The World’s Leading Brainwasher: Moonshot

Moonshot is a counter-violent extremist (CVE), which is a category of left-leaning think tanks. Moonshot is a source of highly flawed extremism and terrorism reports and the pioneer of the Redirect Method.

How the Redirect Method software functions:

1. Users are flagged based on their data history or real-time-input.
2. Users are then profiled and sorted into "cohorts" online, which determine what sort of propaganda or training the user needs.
3. If the user takes the bait, they will be directed to far-left pages and groups.

This program is often used on at-risk audiences (such as the youth and mentally ill).

By simply lying about extremism/terrorism, Moonshot and the rest of the CVE community, convinces tech platforms to host their AI and software algorithms (the Redirect Method) to profile and manipulate people. They are even policing criticisms of their chosen politicians while demonizing right-leaning people^[1]. Moonshot does this by highlighting a small minority of vulgar individuals online and assuming that all right-leaning people are of this nature.

Moonshot is armed with the Redirect Method and enormous data advantages of tech platforms with special privileges to that data. Their Redirect Method occurs without the consent or knowledge of those being redirected (to far-left content). Other techniques and organizations that perform similar functions are Counterspeech initiatives, Jigsaw, ConnectFutures, and others^[6], but Moonshot remains the pioneer of internet manipulation.

Moonshot CVE is a London-based social enterprise specializing in countering violent extremism and other online harms. Moonshot designs new methodologies and technologies to support more effective, scalable, and sustainable responses to the threats posed by harms such as violent extremism, disinformation, and gender-based violence, online and offline. Moonshot’s work ranges from software development and digital capacity building to leading global counter-messaging campaigns. Since its founding in 2015, Moonshot has worked with a range of governments and private sector organizations around the world, including local and national governments, multilateral organizations, and major technology companies. Recent collaborations include a multi-year media literacy project with USAID, a transnational project on violent extremism with the International Organization for Migration, elections integrity projects with the Anti-Defamation League, and emergency COVID-19 response initiatives with USAID.” ¹ _{p. 49}

That quote is from Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Otherwise known as the Wilson Center, it was established by Congress in 1968. The Center’s mission is to provide a link between the worlds of ideas and that of policy – politicized academics. I would not claim that the entire center is ideologically aligned with Moonshot, but the authors of this article certainly are.

Moonshot believed this article to be worthy of their resources page, and obviously, the authors of the Wilson Center article believed Moonshot to be worthy of specific introduction within the article. Shall we analyze the claims put forth in the article?

The Wilson Center Article

The Wilson Center Article serves as the justification for Moonshot's methods and expansion on those methods.

The Wilson Center article was 60 pages long, but I focused on the quantitative portion, which was 16 pages. The second half was qualitative nonsense.

The authors used 13 subjects, all left-leaning female political figures from English speaking countries and collected data from Twitter, Reddit, Gab, 4chan, 8kun, and Parler; but 95% of the data came from Twitter^[2][page 25] because the CVEs have special privileges to Twitter data. The data collection process took place from September 1 to November 9 of 2020 and totaled 336,000+ data points. The collected data consisted of anything (often arbitrary) the authors believed to be disinformation or abuse, by focusing on key words, such as “bitch”.

It's critical to point out that Moonshot has a database of over 30,000 key words, so anytime Moonshot collects data, definitions are broad and vague, while only the worst of those terms are mentioned. Basically, Moonshot collects relatively innocuous data points while attempting to convince their readers that their data collection only consists of extremists. If CVEs only collected data on legitimate extremists, the data sets would be too small for anyone to take seriously, so there is an incentive for Moonshot to tamper with datasets and their meanings.

To their credit, the Wilson Center team did attempt to correct for false positives where terms such as “bitch” were used as terms of endearment, rather than harassment. ² _{p. 28} Furthermore, 78% of the data stemmed from abuse towards Kamala Harris. ² _{p. 18} It is difficult to tell if the authors considered these data points to be uncoordinated disinformation or coordinated, but they do admit to the two being difficult to distinguish.

Interestingly, the authors showed their obvious bias when they used Project Veritas as an example of "coordinated disinformation". Project Veritas is an organization that utilizes undercover footage and whistle blowers to obtain information, and despite being burdened with quite a bit of criticism, has an outstanding journalist record in regard to retractions.

The quantitative portion of the report contains little analysis; it is essentially 16 pages of data collection methods. There was no standard to measure the data against so no real statistical analysis can be conducted. If the authors had included a data set for number of total political posts (or other archetypical set that the abusive posts could be a subset of) within the time period, then they could have compared the ratio of the harmful posts with the total posts. They could have then calculated a percent difference between the set of harmful posts and the entire set. If they had established some sort of standard, they could have then conducted that percent difference and an error analysis and would have been able to produce a measurement with meaning – this report could have gone from a flawed data collection report to a flawed scientific method report.

The second issue I took with the report is that the authors considered total number of posts, when they could have considered total number of users that produce those posts. It would be much more useful to know how many users were making these posts, rather than the total number of posts. As an example of this issue, “one user (whose pseudonymized username is the same on 4chan and 8kun) posted to as many as 27 4chan and 8kun boards, and repeatedly posted to the Politically Incorrect, Q Research, and Random boards up to 551 times on 4chan and 8kun”. ¹ _{p. 27} Again, this would have been a more useful data set for comprehending the scope of the issue, where we are interested in number of extremists, rather than total posts.

By far, the most important point that I can make on this article and Moonshot CVE is: So what?

Sure, vulgar individuals exist. Why would a technology company decide that social interactions need to be policed? Societies define certain behaviors as criminal, but simply because a behavior is unlikeable, does not warrant authoritarianism. One must wonder if the suppression of social dynamics is ultimately beneficial to a species, and if it is, where is the science? If leftist truly think that they know what science is and how it is conducted, then why would they be so quick to support something for which the consequences are not studied? If leftists claim a love and understanding of science, then why have they not turned their attention on technology companies that vainly attempt to justify authoritarianism with unscientific evidence?

I use "leftist" loosely because I have found no one in the center or right-of-center who support the CVE and tech platforms methods. I also use the term because many of the organizations that the Redirect Method directs traffic to (without user's knowledge or consent) are Leftist propaganda^[5][6]. Moonshot is not interested in the extreme left and loosely defines what is extreme on the right in all of their works. This is not a mere coincidence.

I will lead the reader to ponder a question.

The schemes to censor, proselytize, and mischaracterize the public have roots in the US government. The Department of Homeland Security created a market for this behavior in 2016 when it promised $1 billion in grants to anyone who was willing to pose as a scholar while serving the interests of the goverment.

With that considered, is it left-wing propaganda that we are seeing online, or is it government propaganda?

[1] Nina Jankowicz. Jillian Hunchak. Alexandra Pavliuc. Celia Davies. Shannon Pierson. Zoë Kaufmann. “Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. [April 2021]. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/uploads/documents/WWICS%20Malign%20Creativity%202021_0.pdf

[2] Wilson Center. Nina Jankowicz. Jillian Hunchak. Alexandra Pavliuc. Celia Davies. Shannon Pierson. Zoë Kaufmann. “Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. [April 2021]. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/uploads/documents/WWICS%20Malign%20Creativity%202021_0.pdf

[3] Moonshot. https://moonshotcve.com/adapt-ethics-audit/

[4] Twitter. https://twitter.com/MoonshotCVE

[5] Kelly C. Offield. "Grand Manipulation: Facebook Edition" The ARKA Journal. (2021) https://advocate-for-rights-and-knowledge-of-americans-arka.ghost.io/grand-manipulation-facebook-edition/

[6] Kelly C. Offield. "Grand Manipulation: The Agents" The ARKA Journal. (2021) https://advocate-for-rights-and-knowledge-of-americans-arka.ghost.io/grand-manipulation-the-agents/

[7] IDA Ireland. https://www.idaireland.com/newsroom/moonshot-to-establish-software-development-centre

[8] Yahoo!Finance. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/data-analytics-firm-that-raised-7-m-warns-online-threats-have-changed-substantially-due-to-pandemic-230105713.html?guccounter=2