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Thread: Sign of public indignation or novel form of astroturfing? My take on corporate "censorship" of its own feeding trough.

  1. #1

    Default Sign of public indignation or novel form of astroturfing? My take on corporate "censorship" of its own feeding trough.

    A member by the name of Heathenhammer posted a reply in the NPC meme controversy tread, not explicitly stated to be one of my posts, but by all intents appearing to address a point I raised in them. I originally wanted to post my response in that thread, but given its lack of relevance to the subject, I felt compelled to state it in a separate discussion topic. Obviously I won't reveal the entirety of my argument here since I don't want this post to be of astronomic size (as opposed to at present, merely gargantuan). Perhaps in the course of discussion, members could arrive at their own conclusions, which might be my insidious intent after all.

    Anyway, here's what he (or she?) had to say.

    Quote Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer View Post
    "Yeah, Twitter is a private company, so we should let private corporate CEOs make decisions on what can be said on the Internet". I'm not surprised that people who subscribe to "progressive' nonsense actually spout that. Again, without thinking. No wonder that NPC meme is so spot on, since it just shows how a person who promotes this is dehumanizing him/herself into being a mindless robot, without any critical thinking skills or own opinions.
    Interestingly enough, it's in no small part the point raised here that I'm drawn to investigate.

    The charge usually leveled against private companies is that they're indifferent towards social issues. Even when they're not, it's still commonly assumed that they generally act against the weal of the public, in favor of their own narrow minded schemes.

    However, is that really the case? If I were a corporate CEO, whose life consists of marginal choices that bring optimum benefit, unlike a government bureaucrat with a theoretically infinite budget to stomp his boot on something, how would I go about manipulating public opinion to get my buck's worth?

    Take a typical internet forum, like this one. You have your bunch of left wing members and your bunch of right wing members, each expressing usually uninformed and banally predictable opinions on any given subject. Members can agree on some subjects or remain starkly divided on others. But for all the sound and fury, a central consensus is very unlikely to emerge. And this is perfectly normal, in fact I would go as far as to say indicative of a "healthy" community.

    But the question remains, how do you go about creating such a consensus, especially on a large, highly influential platform? You can in theory, co-opt or coerce site owners to push a radical social agenda by force, by banning a broad selection of members who express a certain category of opinions. I've seen this happen many, many times. In general, it doesn't work. People tend to congregate towards places of shared interest, but they don't respond well to being segregated from ones. In any case, the existence of proxies and dynamic IP's makes any such enforcement a costly attrition battle, especially on a large scale. The battle against digital piracy is a prime example of the futility of this enterprise.

    So when a corporate CEO directs his/her company to effectively exclude a sizeable chunk of their platform's users and damage their reputation in the eyes of the public (not the media mind you which will no doubt heap praise for their "social courage", but the actual buckswagging public), what do they want to achieve for this? What will they be getting in return? Are we so naive to believe that they're doing it as a public service?

    What I offer is a psychological explanation of this phenomenon. I won't cite studies or statistics. I want to enjoy this discussion, not submit it to peer review. If you were to critically assess its truthfulness via such meticulous methods, by all means I encourage you to do so.

    The gist of my argument is that the persuasiveness of a medium is shaped by two psychological factors:

    1. People tend to respond well to suggestions which confirm their bias, especially when it leads them to believe it's a conclusion they arrived by themselves. This is because of our fundamental shared feeling that we're all unique and exceptional, but at the same time, paradoxically, we strongly want to belong to group of peers that thinks like us. Hence when I encounter a person who utters something which I might have thought, I have a warm feeling of congeniality towards that person, but when someone voices a unique opinion different from my own, I feel indignation. Of course I can be accused of projecting here, but can anybody say they're truly different?

    2. People tend to be averse to being told what to think by a figure that claims to have moral superiority over them. In fact, any insinuation that plays on a public's conscience which accuses them of being party to some moral outrage, is very quick to garner unequivocally negative responses from the audience, in fact drowning the occasional voices of support, especially when the moral authority of the "mainstream" is being strongly put into question. Indeed this point is best illustrated by examples in the press. Look at the comment sections of mainstream media outlets, such as WP or Guardian, oozing with guilt tripping hysteria, and see how many opinions differ from the published narrative (even given their spastic comment filtering). Time after time the debate turns into more of a monologue.

    So when one understands the antithesis at work here, one can't help but strive to arrive at media persuasion, as Clausewitz might have put it nowadays, by other means. Drawing from above two factors, two things are needed to accomplish this. First, people need to think that the opinions they express are their own, or come from others just like them. Second, the opinion must countervail that prevalent in the mainstream, especially its moral dimension, which is depleted of all credibility. What is thus needed is not a statement of fact, as in existing media, but rather an insinuation. In other words, a meme. One doesn't have to for example, explain the fine points of what is wrong with intersectional theory that way. All you have to do is show some doodle of a fat cartoon bear with a pink toupee and a bulging codpiece with a caption "chek ur briblge, shidlord". Likewise a picture of a puppet uncle Sam with a bloody six pointed symbol above him speaks volumes in such a way that an entire vast body of journalism which investigates a certain state's influence on US foreign policy never can. The fact that the feeling evoked by this image can potentially carry with it the resurgence of the vilest forms of prejudice is irrelevant, or perhaps even indicative, to its power of persuasion.

    So the meme divides (et impera) public opinion in the sense that it allows a certain trend, a viral idea to emerge and take hold of a critical mass of people via the consanguinity of shared impressions, which bypasses their tendency to critically assess it. The indignation on the other hand, serves as means to unite across a broad spectrum, since the more people feel tied up in a common value under duress, such as freedom of speech, the more likely they will identify with the rather narrow group that seems to be subject to its disaffection. Thus a sacrificial lamb is prepared, from which a drop of blood is drawn, and of course this entire event is broadcast everywhere in the media, to inform just about everybody's grandma of the imminent threat of fascists posting cat pictures on Twitter and Facebook. How the is it than even I, who lives under a rock, am aware of what these things represent? Don't they realize that the first thing people do after reading the topic of yet another MSM hitpiece, is that they google it, which leads them to certain places which expose them to precisely truckloads of such taboo information, de facto catechizing them in a particular world outlook in a way that no government or corporate indoctrination program could ever dream of? Unless of course, we realize the message lies in the medium.

    Keep in mind here that we are abandoning the "rationalist" view of media producing intelligible information that is critically assessed and then rejected or accepted by the conscious mind. This is something that plays on the sub-cognitive impulses of the subject base, which forms the stratum susceptible to social engineering techniques...

    There is also another element at play here. People who are in power, be they CEO's, CIA's, politicians, generals, media mouthpieces, grey eminences, and what not, don't have the slightest concern about what ideology drives the public at the present moment. That's not to say that they don't have an ideology of their own, but rather that their "left or right" strongly varies from the average Joe's. I'm not trying to sound cynical here, but it's merely an observation of power having its own needs, the nature of which are obscure to those who do not possess the means of its exercise. This explains why every successive American administration essentially pursues the same policy, the reasons for which must appear utterly insane to any rational mind, but are perfectly justified from the perspective of power dynamics of the state. That is why it stands to reason that the popular social dynamics of left and right are of no consequence to the rulers beyond what is required for the control and management of public opinion. The experiment with the left seems to have failed, as not many are buying into all this genitalia obsessed nonsense. However the swing of public opinion to the right, in particular to the very extreme right, is very much apparent, which speaks of the effectiveness of the means I have outlined.

    Whenever I look at any information in the media, the first thing that I seek to investigate is not its relevance to a particular left or right movement, but the dynamics of power that are disclosed behind it. For there is one sure thing which you can expect the state to be absolutely honest with, and that is trying to inculcate in the minds of the public, power's ways of thinking, and in the end, self-identification with power. Then, and only then, would the public be led to support ruinous policies which will lead to their economic and social expropriation. This is necessarily the case, because the source of power lies in chaos, and chaos is the ultimate consequence of its exercise. History shows us endless examples.

    The people who hate their TV watching boomer normalfag parents, who consider themselves informed fighters for justice, "woke" up, having taken the "red pill", what gullible fools they are, eagerly marching into the burning mouth of Moloch.

  2. #2

    Default Re: Sign of public indignation or novel form of astroturfing? My take on corporate "censorship" of its own feeding trough.

    Ask Heathen Hammer if it's okay for bakers to refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding and why if you want to get to the hypocritical centre of this as quickly as possible with the least effort.

  3. #3

    Default Re: Sign of public indignation or novel form of astroturfing? My take on corporate "censorship" of its own feeding trough.

    I'm sure that if there was only one or very few bakery chains in the country and they would form an oligopoly to refuse to bake gay cakes, then that would be a problem.

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