Software bought by spy agencies, political parties and corporations, can control 30,000 fake profiles at once

MediaTricks | March 23, 2023

Fake protests were also organized, so they could be broadcast on social media using the bot software, to fool people into thinking they were genuine grassroots protest movements.

Apple rejected YouTube-competitor Odysee from the App Store because a video had pepe the frog as a thumbnail — and because Odysee refused to filter Covid videos out of search results

MediaTricks | March 23, 2023

The Apple censorship team once rejected the Odysee app from the Apple App Store because of videos containing images of Pepe the Frog. Apple made no such demands of Odysee’s competitor, Google’s YouTube.

Apple also demanded Covid-related terms be filtered out of Odysee search results.

Screenshot of a LBRY tweet, November 28th 2022: During Covid, Apple demanded our apps filter some search terms from being returned. If we did not filter the terms, our apps would not be allowed in the store.

Apple may make good products, but they have been opposed to free speech for some time. Apple disallowed almost anything related to Covid, especially vaccines or human origins of the virus. We had to build a list of over 20 terms to not show results for, only on Apple devices. Apple also later rejected us because users included Pepe images in videos.

The email Apple sent Odysee rejecting their app because of a user’s frog image:

Email from Apple App Store to LBRY about banning the LBRY app:

Regarding 1.1, we continue to find that your app or metadata includes content that some users may find upsetting, offensive, or otherwise objectionable. Specifically, Pepe the Frog. To resolve this issue, it would be appropriate to remove all potentially objectionable content from your app and metadata and submit your revised binary for review. We look forward to reviewing your resubmitted app. Best regards, App Store Review

These restrictionist media and surveillance firms like Apple and Google all work to protect each other, and to protect the corrupt establishment. They will do anything to prevent new competitors from expanding freedom of expression, outside of the control of the Big Tech oligarchs. They act exactly like a protectionist cartel; a criminal conspiracy.

Combined, Apple and Google control 98% of the mobile marketplace.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says there were “world events” that the company “didn’t make public”

MediaTricks | December 8, 2022

While discussing Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter:

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone tweet thread:

Biz Stone tweeted: He’s not a serious person. He does things for sport that have serious consequences for real people. This is an open, global service. US politics is not much of Twitter. (K-pop might be bigger.) Also, in other places lives are at stake.

Jason Goldman replies: This is the most painful part and where I get worked up. Honestly if the thing just died in a fire so be it. Sites die. But he’s acting with such a reckless and incurious disregard to the consequences of his actions. Because he’s never had to deal with any.

Biz Stone replies to Goldman: It’s heartbreaking. All the world events we didn’t make public to protect brave people. Also, on the Trump poll, “The people have spoken!” How many Russians voted? It’s global. That’s not what we made it for…Chief. Oy.

Stone worked at Twitter from its founding in 2006 until 2012, and he re-joined the company in 2017.

Many people have asked Stone what world events they buried, but he has ignored all questions.

What have they been hiding? It sure sounds like a CIA thing.

^{_{Source: The tweet (archive)}}

Researchers discover Google sends fewer ‘Go Vote’ reminders to conservatives than to liberals and centrists in swing states, secretly shifting millions of undecided votes leftward

MediaTricks | November 24, 2022

See more posts from this researcher: Dr Robert Epstein

The researcher is a Democrat, a Hillary voter, and he has had enough of Big Tech monopolies manipulating the results of elections.

Article screenshot from The Epoch Times: "How Google Stopped the Red Wave." Google and other tech companies want you obsessing about conspiracy theories so you won’t look at how they tampered with the 2022 midterm elections. By Robert Epstein.

Based on my team’s research, Google, and to a lesser extent, Facebook and other tech monopolies, not only took steps to shift millions of votes to Democrats in the midterms, but they are using their influence to spread rumors and conspiracy theories to make sure people look everywhere for explanations—except at them.

Google isn’t the only culprit, but since they’re the biggest, most aggressive, and most arrogant culprit, I’ll focus on them in this article. Over a period of months, Google nudged undecided voters toward voting blue by showing people politically biased content in their search engine, suppressing content they didn’t want people to see, recommending left-leaning videos on YouTube (pdf) (which Google owns), allegedly sending tens of millions of emails to people’s spam boxes, and sending go-vote reminders on their home page mainly to liberal and moderate voters.

I know Google did these things (and more!) because, in 2022, my team and I were doing to them exactly what they do to us and our kids 24/7: We were monitoring the politically related content that Google and other tech companies were showing to actual voters—our politically diverse panel of 2,742 “field agents,” who were located mainly in swing states.

In particular, we were tracking what Google employees call “ephemeral experiences”—content that appears briefly, affects people, and then disappears. In 2018, in emails that leaked from the company, Googlers were discussing how they might use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban. They know how powerful ephemeral experiences can be. That’s one of the most closely held secrets of Google’s management.

But we were capturing, aggregating, and analyzing the content that Google and other companies were sending to the computers of our field agents, so we could accurately estimate how many go-vote reminders Google was sending to liberals, moderates, and conservatives. In all, in the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterms, we preserved more than 2.5 million of those persuasive ephemeral experiences.
When we used similar methods to monitor content being sent by tech companies to voters before the 2020 presidential election, we found that Google was sending fewer go-vote reminders to conservatives than to moderates and liberals. Targeted messaging of this sort is a blatant manipulation that can, on Election Day in a national election in the United States, generate 450,000 extra votes for the favored candidate.

In 2020, we reported our findings to members of Congress, and on Nov. 5, 2020, three U.S. senators sent an intimidating letter (pdf) to the CEO of Google that summarized our data. As a result, Google turned off its manipulations. In the Georgia Senate runoffs that followed the presidential election, no one received a go-vote reminder from Google.

But we weren’t so lucky this time around. The article I published just before the election had no effect on Google, and this year, we couldn’t find a member of Congress to send a warning letter, although we came close.

As a result, Google search results remained politically biased on Election Day, and so did the up-next recommendations on YouTube. Google also sent out targeted go-vote reminders in most swing states.

Source: https://archive.ph/mQ9kp

The Persuasive Power of Dissenting Comments

MediaTricks | November 7, 2022

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.

How Associated Press Pushes a Narrative To The Entire Media

MediaTricks | August 8, 2022

When the Associated Press pushes their propaganda, it spreads to the entire ecosystem:

Outlets everywhere reprint or slightly reword AP articles day after day:

One writer with one editor, and the story is republished across the entire digital media.

Bill Gates says he’s building a 3000-person team to spread his propaganda on Social Media

MediaTricks | May 7, 2022

Bill Gates said he plans to set up a 3,000-person social media unit to help propagate accurate vaccine information in the future. He stressed that “good messages” need to be carried forward by people of trust in the community, such as political and ethnic leaders.

^{Source: CNBC reporting his Wall Street Journal interview}

Publicists buy fake web traffic to pump up the stats of any publicity the media gives their clients

MediaTricks | March 23, 2022

Publicist Ryan Holiday—writing in his book Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator—shares another one of the industry’s sneaky publicity tricks:

Buying followers is cheaper than you think

MediaTricks | March 9, 2022

Bywex, a clickfarm selling fake Twitter followers.

- Twitter followers.
- Twitter Likes.
- Twitter Retweets.
- Twitter Views.
- Twitter Impressions.
- Twitter Live Video Views.
- Twitter Poll Votes.

You can even buy fake YouTube livestream viewers, and many other things.

Bywex, clickfarm selling fake YouTube viewers.

- YouTube Live Views - Pre-Premiere Waiting Viewers Instant.
- YouTube Live Views - Active Live Stream Views - Monetizable.

You can see the other Scam Tricks they sell here:
https://smm.bywex.com/services

How Publicists Manipulate Journalists to Control Wikipedia

MediaTricks | March 5, 2022

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.

"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‘.