We are now becoming uncomfortably aware of how propaganda works and how social media has been used as a weapon of psychological warfare. Moreover, now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars, the Left may not be able to effectively utilize this coveted digital platform in determining politically-charged interpretations of undefinedmisinformationundefined and undefinedfake news.undefined The puppet masters knew that the eccentric entrepreneur was going to make an offer for Twitter and now, those triggered are undefinedTwitterpatedundefined because their ability to control the narrative and censor free speech is going to be curtailed. Tonight on Ground Zero, Clyde Lewis talks with digital marketing strategist, Brian Cross about TWITTERPATED.
SHOW PREVIEW:
SHOW SAMPLE:
SHOW PODCAST:
https://aftermath.media/podcast/4-26-22-twitterpated-w-brian-cross/
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
When you are not a politically obsessed person it takes a long time, and a lot of evidence quietly piling up in the sub-conscious, before you reach the point of questioning your own country’s ultimate behavior. You start questioning why people around you think the way they do and do things that donundefinedt make any sense.
I think this was especially apparent during the peak of the Pandemic and how easy it was to convince people to willfully accept their house arrest with lock downs, and no touch torture rituals like mask wearing and social distancing.
We are now becoming uncomfortably aware of how propaganda words and how social media has been used as a weapon of psychological warfare and now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars undefined the Left is realizing that the controls they have had on Twitter is about to meet its demise.
But it is also embarrassing to note that the only question to come from the media and the GOP is whether or not Donald Trump will be welcomed back to post his mean tweets again.
Is this the only thing the media wishes to exploit? is this the only thing that the GOP cares about?
Again this is embarrassing.
Musk has frequently expressed concern that Twitter’s content moderators go too far and intervene too much on the platform, which he sees as the internet’s “de facto town square. “He brought up those concerns once again in the release announcing the agreement: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Elon Musk said:
“I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans” he added. “Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
The best the media can come up with is undefined Will Donald Trump be welcomed back to Twitter?
Seriously?
Honk honk the clowns are back and they are so terrified that Trump will be legitimized on Twitter Oh the humanity!
Can someone please explain to me how Trumpundefineds mean tweets come back is anything but typical, cliché, and really a non-issue?
Even Musk didnundefinedt bring it up.
Musk has not commented publicly on how he would handle the former President Donald Trump’s banned Twitter account. But his free speech comments have stoked speculation that Twitter under his ownership might reinstate Mr. Trump, who was barred from the platform last year. After the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Twitter said Mr. Trump had violated its policies by inciting violence among his supporters. Facebook also banned Mr. Trump for the same reason.
Trump says he has no intention of coming back undefined but the left-wing media says that he will.
I think they hope he will undefined his tweets were golden for the media.
I am all for free speech, I donundefinedt mind if Trump gets his Twitter back undefined but this is in my opinion sounds like some paranoid propaganda that the left is exploiting because they are cynical and worry about how they are going to circumvent free speech.
Oh yes undefined the first thing you are hearing is that people are going to quit Twitter because they are afraid of being bullied or harassed or some other cooked up excuse. Yet those who espoused left wing leanings were not victimized or shut down by Twitters former owners and the vicious bots they used to patrol it.
Again, this is the equivalent of a kid wanting to take his toys out of the Sandbox because someone that he doesnundefinedt like has decided to come in and join the group.
The whining and crying is evident of the infant school that has been created in this country and the USA today brand of psychological literacy that is pervasive in this era.
The Right is just as fickle as now they are praising Musk for his courage but not long ago, however, the right frequently railed against the Musk as a climate change–promoting “crony capitalist.” His electric car company used to greatly benefit from a generous US tax credit for electric vehicle purchases, and in 2010 during the Obama administration, it received a $465 million loan from a 2010 Energy Department program that offered funding to auto companies looking to make greener vehicles. Tesla repaid the loan in May 2013, with $12 million in interest.
Again, the clown car is a Tesla and the new sycophants are clueless.
Then there’s Musk’s rocket company, which has landed billions in NASA and Pentagon contracts. Musk’s various ventures have also received state government subsidies over the years.
So, I think the question of his political leanings are just another manipulation on the part of the media undefined a media that continues to focus on whether or not Trump returns top twitter.
A few years ago, Musk described himself as “half Democrat, half Republican.” His Time magazine Person of the Year profile said that Musk has “disavowed terrestrial political affiliations.”
He seems to like carbon taxes and the notion of a universal basic income. Billionaire taxes and regulation not so much.
Musk disagreed with Donald Trump’s immigration policies. He’s pro-vaccine, but against COVID-19 mandates. And about his adopted country, he’s said “America is the land of opportunity — there is no other country where I could have done this.”
Like many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and technocrats, Musk isn’t so easy to slot on the traditional left-right spectrum, much less place in the Democrat or Republican bucket.
This is how shallow the media is and how people want to identify with someone who has no real political affiliation because the money of both the left and right is green and spendable.
Moderates tend to confuse the media and those who wish to take a side undefined it is a monstrous joke undefined people should just be people and forego identity politics.
But easier said than done.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter may not even be such a big deal in the long run undefined because I would think that this would embolden to woke to become more militant as they suspect that this move is going to thwart their mission of controlling nearly all of the narrative and pushing their propaganda to their benefit.
About 6 days ago the superstar former President that everyone suspects is still running the show- Barack Obama embarked on a campaign to warn that the scourge of online falsehoods is killing Americans and has eroded the foundations of democracy.
In private meetings and public appearances over the last year, the former president has waded deeply into the public fray over misinformation and disinformation. 10 years before that Obama yucked it up with Mark Zuckerberg and his buddies at Facebook pitching the idea on how the social network can be used for disseminating information about taxes, health care, the promise of technology to solve the nation’s problems.
I guess that now Obama has to remind Facebook of its responsibility to make sure that information that passes the controlling leftundefineds seal of approval is allowed.
In a speech at Stanford University on Thursday, he urged demands for rules to rein in the flood of lies he claims are polluting public discourse.
The urgency of the crisis — the internet’s “demand for crazy,” as he put it recently — has already pushed him further than he was ever prepared to go as president to take on social media.
Obama stated:
“I think it is reasonable for us as a society to have a debate and then put in place a combination of regulatory measures and industry norms that leave intact the opportunity for these platforms to make money but say to them that there’s certain practices you engage in that we don’t think are good for society.
Today, we occupy entirely different media realities, fed directly into our phones. You don’t even have to look up. And it’s made all of us more prone to what psychologists call confirmation bias, the tendency to select facts and opinions that reinforce our preexisting worldviews and filter out those that don’t.
So inside our personal information bubbles, our assumptions, our blind spots, our prejudices aren’t challenged, they’re reinforced. And naturally, we’re more likely to react negatively to those consuming different facts and opinions.”
So right out of the gate, Barack Obama gave his best pitch for the curtailing of free speech on the internet.
it can be said that it could be seen as the last act of a scoundrel.
The bulk of that speech was designed to demonize Russia, whitewash U.S. history, and paint censorship as freedom.
The current state of the web says Obama is “a constant feed of content where useful factual information and happy diversions, and cat videos, flow alongside lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, White supremacist, racist tracts, misogynist screeds.”
His speech was masterfully taken form the World Economic Forum play book as Emanuel Macron used the same propaganda on the French.
It is a simple recipe of conflating alleged “conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery” with “White supremacist, racist tracts, misogynist screeds.” Such a state, he continues, makes it impossible to “tell the difference between, say, a peer-reviewed article by Dr. Anthony Fauci and a miracle cure being pitched by a huckster.”
He then went on to say that “The fact that scientists developed safe, effective vaccines in record time is an unbelievable achievement. And yet despite the fact that we’ve now, essentially clinically tested the vaccine on billions of people worldwide, around 1 in 5 Americans is still willing to put themselves at risk and put their families at risk rather than get vaccinated.”
He then decides to go into full propaganda mode by saying: People are dying because of misinformation.” Of course, which deaths he is referencing and what he deems to be “misinformation” is the entire point here.
After those opening remarks, he launches into his proposed “solutions.” All of which are designed to create an even greater monopoly of information and control for the power elites.
“Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he concluded. Just kidding. Actually, that’s from Orwell’s 1984. I’m just seeing who’s paying attention.undefined
Edward Bernays, considered the Father of Propaganda, once said that If you manipulate the leader of a group, the people will follow- that leader.
In fact, one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology is that the “group mind” does not “think”, rather, it acts according to impulses, habits and emotions. And when deciding on a certain course of action, its first impulse is to follow the example of a perceived leader undefined even the media creates leaders and experts that may not be all that they say they are undefined remember it is all a show with lights and cameras and there are scripts undefined and they are all told to adhere to the script to generate group think.
Humans are, by nature a group species. Even when we are alone, we have a deep sense of group belonging. Whether they consciously know it or not, much of what people do is an effort to conform to the ideals of their chosen group so as to feel a sense of acceptance and belonging.
This exact method of influencing the leader and watching the people follow has been used extensively throughout the last few years. We are now learning that the group think of Lockdowns masks and social distancing really did not have that much of an effect on COVID according to a new study from Johns Hopkins undefined
Bernays once stated: undefinedBy playing upon an old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass of group emotions.undefined
It is all an emotional psychological operation undefined but people donundefinedt want to believe that they are falling for a a political group or pharmaceutical companies that gas light you into thinking you are crazy for being a critical thinker.
The clever use of language has been employed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to great effect. An obvious example of this was when the definition of “vaccine” was changed to include injections utilizing experimental mRNA technology.
You see, the word “vaccine” is associated in the public mind with a certain picture – that of a safe, proven medical intervention that is not only life-saving but absolutely necessary.
If governments had told people to go get their “gene therapies”, the vast majority of the public would likely question the motives behind such a campaign; they would feel extremely skeptical because the phrase “gene therapy” is not associated with the same images, emotions and feelings as “vaccine”.
The same goes for the word “pandemic”, the definition of which was also changed. The word “pandemic” is generally associated in the collective consciousness with fear, death, chaos and emergency- we can blame Hollywood for that as the predictive programming acclimated us to the hear of various contagions.
Any system of communication, whether phone, radio, print, or social media, is nothing more than a means of transmitting information.
However undefined you can trust the information you get immediately or you can sit back and wait to make your own conclusions or perhaps listen to someone you trust.- a columnist or maybe an alternative reporter of talk show host.
Obama has always been called the king of Neuro Linguistic Programming undefined often offering repeated sentences and phrases so that the group he addresses has a mantra that they can parrot when confronted with inconvenient truths.
Repeating the same idea or the same “mantra” again and again is a form of Neuro Linguistic Programming aimed at instilling certain concepts or emotions into the subconscious mind. Indeed, people who are feeling sad or depressed are often advised to repeat to themselves an uplifting saying or affirmation.
There are many examples of this simple, yet effective, technique being used to great effect over the last few years. Think of Q’s “trust the plan”, the globalist favorite, “build back better” or the incessant repetition of that twisted phrase, “trust the science”.
And how about Obamaundefineds own Yes we can phrase that he repeated over and over again while also repeating the idea of Hope and Change.
But the left embraced the words of their darling Mr. Yes We Can -and have forgotten that his words are nothing more that hypocritical propaganda because when it comes to the notion of free Speech undefined he and President Biden love to twist the constitution in their favor.
Obama mentioned the U.S. Constitution twice in his speech. But right before leaving office, Barack signed Executive Order 12333 which gave the National Security Agency (NSA) even more power than it already had. Obama enabled them to share a raw stream of the communications it regularly intercepts.
The NSA no longer has to screen the data and/or filter out personal information that could put innocent people in danger. Instead, they could now immediately share the unedited data with agencies like the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security. How many people had their privacy violated, how many people have been exposed unnecessarily, and how many lives were ruined by this unconstitutional salvo?
But please undefined this information I am sure would be fact checked and re fact checked and homogenized until people like Barack Obama continue to be the messiah that the left wishes would return to the Whitehouse and put a fresh coat of shine on these oppressive moves that the Biden administration has put on free speech.
Between March 10, 2020, and March 10, 2022, there were 646 instances where Big Tech has censored criticism of Biden, according to an analysis by the Media Research Center.
In its Censor Track database, MRC recorded over 600 cases where Big Tech platforms censored criticism of Biden. 140 of those cases involved the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s potentially corrupt foreign deals when his father was president.
Twitter censored the story by blocking it from getting shared, suspending the New York Post’s account for more than two weeks, and suspending any account that dared reference the story, which was authenticated by the New York Times this year.
Most of the censorship cases, 232, surrounded criticism of Biden’s inappropriate behavior around kids and women. In one of the cases, Facebook deleted a post featuring three photos of Biden kissing his granddaughter on the lips. Facebook claimed the post violated its policy on “nudity or sexual activity.”
Big Tech platforms even went after posts quoting controversial and embarrassing statements made by the president. For example, Facebook deleted a video posted by Heritage Action showing Biden and officials from his administration saying his policies would result in an increase in fuel prices.
MRC’s analysis underscores Big Tech’s liberal bias and proves the lengths these companies will go to squash criticism of the president.
The world is a volatile place right now. Things seem to change quickly, and no one knows what might happen next. However, amid all this chaos there is one thing that has not changed and is unlikely to change any time soon, and that is human psychology and how it responds to well-crafted and biased speech.
The puppet masters knew that Elon Musk was going to make an offer for Twitter and now the triggered are undefinedTwitterpatedundefined because they now know that their abilities to control the narrative are going to be curtailed.
SHOW GUEST: BRIAN CROSS
Brian Cross is founder and lead strategist at Elasticity (digital marketing and branding) working with clients such as Capital One, Fireball Whisky, GoDaddy and H&R Block. Prior to Elasticity, Brian was the Global Practice Group Lead for Fleishman-Hillardundefineds Worldwide Digital Practice & was digital strategist for Omnicom’s DAS network. Brian has 20+ years of experience working with startup, Fortune 500, and government clients as CMO and Chief Creative Officer.
As a thought leader in digital marketing and previous creative director, Brian has spoken at conferences, written on several topics, was a regular guest on TV, radio, and podcasts, and launched his book “Why Following the Rules is the Worst Marketing Decision You’ll Ever Make” in Q1 of 2021.
In the world of startups and entrepreneurism, Brian is the founder of the non-profit, Fund St. Louis which crowdsources seed capital for local entrepreneurs. He’s a mentor for several accelerators and is the lead mentor for Stadia Ventures which invests in sports and esports technology startups. Brian has extensive experience launching international startups into the US marketplace and is a board member & investor in several startups.
