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Friday, August 9, 2013

US Military Caught Manipulating Social Media, Mass Fake Accounts

by Anthony Gucciardi
August 9th, 2013

It has been common knowledge to anyone paying attention within the alternative news community for years, but once again the media is now admitting that the US military and intelligence agencies are indeed running massive propaganda campaigns that cover a vast array of online networks. 

US military soldier on social media.
How many times now has such ‘conspiracy nonsense’ now been reported years later by the mega media as undeniable fact? In the case of the US intelligence propaganda machine that even the New York Times has covered in an article entitled ‘The Real War on Reality‘, we are seeing just that. The New York Times report goes on to detail information uncovered from hacked data regarding the military operation to stage ‘grassroots’ responses and organizations in order to deceive via psyop.  Professor of philosophy Peter Ludlow writes for the Times:

“The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support.  The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm.”

This cyber warfare is clearly not just in the capacity of ‘improving international reputation’ as military commanders are claiming on record (just like there is ‘no such thing’ as domestic spying and it’s only for terrorists). Instead, we’re talking about running a major network of computers that are constantly running code specifically written to post to social media and news comment pages. Something that was revealed all the way back in 2011 by RawStory and brushed off in the name of national security by the military.

Intelligence Agencies Running Mass Number of Propaganda Accounts

And remember, this is the same military that says political activists are terrorists and need to be targeted. At the highest levels, combating ‘terrorism’ simply means going after law-abiding citizens and journalists — especially so-called ‘leakers’. With propaganda scripts that run 24/7 and are intended to discredit people like Edward Snowden, top level intelligence agencies are teaming up with the military to combat whistleblowers through such phony means.

An excerpt from a particularly concerning summary of a recent German report on how political activists are targeted reads:

“The targets of these attacks are scientists… It does not stop at skirmishes in the scientific community. Hackers regularly target various web pages. Evaluations of IP log files show that not only Monsanto visits the pages regularly, but also various organizations of the U.S. government, including the military. These include the Navy Network Information Center, the Federal Aviation Administration and the United States Army Intelligence Center, an institution of the US Army, which trains soldiers with information gathering.”

Now admittedly the news is not getting nearly as much coverage as it should, especially when considering it highlights two essential points:

1. This means that the United States military and intelligence communities are highly afraid of alternative networks and the overall public perception when it comes to the United States government and the state of the corrupt political mafia at large.

2. This also means that the United States military and intelligence agencies are losing the informational battle, and the only way they can even fight back is to run a conglomerate of fake accounts attacking legitimate users and journalists. You know, the terrorists that dare to question anything.

Social media pages, comment systems on top news websites, and various other areas online are the targets of a pinpointed ‘cyber psyop’ by a government that simply can’t answer real questions. And instead of actually doing anything about the outrage, disinformation campaigns are of utmost priority.