Facebook's Infamous Psychological Experiments Are Connected To The Department of Defense

a reply to: Chrisfishenstein

Exactly what I just said!
Some don't know or have time to fiddle around with privacy settings. The majority never read the terms they agree to when signing up.

You can connect the dots so fast, get their family, friends, twitter accounts of all.

Some I've seen say married to, or girlfriend of. Mother, sister, etc.

Doesnt Facebook have the facial recognition feature now? If you happen to be included in a photo, it gets tagged. When it was introduced I think it was a default setting you had to manually change to disable your photos from being tagged.

a reply to: sixandone

No surprise there.

Facebook saves the government billions in spying expenditure. They us doing their job for them.

a reply to: WhiteAlice

My OP was perhaps a little misleading, there is no definitive proof that this exact study was funded directly by the Minverva Initiative. Cant prove that without following the money. However, there are a lot of fishy connections between the Minverva Initiative and Jeff Hancock who headed up the Facebook study. You can read more about said connections in this article.

Fools. Social networks enable mass think. With a networked world, people are able to cross compare information from
around the network and tease out the truth of a situation. Before social networks, the world was heavily compartmentalized because people in diverse areas and diverse knowledge sets were unable to share information.
Now its easy to ferret out the politician who's lying to everyone. Corruption is easily exposed, lies fall apart like a house of cards. The old ways of lying to folks to hide the truth to hold onto power are quickly falling apart. They need a police state to maintain their status quo, which ain't going to happen.

Someone, I don't care who, needs to upend the next election with social networking, and I mean in a huge way.

originally posted by: sixandone
a reply to: WhiteAlice

My OP was perhaps a little misleading, there is no definitive proof that this exact study was funded directly by the Minverva Initiative. Cant prove that without following the money. However, there are a lot of fishy connections between the Minverva Initiative and Jeff Hancock who headed up the Facebook study. You can read more about said connections in this article.

The study that I read made no mention of military anything and the OP did not give the Cornell University press release. The fact that Hancock was awarded a Minerva funding award in 2009 for a different research set could also explain the error on the University press release. People do make mistakes and somebody could have provided information poorly. The Cornell Chronicle isn't the NY Times. it's a college paper with student journalists. In this case, the research paper for the Minerva Initiative is actually part of this one of which the project site is showing the way the output of the research--the outright processing of discourse and infectiousness.

Social language processing: A framework for analyzing the communication of terrorists and authoritarian regimes


I laughed a little bit at the Zerohedge article on it because the 2009 research that Hancock did on discourse in authoritarian regimes gets described as "that models the spread of beliefs and disease." Social contagion uses the same language as any other kind of contagion be it viral or bacterial. A contagion is an infectious disease but Hancock's work isn't about the biological kind but the social kind.

The thing is that these are still two different research papers. The one funded by Minerva was awarded in 2009 and published in 2010. The Facebook study occurred a few years later.

The source of the claim that the actual abstract had stated that it was funded by the Army Research Office is not quite telling an up and up story. When I looked at it the other day, there was zero mention of the military and already being aware of Minerva, I looked. Nothing. Today, the study does state that a correction has been published. What's the correction then?

A correction about one of the authors of the study as you can see for yourself here:

www.pnas.org...

You can look at my posting history and pretty much figure that I would love to find a smoking gun that would indicate that the military or any other governmental entity was attempting to utilize psychological manipulation for whatever reason. I'd love it. This isn't it. Jeffrey Hancock is a professor of Communications and Information Science at one of our top universities. He's going to have a myriad set of funding sources for differing subjects. In the case of Minerva research so far all I've seen have been 1. foreign and/or 2. terrorists being the targets of research so if they were doing domestic research, then they covered their tracks very well.

guys, don't act like paranoid or something.

Behave like a "normal" person on facebook and they'll leave you alone...

...But stop using facebook, or delete all your pictures, or change to a fictitious address, then someone might just knock at your door!

I'm an extremely light facebook user ever since so if I decided to stop using facebook, probably no one will ever notice... But if you're a heavy user then you stop suddenly, you might tip some alarms and whistles!

If anyone wanted to delete their accounts or delete their pics or change to a wrong address, the NSA scandal would have been your best opportunity...

Wait for another facebook scandal before you do anything..

...And guess what, this is probably a good time to do it.

everything is 'the shop'

who's ever read 1984 or brave new world? you'b be familiar with something like 'the ministry of food' or whatever, right?

they think by slapping the words "jamie oliver" in front of it we won't notice

everything is 'the shop'

originally posted by: sixandone

The premise behind Minerva is simple: study how violent political overthrow, aka mass civil breakdown, happens in the day and age of social networks, and be prepared to counteract it - by "targeting peaceful activities and protest movements" - when it finally reaches US shores

This is interesting. It makes me wonder if they really were involved in the set-up of the Arab Spring uprisings? I mean, I thought they were but this makes me think they were even more-so now.

Lastly, "when it finally reaches US shores"??? That's not if, but when!

a reply to: UNIT76

Scary to think that children's lunches are inspected and 'unhealthy' food is thrown out at some schools.

Few realize one of the goals and accomplishments of the DARE program was to get children to 'narc' on their parents.

Look at how many people get arrested over stupid confessions and evidence of criminal activity the post, the FB experiment is working.

a reply to: sixandone

For me, this didn't come as a surprise at all. The problem with all things online is eventually, someone is going to try to exploit the research for one reason or another.

Now, what I'm wondering is if future experiments are in place - such as rewriting posts made in the past, and seeing if we, the users, caught the differences (those who control the past...).

PS: If anyone associated with facebook's company is reading this, next time you want to run a social experiment, ask people if they want to participate like any other non-corrupt company would do . Because now, I'm just going to post wacky content, change around a couple fields, and mess with my statuses to nullify my results from any potential surveys. Any bets how long before I'm on the infamous black list?

-fossilera

a reply to: violet

Another feature of Facebook. Now they have a huge database of faces and names.

Obviously they have a facial recognition.

There is a huge amount of information that the masses have volunteered for free. This can be used for a variety of reasons. Marketing of course is a popular one. They also have the ability to control the type of information a person is exposed to, especially if their internet experience is limited to FB and other social media geared services.

It has been speculated that this is playing a role in the polarization of ideals the US is experiencing.

originally posted by: jrod
a reply to: violet

Another feature of Facebook. Now they have a huge database of faces and names.

Obviously they have a facial recognition.

I'm sure it can be surprisingly accurate at times but I'm equally sure it can also be wildly inaccurate quite often, as most "AI" types of things are. Try taking a thousand photos with a point and shoot camera set to auto for an example of this. Computers are usually quite good at things that are precise and don't change. Like a word. They kind of suck at things that look different from different angles, like a face. Or even depending on the lighting, the shadows and so forth.

Even humans can be fooled (or could be if our thinking was as cold and calculating as that of a computer). People often strongly resemble someone else. If we didn't understand this, we might completely confuse one person for another.

a reply to: BrianFlanders

You would be surprised how good the algorithms for facial recognition are, scary accurate, not vulnerable to being 'fooled' as you mentioned. Our face is just one of many way's to fingerprint our identity.

Mornin',

Lemme get this straight.
You're all suprised by this little "revelation"?
You were all warned and the warning was ignored like a homeless person.
You all lowjacked yourselves anyways.
Now, you're upset about it?
The problem is you're all now addicted to this technology and won't part with it or anything connected to it.
You'll all whinge and moan about how it's unfair but at the end of the day?
You'll keep using it anyways because you've all been convinced that you can't live without it.
Manipulated by your own desires like a trained seal.
I can only hope some of you heed this wake up call and begin to abandon this Orwellian dream...re: nightmare.

-Peace-

a reply to: sixandone

I honestly don’t feel comfortable using Facebook anymore if it’s going to be used as a tool for social control.

It's no different than everything else.
TV, radio, etc, etc, etc.

a reply to: sixandone

Great find, great links. Especially this (secondary) link from last year:

Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks

Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealand court records suggest that data harvested by the NSA's Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

a reply to: WhiteAlice

The correction, or admission of a correction, can be found at the bottom of this page.

Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that the study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office. In fact, the study received no external funding.

If you're looking for definitive proof of the military and government attempting to utilize psychological manipulation you should look into the MKUltra project.

originally posted by: sixandone
a reply to: WhiteAlice

The correction, or admission of a correction, can be found at the bottom of this page.

Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that the study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office. In fact, the study received no external funding.

If you're looking for definitive proof of the military and government attempting to utilize psychological manipulation you should look into the MKUltra project.

Which I already mentioned and referenced as the Cornell Chronicle is meant to be an in-house campus paper. It's not the NY Times or the Washington Post where they are going to drill over every word. It's just a campus paper meant for faculty and staff and, as such, can be prone to making a mistake here and there.

ecommons.cornell.edu...

originally posted by: jrod
a reply to: violet

It has been speculated that this is playing a role in the polarization of ideals the US is experiencing.

Oh, and by the way, freedom is what causes polarization. Who woulda thunk that people who have a right to an opinion would actually have one that is different?

It's bizarre that many people actually believe this isn't supposed to happen.