11 min read

Manufacturing Support

"Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music." - Diogenes

The Corporation or the State?
The "Culture War" or Something Else?


Manufacturing Support

Leftist think tanks and the most dominant tech platforms have partnered together to produce various techniques that they refer to as "CounterSpeech initiatives".

The simplest CounterSpeech initiative consists of an organized group with special training with platforms like Facebook. This initiative uses simple mob tactics to suppress unwanted ideas. They call themselves the #iamhere group, and have 150,000 members from several dozen countries. Their sole purpose is to shift the malleable center and the apolitical more to the left side of politics, which includes the support and defense of established corporate media.[6] Their methodology is simple: find relevant articles (such as the New York Times articles on social media), tag each other, comment, like each other's comments, and suppress opposing views.

Just when #iamhere was formed, Facebook released a new comment architecture option, where comments are not in chronological order, but ordered by reactions. This means that a reply to a comment can be placed higher than the comment it was replying to. If a group were to emerge who took advantage of this, then that group could effectively hide opposing views by replying to those views and then reacting to their own replies (by tagging each other). This makes their comments more visible and their opponents less so. It is no coincidence that #iamhere and this comment architecture emerged simultaneously. It is no coincidence that Facebook has partnerships with certain leftist think tanks and that these organizations chose the new comment architecture option. In fact, Facebook and the Counter-Violent Extremist (CVE) community admitted as much.[9]

Return to the 150,000 figure above for a moment. Facebook has enormous data advantages and has software programs that can target people based on specific criteria. Facebook has 2.9 billion active monthly users; yet they were only able to organize 150,000 real people on their own website.

We will return to this peculiar discovery later.

Censorship and Shadowbanning

We should examine a different CounterSpeech initiative now. The New York Times partnered with a software-developing think tank called Jigsaw, on at least two occasions. In both cases, Jigsaw tested their new content moderation (censorship, shadow ban censorship, and artificial moderation) on the New York Times' social media pages.[15] If you were to visit the New York Times' Twitter and LinkedIn pages, you will see comments from bots and throwaway accounts that are pro-NYTimes.

Most important of all, Jigsaw is owned by Google with special privileges to Google Search data and YouTube data. Despite the New York Times receiving preferential treatment by Google Search and YouTube (think Google's search results and YouTube's news bar), the news agency needs artificial manipulation to appear more popular. In fact, all leftist corporate media receive preferential treatment by the most dominant tech platforms (again, YouTube's news bar), yet their ratings are still plummeting.

In other words, a small number of tech firms are placing leftist media directly in front of most of the world's population, and leftist media is still failing. What does this tell us about the popularity of leftism?

The Redirect Method

I have also conducted in-depth investigations into the other component of information control – propaganda dissemination. In essence, these programs targets people and manipulates what they see online by placing far left pages in front of them. Some of these pages even tailored political courses to 7+ year old kids.[7] Other pages that people are redirected to, such as Life After Hate are disguised as humanitarians that quite literally teach people to not debate or discuss matters online.

The Redirect Method

  1. tracks users,
  2. profiles them based on their searches and data history,
  3. categorizes them into special "cohorts", and finally
  4. tailors the ad feeds of these users.

The think tanks that refer to themselves as the counter-violent extremist (CVE) community is responsible for developing this technique. The CVE community is comprised of software developers and extremist "researchers". The London-based Moonshot and Google's special division, Jigsaw, are the principal authorities in the CVE community, though there are many others. With their origins in the War on Terror, the CVE community has largely shifted their attention from Islamic terrorism overseas to far-right extremism at home. The only issue with their new mission is that it is built on a lie – a convenient narrative that neatly markets the four products produced by the CVE community – censorship, shadow ban software, ad feed manipulation [the topic of this article], and CounterSpeech initiatives.

The first step (tracking) in the process only works because the tech platforms store sensitive data on their users (indefinitely) – the 1st sin goes to the platforms. Also, this step works because the CVE software tracks users real-time – the 2nd sin goes to the CVEs. The profiling and sorting of users into CVE-defined "cohorts" is obviously another sin of the CVEs, but of course, the tech platforms agreed to it all by hosting the method. Obviously, the questionable "ad results" that show up in the last step of the Redirect Method involves a third set of organizations that are neither CVEs nor tech platforms. This third group of organizations are chosen by the CVEs to indoctrinate users flagged by the program. The "ad results" are often sources of group think and appeals to authority; and are themselves, extremist organizations that target the mentally ill, children as young as 7 years old, and teach people to simply trust in authority.

The tech platforms are more than happy to host the CVE products because the narrative serves the tech platforms' economic agenda, which is to expand their influence across all networks and crush those extremist-infested start-ups.

That's just the private sector. The security state agencies have an interest in network and information control as well. The 3-letter agencies and the White House and are not above funding and providing protection for the private sector CVE organizations, even if the CVE community's narrative about far-right extremism is highly unscientific, harmful to the at-risk, and misleading altogether.

The False Intellectual

Another technique is to create questionable psychology pages to target the mentally ill (more specifically, people that search for mentally ill-related content) for leftist content.[7] The psychology subfield of trauma and resilience [22] happens to be incompatible with dominant narratives over "trauma", particularly from psychology institutions that lean left.

Below are all major firms, corporations, and government agencies involved (that I have tracked down thus far) in the processes mentioned so far:

Organizations Involved in Content Moderation & Redirection

Content Moderators (CM): 23 organizations
Redirection (R): 41 organizations
 enabler: produces flawed research in support of these techniques
 proselytizer: has a page/content that users are redirected to
 sponsor: provides funding of these techniques
 host: hosts these techniques/software

  • Adapt (R: enabler) [1]
  • Adyan Institute (R: enabler, proselytizer) [2]
  • American University (R: proselytizer) [3]
  • Anti-Defamation League (R: developer, enabler) [4]
  • Beringea (R: sponsor) [5]
  • Bing (R: host) [2] (CM) [15]
  • Center for Strategic and International Studies (R: enabler) [4]
  • Center for the Analysis of the Radical Right (R: enabler) [6]
  • Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism (R: enabler) [7][8]
  • ConnectFutures (R: proselytizer) [2][7]
  • Coral by Vox Media (CM) [16]
  • Department of Homeland Security (R: enabler, sponsor) [3]
  • Der Spiegel (CM) [16]
  • Disqus (CM) [17]
  • European Derad Toolkit (R: developer, enabler) [6]
  • El Pais (CM) [18]
  • Facebook (R: host) [2] (CM) [15]
  • FACEIT (CM) [3]
  • The Financial Times (CM) [16]
  • Galop (R: enabler) [6]
  • Google Search (R: host) [2] (CM) [15]
  • Hope Not Hate (R: enabler) [6]
  • iamhere (R: enabler, proselytizer) [6]
  • Instagram (R: host) [9] (CM) [15]
  • Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (R: enabler) [6]
  • Institute for Strategic Dialogue (R: enabler) [7][10]
  • International Center on Security and Violent Extremism (R: enabler, proselytizer) [2][11]
  • International Organization for Migration (R: proselytizer, enabler) [12]
  • Jigsaw (R: developer) [7]
  • LA Times (CM) [16]
  • Le Monde (CM) [16]
  • Life After Hate, ExitUSA, ExitAustralia (R: proselytizers) [2][7]
  • Media Diversity Institute (R: proselytizers) [6]
  • Mercia (R: sponsor) [5]
  • Moonshot (R: developer, enabler) [2]
  • Newlines Institute (R: enabler) [13][14]
  • New York Times (CM) [16]
  • OpenWeb (CM) [16]
  • Reddit (CM) [16]
  • Taringa (CM) [16]
  • Terra Toolkit (R: proselytizer) [6]
  • Textgain (R: developer) [6]
  • The Campaign Toolkit (R: enabler) [6]
  • Twitter (R: host) [2][12] (CM) [15]
  • Soufon Center (R: enabler) [13]
  • Southeast Missourian (CM) [16]
  • Swedish Defense Research Agency (R: enabler, developer) [6]
  • USAID (R: proselytizer, enabler) 3
  • USA Today (CM) [16]
  • Wall Street Journal (CM) [16]
  • Washington Post (CM) [16]
  • White House, The (R: enabler) [3]
  • Wired (CM) [16]
  • Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (R: enabler) [12]
  • YouTube (R: host) [2] (CM) [15]
  • Zivilcourage und Anti Rassismus-Arbeit (R: enabler) [6]

If the leftist movement was indeed a grassroots activist movement, then why does it rely on conglomerate-state censorship? Why does it rely on conglomerate high-tech propaganda techniques (the Redirect Method) to indoctrinate more leftists to the cause? Why does it rely on questionable psychology pages to target at-risk audiences? Why does it partner with groups that tailor left-leaning political training for kids? Why does it produce disinformation about extremism, terrorism, and hate (all of which benefit the state's interests)?[19]

This would not need to occur if that ominous thing we refer to as "The Left" had legitimate support. This is clearly manufactured. Otherwise, the #iamhere organization would have been more successful than its meager 150,000 membership given its obscure partnership with Facebook.

The modern left is largely manufactured. It is institutional and state interests disguised as grassroots movements. Two conclusions can be drawn from this discovery:

  • What we face is not a great "culture war". A culture war implies that two significant factions of citizens have fundamentally different views. If the culture war was as great as right-wing commentators claim it is, #iamhere would have more than 150,000 members. Furthermore, appeals to culture are necessarily imprecise, and thus cannot adequately address, much less solve problems.
  • The struggle is actually Citizens vs the Institutions (but the institution of the state or institutions of the corporation?).

The Corporation or the State?

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