Social Media: The Danger of Emotional Engineering

Do people remember the 2012 scandal revealed in 2014, when we discovered that Facebook was conducting brainwashing experiments without telling the users? It was thought that the government had a hand in it. They had done things like that in the past.

DARPA?

It was thought that a government agency, DARPA, might have had a hand in developing Facebook.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was responsible for developing innovative and often secret technology for the U.S. military. They also conducted experiments in brainwashing without telling the Facebook users.

Facebook’s first big outside investor, Peter Thiel, has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with American spy agencies.

However, there is no evidence that DARPA or the U.S. intelligence services had any role in creating Facebook, nor is there evidence that intelligence agencies have directly invested in the company.

Facebook Experimented with Our Emotions Through Brainwashing

Nonetheless, Facebook received a lot of backlash in 2014 when it revealed it had conducted emotional brainwashing experiments.

Facebook was condemned after it emerged it had conducted a psychology experiment on nearly 700,000 users without their knowledge.

The test saw Facebook “manipulate” news feeds to control the emotional expressions to which the users were exposed.

The research was done in collaboration with two US universities to determine whether “exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviours.”

Facebook added that “no unnecessary collection of people’s data was used. None of the data was associated with a specific person’s Facebook account.”

Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco were involved in the study.

The Harvard Mind Control Expert

That takes us to Harvard professor and mind control expert Rebecca Lemov. They soon discussed government interference in digital life. Joe Rogan is fascinated by the topic.

Rogan noted that what you see on social media regarding interactions and debates is not real. It’s not organic.”

“It’s state-run and state-funded, and it’s whether it’s foreign governments or our government or even corporations, you’re getting inorganic discourse that’s designed to form a narrative and which is a form of mind control.”

Professor Lemov added that even when we know it’s fake, our minds still react like it’s real.

“Yeah. I mean, I think even on a basic level, people, it’s known and studies have shown that we respond as if it were organic and real.

“Even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as, like, in-person interaction.

“It’s not just governments pulling strings. The platforms themselves are wired to exploit how we feel. I think at the root, there is a kind of way that, on an emotional level, it’s not just manipulation of ideas, but there’s a kind of emotional engineering that’s built into the platforms and doesn’t even demand, you know, at first, government involvement.”

She revealed that DARPA wasn’t just involved in building the Internet. It may have laid the groundwork for global emotional manipulation.

“DARPA was involved in the development of the internet and of things like pattern recognition,” she said. “The government has funded many, many studies.”

She is concerned in how it is used.

“What I got interested in, in social media and how I connect it with the episodes of brainwashing—it creates states of emotional contagion that aren’t really about convincing people of a different way to think,” she explained.

“But more about how you feel about what you think.” That emotional shift, she added, is straight out of the cult playbook. “It’s not that it changed my thoughts,” she said. “It’s how I felt about those thoughts.”

When you see the candy at the checkout counter in the store or the gossip rags, you know you’re being tempted to buy. It’s the marketers’ one last crack at you as you leave the store.

However, now we see cultish thinking over insane ideologies that encourage mutilation surgeries of children or searing hatred toward politicians we don’t know. It’s dangerous and it works. Look at all the people who started burning Teslas or hurting innocent people driving them because the founder is trying to make the government more efficient.

Does it have a role in suicides as an example of its power?

Watch the full clip:

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