Influencers



The Persuasive Power of Dissenting Comments

This is why news sites deleted all their comment sections. This is why they censor you on social media. This is why companies and campaigns hire content farms to bury dissent beneath a flood of approval.

They know the research shows dissenting comments reduce the persuasiveness of their propaganda, while likes and approving comments have no such persuasive power.

  • Dissenting comments are more persuasive than high numbers of likes.
  • Dissenting comments reduce the persuasiveness of news article content.
  • Comments in agreement with article content have no such persuasive impact.

Psychology Study screenshot: "They Came, They Liked, They Commented: Social Influence on Facebook News Channels." by Stephan Winter, Caroline Brückner, and Nicole Kramer; published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

Due to the increasing importance of social networking sites as sources of information, news media organizations have set up Facebook channels in which they publish news stories or links to articles. This research investigated how journalistic texts are perceived in this new context and how reactions of other users change the influence of the main articles. In an online experiment (N=197), a Facebook posting of a reputable news site and the corresponding article were shown. The type of user comments and the number of likes were systematically varied. Negative comments diminished the persuasive influence of the article, while there were no strengthening effects of positive comments. When readers perceived the topic as personally relevant, comments including relevant arguments were more influential than comments with subjective opinions, which can be explained by higher levels of elaboration. However, against expectations of bandwagon perceptions, a high number of likes did not lead to conformity effects, which suggests that exemplifying comments are more influential than statistical user representations. Results are discussed with regard to effects of news media content and the mechanisms of social influence in Web 2.0.





Dancing Mania and other social contagions

Definition: "Behavioral contagion"
Spontaneous, unsolicited and uncritical imitation of another's behaviour.

Behavioral contagion is a form of social contagion involving the spread of behavior through a group. It refers to the propensity for a person to copy a certain behavior of others who are either in the vicinity, or whom they have been exposed to. The term was originally used by Gustave Le Bon.

Dancing Mania. Medieval social phenomena.

Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague) was a social phenomenon that … involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time … until they collapsed from exhaustion and injuries.

The outbreaks of dancing mania varied, and several characteristics of it have been recorded. Generally occurring in times of hardship, up to tens of thousands of people would appear to dance for hours, days, weeks, and even months.

Women have often been portrayed in modern literature as the usual participants in dancing mania, although contemporary sources suggest otherwise.  Whether the dancing was spontaneous, or an organized event, is also debated. What is certain, however, is that dancers seemed to be in a state of unconsciousness and unable to control themselves.

In his research into social phenomena, author Robert Bartholomew notes that contemporary sources record that participants often did not reside where the dancing took place. Such people would travel from place to place, and others would join them along the way. With them they brought customs and behaviour that were strange to the local people.  Bartholomew describes how dancers wore "strange, colorful attire" and "held wooden sticks".

Robert Marks, in his study of hypnotism, notes that some decorated their hair with garlands.[7]: 201  However, not all outbreaks involved foreigners, and not all were particularly calm. Bartholomew notes that some "paraded around naked" and made "obscene gestures". Some even had sexual intercourse. Others acted like animals, and jumped, hopped and leaped about.

They hardly stopped, and some danced until they broke their ribs and subsequently died. Throughout, dancers screamed, laughed, or cried, and some sang. Bartholomew also notes that observers of dancing mania were sometimes treated violently if they refused to join in. Participants demonstrated odd reactions to the color red; in A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, Midelfort notes they "could not perceive the color red at all", and Bartholomew reports "it was said that dancers could not stand... the color red, often becoming violent on seeing [it]".

Imagine the spread of dysfunctional social contagions now that social media has burst onto the scene..



Media Pretends Putin Killed a Woman in a Suitcase, Instead of the Boyfriend Who Confessed

Girl who “slammed” Putin a year ago was strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend.

The media sloppers know most people only read headlines, and hardly any read the small print. So, let’s just blame Putin.

Fox News article: "Russian model who trashed Putin on social media found dead in suitcase"

A Russian model who called Vladimir Putin a "psychopath" has been found dead and stuffed inside a suitcase, a report says. Gretta Vedler, 23, went missing a year ago after her anti-Putin social media rant, but the two events do not appear to be connected.

"Vedler's ex-boyfriend Dmitry Korovin, 23, has now confessed to strangling her to death before driving her 300 miles to the Lipetsk region and abandoning the body in the boot of a car.." the Daily Star reports. 

Fox News brands Putin with "CLEAR PSYCHOPATHY" despite his lack of involvement.

Daily Star: "Russian model who called Putin 'psychopath' found dead in suitcase after year missing"

NEW YORK POST: "Russian model who trashed Putin on social media found dead in suitcase" by Pilar Arias

METRO News: "Russian model who branded Putin a 'psychopath' found dead in suitcase", fake news story by Sam Corbishley.

If they are willing to lie about something as obvious as this, what wouldn’t they lie about?

The propaganda machine pushes hoax after hoax, day after day. They are in the business of perception control, not honest reporting. Information suppression and perception control. Oh well, it’s a good job hardly anyone trusts them anymore.




How Publicists Manipulate Journalists to Control Wikipedia

Book extract from "Trust Me I'm Lying", written by Ryan Holiday:

"I remember sitting on the couch at Tucker Max's house one January a few years ago when something occurred to me about his then on-and-off-again bestseller. "Hey Tucker, did you notice your book made the New York Times list in 2006, 2007, and 2008?" (Meaning the book had appeared on the list at least once in all three years, not continuously.) So I typed it up, sourced it, and added it to Wikipedia, delineating each year.* Not long after I posted it, a journalist cribbed my "research" and did us the big favor of having poor reading comprehension. He wrote: "Tucker Max's book has spent over 3 years on the New York Times Bestseller List." Then we took this and doubled up our citation on Wikipedia to use this new, more generous interpretation."

Publicists and lobby groups organize their manipulation of Wikipedia very carefully, using it to pump information up the chain, helped along by lazy, willing and/or corrupt journalists.

Book extract from "Trust Me I'm Lying", written by Ryan Holiday:

Wikipedia acts as a certifier of basic information for many people, including reporters. Even a subtle influence over the way that Wikipedia frames an issue—whether criminal charges, a controversial campaign, a lawsuit, or even a critical reception—can have a major impact on the way bloggers write about it. It is the difference between "So-and-so released their second album in 2011" and "So-and-so's first album was followed by the multiplatinum and critically lauded hit ..." You change the descriptors on Wikipedia and reporters and readers change their descriptors down the road. A complete overhaul of one high-profile starlet's Wikipedia page was once followed less than a week later by a six-page spread in a big tabloid that so obviously used our positive and flattering language from Wikipedia that I was almost scared it would be its own scandal. It's why you have to control your page. Or you risk putting yourself in the awkward position a friend found himself in when profiled by a reporter at a national newspaper, who asked: "So, according to Wikipedia you're a failed screenwriter. Is that true?"
"On occasion I have instructed a client to say something in an interview, knowing that once it is covered we can insert it into Wikipedia, and it will become part of the standard media narrative about them. We seek out interviews in order to advance certain "facts," and then we make them doubly real by citing them on Wikipedia."

These extracts are from publicist Ryan Holiday’s book titled ‘Trust Me I’m Lying‘.