The indirect funding of promoting products, politics, and propaganda against public health.
On The Majority Report they mentioned how the guys on The Vanguard Podcast said when the pandemic hit they were getting a few thousand dollars on their Patreon, but that dried up for them when they came out and supported a public health response to the pandemic. I’ve heard several stories like this before. The big money, the dark money has always been against public health, right from the get go. And content creators are very sensitive to their stats. All these platforms have ways that track things, and you get feedback. This obviously sometimes leads to audience capture, and a feedback loop. There is money pulling strings, and often people don’t even know who they’re working for, I notice this lots.
The recent news of how Tim Poole and Dave Rubin have made large sums of money for their shows that have been found to come from Russian sources. I recommend listening to the entire segment on The Majority Report on the Tim Poole story, not because anyone cares about Tim Poole, but because Matt Binder, Brandon Sutton, Emma Vigeland, and Matt Lech, do a good job there talking about the reality of how this economic media landscape works, and there’s plenty of evidence. How and why people aren’t fully aware of who’s paying for what, and even requiring people to disclose conflicts of interest, while very important, doesn’t completely fix it even if it were better enforced. Because many people who just wouldn’t be put in a position to have a microphone or a platform to reach a lot of people if they didn’t already have particular interests. A lot that people have a hard time grasping the idea that a lot of popular pundits and influencers themselves don’t truly understand why they’re popular. Most people in such a position will assume they must be great and people like them, who wouldn’t be tempted to believe that? But there’s a lot of money sloshing around to boost people indirectly, it’s inauthentic. Often people just hit upon saying the right things, and in comes the money.
One thing Matt Binder keeps bringing up is how the report says that someone was issuing invoices via a discord server. Nothing’s really too petty or halfass to be part of a well funded operation in the gig economy.
The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War by Mark Galeotti - Feb 2023
Outsourcing goes beyond direct warfare and into non-kinetic contests. This century has also seen the explosion of the gig economy. Individual freelancers and temporary workers sometimes recruited directly, sometimes through online platforms or third party matchmakers. It may seem ridiculous to draw comparisons with the cycle courier that brings you your pizza. But this is less fanciful than might appear in an age when conflicts may be fought through the medium of carefully curated newspaper articles highlighting a grievance or attacking a government. And when online influencers can pivot from hyping a hair product to pushing a political cause.
This may be the age of multinational corporations, mass social movements, and powerful governments, but a coincidence of technological, social, and political change means that it is also the age of the individual, and many of them are for hire. Suddenly the world is full of people who seem to be doing the work of states. Yet not as direct employees, nor even out of ideological commitment or patriotic passion. Journalists hired to write hit pieces. Scholars saying the right things for a grant. Think tanks producing recommendations to order. There may be no geopolitical equivalent of Uber yet, but lobbying, strategic communications - were I a cynic I would suggest this is what we call propaganda when we do it ourselves - and similar consultancy and service companies often act as the middlemen.
Quick article on the content that Russia's influence operations are pushing. Reveals the agenda of the influence operation, their strategic ambitions and the basic thrust of the whole thing. In short: democracy is failing and only the strong Russian leader and strong Russia are doing well. Bit of a shocker there, eh?
Cyber Attacks and Influence Operations vs the U.S. and Related : Published 4/9/26AM
It's almost as if Trump's decision to deliberately dismantle most of our protections in order to help Russia harm the US is exactly as bad as everyone with sense said and also helps other advisories just as everyone with sense also warned. Sigh.
Cable signed by Marco Rubio and seen by Guardian suggests staff work with Pentagon psychological operations unit
The designation suggests the hackers successfully compromised swathes of sensitive data stored directly on FBI systems.
People who are behind that curtain have no incentive to pull the curtain back.
It’s weird when people claiming to be disinformation experts take at face value and even assert the idea affirmatively that very wealthy conduits of PR with very large platforms, are in fact true believers and saying wild and weird things as good faith actors who are simply deranged or just confused. If someone isn’t talking about how the money changing hands in all this to push the narratives, directly and indirectly, they’re not informative, they’re just another outlet of propaganda with their own motivation for criticizing the particular disseminators of misinformation. It seems like this type of voice in the discourse simply exists to keep that curtain from being pulled back on what’s really going on. So we are all just led to just assume some prominent well-known people in the media business are simply crazy, victims of nonsense, or happen to be wrong. Someone honest and a real expert in disinformation would be properly acknowledging and pointing out to everyone that the entire communication system has been hijacked by people with a lot of money trying to trick us into believing things that will wind up somehow financially benefitting the people with the money at our further expense. And that the most obvious explanation for someone to say something off the wall or especially inexplicably crazy is that there’s some motivation for them to do so, and considering the type of money that changes hands for influence operations, it’s probably a financial motive. Some may be true believers or become so, but assuming people who make their money in the media space are just clueless victims of conspiratorial thinking acting in good faith, is far too naive a stance for a so-called disinformation expert.
The PR operations on social media have really jumped the shark in trying to defend the Department of Homeland Security.
On Bluesky I saw some PR hack saying democratic politicians can’t risk “falling for” “abolish Ice” “again” whatever that all even means because it makes no sense. I’m not even clear who that was meant for, or what they assume people believe because it’s just not based in any reality. This person, who was advertising their op-ed was even warning Democrats to NOT fight the GOP. Should anyone be taking advice from someone who’s saying we should just all lie down and take it? Then to boot there’s someone in the comments reply thread all condescending and trying to lecture, who knows what audience this is for, saying how you can’t say this or that, you have to say what he thinks you should say in this word salad. And of course he’s also selling “anti-maga merch” check the link in his bio!
Don’t boost anonymous accounts selling merch by pumping out viral content, often boosted by inauthentic networks.
What's it going to take to get people off tech tycoon algorithm controlled communication?
I don't know why anyone would want to stay on the mechahitlerbot csam generator at this point. The government won't act presumably because the chief troll is having dinner with the troller in chief, and it reminds me of the quote from Rick Pollay from 1992: "Many people rationalize that if it were really dangerous the government wouldn't let it be advertised. They are wrong in that thinking. It is dangerous and the government does let it be advertised."
I've experienced shadowbanning myself repeatedly on various platforms, and I've heard that even in private facebook groups, advocates and activists have their posts shadowbanned, with the admins not even being notified that posts are being held. It's just not a useful place for grassroots people to try to do activism or even public pressure, unless you're part of a coordinated campaign, because you just can't compete as a grassroots activist with the influence operations. Of course influencers will try to convince you to stay on the app and boost them. And not just influencers, but scientist content creators as well. Product cults are a thing, and they even show up getting described as a business model in SEC filing forms.
People are not even talking about the same things and this is dangerous.
I don't think most people realize that many times we think we're talking about the same thing, but in fact, we're not actually on the same page with the underlying premise or even basic facts.
I feel compelled to keep pointing this out, because people have different ideas about topics and the way that meanings of things can work is that people can think they're talking about the same thing and in fact not realize they're not in agreement of actual premises or the facts involved. I think that partly it's the way things work with the information space and media as it is and social media silos, but I think there are also forces out there who are able to manipulate the situation as well.
Whatever the cause I think the only answer is to start speaking in specifics rather than shorthand or buzzwords or sound bites. We need to name specific things happening, and spell out what we mean, not just make off-hand comments and assume everyone's on the same page, because I can guarantee you, not everyone is on the same page.
This has become very very obvious with what's happening right now in US politics. There are a great many people who truly believe that the dispute over Trump's anti-DEI agenda is all about just a superficial argument about superficial words - that it's just to create an artificial argument between Republicans and Democrats. Gin up the MAGA base and trigger the libs, with disingenuous actors trying to fundraise on culture war bullshit. In fact, that is actually happening too, so it's not wrong to notice that. But it's not just superficial. But people often have no idea that actual material damage is being done. They don't know that anti-DEI means erasure or demonization of certain people, not just censorship of certain words.
They have no idea these anti-DEI policies aren't just getting rid of terms, they're undermining ADA and 504 rights because it's considered "woke" and discriminatory against able-bodied young healthy people. I'm not sure where the disconnect is with this - how people aren't putting it together that DEIA refers to policies that are put in place so people follow ADA or civil rights and discrimination laws. But that's what's going on - people aren't stopping to engage in critical thinking about this and asking -. Who will do accessibility or FMLA or whatever at jobs if there's nobody who's allowed to work on disability issues because it's "woke DEI"? That was the first question I've had about this in terms of the federal worker RTO where they said that people with disability waivers could keep teleworking but my first thought was - who's going to even determine that if they're not allowed to do the A in DEIA?
People sometimes apparently think it's just about censoring certain terminology that some don't like - and maybe using other terms. I think word censorship or a book ban is already a case of an impingement of rights. Not to mention that this type of censorship has historically been a precursor to violence or even massacres. But again, many people are not necessarily thinking this through. I'm told that there's some people in academia that aren't fully getting that it's not just about censoring certain terms and just doing the same thing without using those words. I guess they think they could just censor the language so as to appease MAGA. But how is that going to work? If you have to present relevant information, or for example, design a medicine study, and you cannot do anything to include diversity or different genders, basically you're left with only being able to include white males like it used to be... because including diversity would be "DEI" obviously. You can't describe diversity in the study, you can't do such a study! There's already a skewed result in the medical science literature that doesn't properly address women - half the population - in healthcare treatments.
So most people probably don't even know that these anti-environmental reviews have led to a freeze in funding for things like historic abandoned coal mine industrial site pollution mitigation and land subsidence public safety measures because of the mere existence of "environmental impact" of fossil fuels being involved in this. So no mitigation for stuff that could cause explosions and that has already caused fatality. They have no idea that because of these funding freezes states like Pennsylvania are going out on a limb and taking on the debt which will be left upon the taxpayers holding the bag if the federal funds never come through. Right now the Dem governor of PA is shielding the parties involved from the consequences of the spending freeze by keeping everything going with Pennsylvania funds pending a lawsuit at the federal government - but what happens if that runs out before enough people who will feel the impact are fully informed and decide to speak up, lobby, and organize?
This has me feeling a bit alarmed. How about you?
Don't fail to communicate. Don't Wait For Everybody - Episode 017 Chloe Humbert Feb 10, 2025 - I talk about how people aren't talking about the same things, and caution about using buzzwords and shorthand.
Don't accept a disorderly poo circus. Don't Wait For Everybody - Episode 018 Chloe Humbert Feb 14, 2025 - I read a bulk of the Pennsylvania lawsuit against the federal government.
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962)
Psychology Today - Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It's exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2021 | Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader The plodding repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to “cognitive exhaustion.” But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of “censorship by noise” in which governments “create confusion through information—and disinformation—overload.” In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then “like” or share information without critical review because they lack the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out.
The Cognitive Crucible - #212 Libby Lange on Algorithmic Cognitive Warfare Information Professionals Association Dec 17, 2024 John Bicknell: “so the idea here is o try to get people into smaller cocoons of their own maybe their own information echo chambers or something like that and then as a cocoon it's easier to influence the cocoon of people but at a society level you have all these disparate groups of people that don't necessarily align very well with one another anymore” Libby Lange: “yeah and you know in one of the articles that goes through a cognitive operation kind of stage by stage the goal of moving people into groups is also that people will sort of self-police within the group and sort of self-police behavior thus kind of making each group controllable depending on sort of how you insert content that is targeting that group which is kind of a weird sort of wonky way to think about it but essentially creating these groups that are I guess you could say more manageable almost where if you have a really cohesive society where people are really working together then as sort of an outside adversary that's not a very manageable population right but if you have people split off and you understand kind of the workings of that group or why that group comes together the way it does what their sort of central organizing issue is or their central organizing beliefs then they may be easier to kind of manage John Bicknell: “divide and conquer” Libby Lange: “exactly”
The Home Front podcast - Fascism, Modern Masculinity, and TikTok with Jonathan Buchwalter Feb 6, 2025 "For the Putin regime the state controlled media will actively contradict itself in the same broadcast and you will get um for example I was listening to a podcast uh where an expert on Russian propaganda was being interviewed and they described a plane crash where the plane crash was real and the dates and times presented were real but all of the news coverage is speculation about what happened where the facts of the issue beyond the absolute concrete facts like day and time they changed throughout the day where the same broadcasters would run different versions of events such that when you leave the the screen and you go and interact with people in the world you're both only vaguely talking about the same event and this prevents the Russian population from really engaging with reality at all that they don't know anything about what is happening around them because any version of it is not doctored or made glorious or made defamed instead it's just bullshit. Just this constant stream of well that was wrong and now it's this and that was wrong and now it's this you don't know what truth is and in the end state whether it's the American South or not in Germany or modern Russia is a passive population is a group of people who will take what they're given without complaint."
