 1,000 paying readers.
This year, The Center for Countering Digital Hate said anti-vaccine newsletters on Substackgenerate at least $2.5 million in annual revenue. The technology writer Charlie Warzel, who left a job at The New York Times to write a Substack newsletter, described the platform as a place for “internecine internet beefs.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/media/substack-growth-newsletters.html
Between December 2020 and November 2021, Substack saw considerable annual growth, quadrupling paid subscribers from 250,000 to 1,000,000.
The number of paid subscribers increased by almost 90x between July 2018 and November 2021.
Only 5% to 10% of Substack users subscribe to a paid newsletter.
In April 2022, Substack.com received 30.6 million website visitors.
According to a Financial Times estimate, Glenn Greenwald made between $1 million and $2 million on Substack in 2021.
While Substack’s official revenue numbers aren’t available, the company told investors that it generated $9 million in revenue in 2021.
Since 2017, Substack has raised four rounds from 15 investors. To date, the total raised amount is $82.4 million.
The prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led both the Series A and B funding rounds, raising $80.3 million.
Substack was part of Y Combinator’s incubator program, which funded the $120,000 pre-seed round.
https://sellcoursesonline.com/substack-statistics
Using the above numbers for 2021 if sub-stack received $9 million in revenue then sub-stackers got 81 million . Assuming the same revenue growth in 2022 as in 2021 that would mean 320 million dollars for sub-stackers. How much is legit and how much is not (meaning government or political dark money)? No idea, but something to think about.
Question Everyone
CURRENT EVENTS-Ukraine
Given the current conflict in Ukraine and Biden-Ukraine connections , not to mention the Russia-Ukraine Gate that played out since 2016, we should perhaps be taking a closer look at the Ukrainian Emigre population, and their influence on US policy.
Some of these Emigres worked with the Military and OSS/CIA during and after World War II. Some came over after World War I fleeing after the War between the Bolsheviks and the Poland + Ukrainian Nationalists alliance. I discuss some of this here.
I wonder what all of these people (offspring of some of the Emigre population) have in common (along with that gal who was chosen to head the Ministry of Truth not no mention Cynthia Freeland in Fascist Canada).
Janet Yellin, Secretary Treasury
Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State
Robert Klain, Chief of Staff
David Cohen, Deputy Director CIA
Merrick Garland, Attorney General
Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary Homeland Security
Avril Haines, Director National Intelligence
Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State
Victoria Nuland, Secretary State Political Affairs
Eric Lander, Office of Science Technology
Jeffry Zeints, Covid Guru
Rachel Levine, Assistant Health Secretary
Cass Sunstein, Senior Counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, and his wife, Samantha Power, Head of USAID
Dana Stroul, Pentagon Senior Policy Official on the Middle East
Rochelle P. Walensky, CDC Director
Anne Neuberger, Director of Cybersecurity at NSA
Chanan Weissman, Director of Technology at National Security Council
Polly Trottenberg, Deputy Secretary of Transportation
Jessica Rosenworce,l Acting Chairwoman FCC
Jennifer Klein, Co-Chair of the Gender Policy Council
Jared Bernstein, Member of Council of Economic Advisers
David Kessler, Chief Science Officer of COVID Response
Stephanie Pollack, Deputy Administrator Federal Highway Administration
Gary Gensler, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission
JFK files release on George de Mohrenschildt who was a close acquaintance of Oswald show he was from Ukraine and OSS had a file on him.
He was suspected of being a NAZI agent and admittedly was at least an unpaid CIA informant. I cover in more detail here
And speaking of Ukraine, has anyone seen this report on Hunter Bidens Lap Top
https://bidenlaptopreport.marcopolousa.org/Report.pdf
I have not had a chance to go through it. Takes forever to download and its very long. I’ll get to it at some point.
Edward Bernays and Operation Mockingbird
For those wanting a refresher going way back to Bernays and Operation Mockingbird
Edward Bernays
Within days of the War declaration in 1917, the president authorized the creation of the Committee on Public Information.
Under the leadership of George Creel, a former muckraking journalist, the CPI was tasked with winning the war at home by firing up a reluctant American population into what Creel called "the white hot mass of patriotism," and spreading the good news about America and its democratic values throughout the world.
The CPI brought together many of the brightest minds in advertising, journalism, graphic design, academia, and a relatively new industry called public relations.
By the end of the war, more than 100,000 Americans had contributed to the CPI's efforts. They created Uncle Sam and other iconic recruiting images. They churned out millions of press releases, bulletins, photographs and posters, and produced silent movies with names like Pershing's Crusaders and America's Answer.
Within months, Americans had shed their initial war reluctance. Young men were flocking to recruiting offices, and millions were giving money to support the "Liberty Loan" program to help finance the war effort.
The success of the CPI opened the eyes of many of its publicists to new techniques of mass persuasion, and brought the fledgling public relations industry from the fringes of American commerce into the mainstream.
The CPI was the largest propaganda machine the world had ever seen. And while its title stressed "information," the Committee's publicists understood that electrifying American public opinion would take an appeal to the emotions, not the intellect.
The CPI's Division of Advertising churned out posters and ads that depicted German atrocities that never happened, played up threats to American homes and families that were wildly exaggerated, and generally appealed to the fears and anxieties that lurked beneath the surface of public consciousness.
All of this was observed with great interest by a young member of the CPI team named Edward Bernays.
Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and he shared his uncle's fascination with the unconscious mind. But while Freud sought to liberate people from their subconscious drives and desires, Bernays wanted to harness those passions for commercial ends.
His work with the CPI had convinced him that if you could sell war by appealing to images and symbols, then you could do the same thing to sell just about anything.
"I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace," he told a BBC interviewer in the early 1990s.
Bernays had concluded that public opinion was fundamentally irrational, and irrationality was now the filter through which human nature could best be understood. Symbols, not facts, would be the primary tool of persuasion. Public opinion was to be manufactured and managed through communications strategies that aimed for the gut rather than the brain.
Bernays, who died in 1995 at the age of 103, is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern public relations.
Writing 10 years after the war, Bernays noted that World War One had, 'opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.'
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.2684519
Operation Mockingbird
In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) : "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."
One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), C. D. Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), Walter Winchell (New York Daily Mirror), Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, William Allen White, Edgar Ansel Mowrer (Chicago Daily News), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Whitelaw Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles L. Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh, the author of A Very Private Woman, (1998) these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
After 1953 the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Helen Rogers Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Dorothy Schiff (New York Post), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Barry Bingham (Louisville Courier-Journal) and James S. Copley (Copley News Services).
The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning of funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers. Frank Wisner was constantly looked for ways to help convince the public of the dangers of communism. In 1954 Wisner arranged for the funding the Hollywood production of Animal Farm, the animated allegory based on the book written by George Orwell.
According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts". Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala.
Henry Luce, the owner of a large media empire, became a key figure in Operation Mockingbird……Luce used his magazines to get Dwight D. Eisenhower elected as president. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed Clare Booth Luce ambassador to Italy; the first American woman ambassador to a major country. Claudio Accogli, a Italian historian, argues that luce was heavily involved in covert anti-communist activities with local cia personnel. Larry Hancock adds: "With no-holds barred political activism and heavy spending (including the support of the SIFAR/Italian Army Secret Service), Luce and the CIA managed to block the probable takeover of the center-left governments, an alliance between Christian Democrats (DC) and the Socialist Democratic Party (PSI)."
In August, 1952, the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged to form the Directorate of Plans (DPP). Frank Wisnerbecame head of this new organization and Richard Helms became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DPP.
J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the CIA's growing power. He described the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair that Frank Wisner had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war. Hoover, claimed that Caradja was a Soviet agent.
Joseph McCarthy also began accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists" and claimed he intended to root out a hundred of them. One of his first targets was Cord Meyer, who was still working for Operation Mockingbird. In August, 1953, Richard Helms, Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer that Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added to the smear by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and both came to his defence and refused to permit a FBI interrogation of Meyer.
Joseph McCarthy did not realise what he was taking on. Wisner unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all went into attack mode and McCarthy was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.
After Richard Bissell lost his post as Director of Plans in 1962, Tracy Barnes took over the running of Mockingbird. According to Evan Thomas (The Very Best Men) Barnes planted editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA.
In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, was planning to publish that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."
This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing this story in March, 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and the CIA. As well as reporting CIAfunding of the National Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. It named Cord Meyer as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary journal Encounter.
In May 1967 Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article entitled, I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral, in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress. As he pointed out in the article: "In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare."
Meyer's role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. The book was highly critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer's when he was a liberal activist after the war.
Further details of Operation Mockingbird was revealed as a result of the Frank Churchinvestigations (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975. According to the Congress report published in 1976: "The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets." Church argued that the cost of misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.
Frank Church showed that it was CIA policy to use clandestine handling of journalists and authors to get information published initially in the foreign media in order to get it disseminated in the United States. Church quotes from one document written by the Chief of the Covert Action Staff on how this process worked (page 193). For example, he writes: “Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publicans or booksellers.” Later in the document he writes: “Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability”. Church goes onto report that “over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967”. All these books eventually found their way into the American market-place. Either in their original form (Church gives the example of the Penkovskiy Papers) or repackaged as articles for American newspapers and magazines.
In another document published in 1961 the Chief of the Agency’s propaganda unit wrote: “The advantage of our direct contact with the author is that we can acquaint him in great detail with our intentions; that we can provide him with whatever material we want him to include and that we can check the manuscript at every stage… (the Agency) must make sure the actual manuscript will correspond with our operational and propagandistic intention.”
Church quotes Thomas H. Karamessines as saying: “If you plant an article in some paper overseas, and it is a hard-hitting article, or a revelation, there is no way of guaranteeing that it is not going to be picked up and published by the Associated Press in this country” (page 198).
By analyzing CIA documents Church was able to identify over 50 U.S. journalists who were employed directly by the Agency. He was aware that there were a lot more who enjoyed a very close relationship with the CIA who were “being paid regularly for their services, to those who receive only occasional gifts and reimbursements from the CIA” (page 195).
Church pointed out that this was probably only the tip of the iceberg because the CIA refused to “provide the names of its media agents or the names of media organizations with which they are connected” (page 195). Church was also aware that most of these payments were not documented. This was the main point of the Otis Pike Report. If these payments were not documented and accounted for, there must be a strong possibility of financial corruption taking place. This includes the large commercial contracts that the CIA was responsible for distributing. Pike’s report actually highlighted in 1976 what eventually emerged in the 1980s via the activities of CIA operatives such as Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, Ted Shackley, Raphael Quintero, Richard Secord and Felix Rodriguez.
Church also identified E. Howard Hunt as an important figure in Operation Mockingbird. He points out how Hunt arranged for books to be reviewed by certain writers in the national press. He gives the example of how Hunt arranged for a “CIA writer under contract” to write a hostile review of a Edgar Snow book in the New York Times (page 198).
Church comes up with this conclusion to his examination of this issue: “In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.”
In February, 1976, George Bush, the recently appointed Director of the CIA announced a new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” However, he added that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.
Carl Bernstein, who had worked with Bob Woodward in the investigation of Watergate, provided further information about Operation Mockingbird in an article in The Rolling Stonein October, 1977. Bernstein claimed that over a 25 year period over 400 American journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA: "Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad."
According to researchers such as Steve Kangas, Angus Mackenzie and Alex Constantine, Operation Mockingbird was not closed down by the CIA in 1976. For example, in 1998 Kangas argued that CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife ran "Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world." On 8th February, 1999, Kangas was found dead in the bathroom of the Pittsburgh offices of Scaife. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: "Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?