You Are Not Crazy. Google, Facebook, and Twitter Are Stealing Your Memory and Rewriting History
The good news is that you can beat their algorithms, and recover your intelligence and sanity, by "hacking" social media and your own perceptions.
As a university education professor and teacher educator, I taught a section on critical media literacy. This was in the late 1990’s and early early 2000’s when the internet was cranking up. Facebook (created 2003/2004) had not yet been founded. Twitter (created 2006) was still a twinkle in someone’s eyes. Even Google (created in 1998 and publicly offered in 2004) was just getting going. However, even then, corporate propaganda and and the manipulation of consumer and citizen perception was very much a multi-billion-dollar business, and schools rarely if ever offered any protection against well-funded, well-coordinated exploitation of the human heart and mind.
The education of kids, being universal and required, has always been the bull’s eye of any attempt to “brand” a particular product, lifestyle, or idea. Conventional corporate wisdom, deems that if you can get a kid attached to your product (think “Ronald McDonald”) and establish warm feelings and behaviors early on, then you have them for life.
Literate education means kids are prepared to resist this onslaught and not be offered up as a sacrifice. I recognized this gravity when I had my student-teachers do popular culture projects where they would analyze influential images and messages sent to children through media. Once exposed and critically oriented, I encouraged teachers to develop practices and exercises (like Jane Elliot’s famous “blue eyes, brown eyes” experiment on prejudice) to create awareness and positive alternatives that explicitly REBEL AGAINST unhealthy or inhumane “norms”.
From G.I. Joes, to Barbie dolls, to World Wrestling Entertainment. to car commercials that guarantee happiness and freedom on the open road, profit-driven markets deliberately shape not only perceptions about what we want, but indeed, shape our very perceptions and ideas about THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS. And this is where the game can get perilous for democracy, community, and individual well-being.
If we make “choices” we THINK are ours, but that end up being more about subconscious programming, then they are NOT really choices at all, are they? We are, simply put, being used.
Profit-driven and power-driven “markets” (whether they are industries or political parties or some other) are not interested in you making critically-minded, informed, independent decisions. They need the opposite: gullible, biased, conditioned “choices” that end up in a predictable outcome that benefits their power and pocket book (usually at the expense of yours). This includes the food industry’s push toward junk food, the Big Medical’s and Big Pharma’s sick care complex, and Big Insurance’s fear-extorted explosions in premium prices. This includes political parties that stoke fear about the other side and promise paradise for yours, while never seeming to deliver real prosperity for any side but their own.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter are not information or education platforms (not even Google Classroom). They are DATA-MARKETING ENGINES. As with McDonald’s and political parties, these mechanized engines will always promote the short-term, addictive response to their products and advertisers over the long-term healthy use and negotiation of their technologies.
Their algorithms reinforce prejudice, division, censorship, and most importantly PREFERENCE precisely because these things increase “engagement” (forget that it’s unhealthy engagement, kind of like eating your third cheeseburger in a row) and MAKES YOU THINK you are making your own choices according to your own likes and dislikes. “Preference” creates an illusion that you are simply finding what you want, even though your data is being used to flood your field with related “likes” that may cause you to buy some product or some idea or some political candidate.
Why do we fall for media manipulation of our perceptions, over and over again?
The key is this. Our brains cannot distinguish well between what we imagine, what we intend, what we identify with, what we desire to believe, versus what actually HAPPENS according to verifiable, concrete reality. In addition, we tend to take something someone says to us as true. If someone can make us feel something deeply and powerfully, repeat something to us or have us engage in certain repeated behaviors, and reinforce what we want to believe (over what is actually happening) our brains will register these imaginary realities as a certain kind of self-evident truth. This is mainly a subconscious process.
So we have to be able to CONSCIOUSLY catch ourselves and one another (as well as the manipulators) in the act of meaning-making and question what intentions, effects, perceptions, and motivations surround this. This is is a “meta” skill— thinking about how we think, and learning about how we learn.
Too often we grant authority to a celebrity or an expert who does not deserve it, because we feel some sense of desire to be close to them or to relieve ourselves from choice and responsibility. Here is a clear and healthier alternative: Authority is to be given to those who actually turn out to be right, rather than claiming to be right. If you are an expert and wrong, you have no authority. If you are a layperson and right, you have authority. Outcome NOT input, is the arbiter of truth.
Effect NOT intention is the confirmer of not only reality and authority, but also history and memory. We forget this clear simple fact in an increasingly virtualized world where search engine results black out “misinformation” which is actually true around Covid-19 cased, treatment, and vaccines (i.e. that ivermectin is dangerous and ineffective when the opposite has proven to be true), and then promote as “true” (with unqualified “fact-checkers”) those things that have been shown to be false by peer-reviewed scientific papers (i.e. the alleged effectiveness of masks).
But what happens if we can GET BEHIND THE CURTAINS of these motivated attempts to rewrite and distort reality? How can we help teachers and parent turn commercials, TV shows, and other pop culture artifacts from consumerist propaganda into a learning opportunity that empowers aware citizens?
How do we effectively contend with manipulation of choice and perception in today’s reality of algorithms, Big Data, monopolization of media, etc. hitting us from all sides.
It certainly doesn’t look like a fair fight!
The battle may be unbalanced but there are notable vulnerabilities in this MONOLITHIC push. This gaping top-down maw of “more, more, more” can be met with grassroots-up “good, better, best.”
What are some good examples and practices that might help us develop these distinctions and skills?
Here are 6 suggestions:
Keep your eyes on the prize— stable memory and persistent truth: The gem of knowledge is fully-considered, inclusive, referenced, and coherent, “long-haul” truth that remains in memory and can be built upon or altered through intelligent re-consideration. This cannot happen if we simply allow our world to be bombarded with interjections of crises that erase our ability to remember, organize thought, or reflect, think, and act deeply. We need to take time to prioritize the foundational “important” over the sensationalized, immediate “urgent.” How?
Take regular “news fasts” and engage in “healthy” information as you would healthy food. Much of this healthy, verified, well-composed information can be found by reliable, smart writers right here on Substack.
Unplug from overtly manipulative and censoring sources of news like Facebook and Twitter. Recontact real wisdom like the amazing complexity and wisdom of Mother Nature.
Use alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo in place of Google.
Dig deeper and develop a nose for bulls—t: In an amazingly simple but effective manipulation, the film The Creepy Line, showed how Google was able to massively sway voter perceptions of competing political candidates simply by stacking search results on the initial search page to favor one candidate over another. People simply glanced at the page, gathered a general impression of candidates, and then used this two-second “research” to form an opinion or preference. Given the mathematics around this bias, the film speculated that Hillary Clinton might have lost the popular vote as well as the Electoral College if the search results had not been stacked in her favor.
This one is pretty simple: Do not take split-second impressions to make significant decisions. ‘
Knowing that search results are arranged more and more according to paid rankings and ads, take the time to scroll down to get CONTRASTING views from articulate sources that use actual data and give clear policy differences, etc. so you can both expand your knowledge and make a more informed, nuanced decision.
If something smells like manipulation or seems too enthusiastic or repetitive (i.e. fake ads on Amazon) trust your deeper BS meter, and look to sources that require authentic effort and analysis.
Go incognito and/or use tracker-free, blocker browsers: When you allow yourself to be tracked, you unwittingly carry a massive baggage of so-called “preferences” around with you. If any search engine or website can identify “you” by your log-in, your IP address, or some other marker, you will be mercilessly profiled, stereotyped, and targeted according to tens of thousands of bits of information you may have unknowingly provided. This is damning especially if you want to explore new and different things, including even products, to say nothing of ideas, educational videos, or possible travel destinations. You’ve probably seen this ridiculous tendency when you purchase something and then get all kinds of ads popping up trying to sell you the very thing you just purchased!
I found that if I use the New Private Window on Safari I don’t feel as weighed down and “catered” to in ways I don’t want. (I don’t really trust the Incognito mode on Chrome— but it does turn up different search results.)
I’ve taken to using Brave Browser, which blocks a lot of the tracking, and it seems to improve my functionality, because not so much of my computer’s processing power is being used to stoke massive, garish ads and data crunching behind the scenes.
Paying for a VPN (or virtual private network) for your computer is generally inexpensive and puts a buffer zone around you and access to your data.
Read the small print, be patient enough to discern and look beyond, be specific: I was astounded to find that Google’s search engine Chrome had truncated the search hits for my name from 23 pages to 10. When I got to the end of the 10th page, there was a barely noticeable option at the bottom to click on an expanded search, which then turned up 29 pages. I noticed two things: 1) Google only allows 29 pages max (about 300 top “hits”), even if you have thousands of hits more, and 2) Google does NOT select the most popular or well-read of my articles, but those again that have potential to funnel audiences and “sell” engagement or traffic.
Don’t stop at results of the first search page. Go to the next search page and the next. If you detect bias, where all the suggestions seem to support a single view, use the tips below.
Know that you will not necessarily be getting the most popular or best works under your search terms, but rather those that again “sell” you or sell and idea or product to you. Remember: The internet is no longer about informing, but rather selling. Long thoughtful reads don’t boost engagement and result in “actions” like “click-through rates.”
Have a list of works you want to find, and piggy back on good search hits by re-typing key words in “ “ from that hit. The more specific the better, otherwise you will get generic, paid, boosted and/or propaganda sites.
Be specific: If you type in “ivermectin” to a search engine you will get endless propaganda and ads against ivermectin use, but if you type in “latest studies show ivermectin is effective”, you will find the actual scientific papers that support ivermectin and other discussion that would have been buried with a general searches. They are assuming you are ignorant and pliable with general terms. With specific terms you direct the traffic to where YOU want to go.
Find clever or satirical ways to use language and/or code words to circumvent censorship: When the Biden administration started coordinating with Big Pharma and colluding with Big Tech to censor 1) factual criticism of vaccines and masks, 2) support for natural immunity, and 3) scientifically proven alternative therapies, many citizens started to use code words for controversial terms that would be picked up by algorithms and result in a “strike” against your YouTube channel. Even the term “natural immunity” itself was a cause to be banned, even though there was nothing against it in the “medical misinformation” policy at the time. I had four of my videos banned (3 of them RETROACTIVELY), including one that mentioned “vaccine failures” in the title (even though that exact term was used by the CDC), and this “coincidentally” happened right after the CEO of Pfizer met with Joe Biden. (There was also proof of communications directly between White House staff and YouTube leveraging censorship).
I learned that titling your videos in ways that APPEAR to be pro-corporate but that really level a critique can be helpful. One of my non-censored videos read: “You Call This Vaccine Success?” The mindless algorithms assumed I was a vaccine advocate because it said “vaccine success”, and I was able to get away with it.
Posing questions, rather than making out-and-out statements also helps. It says that you are inquiring as to the status of something rather than “peddling” an answer. You can couch statements as questions to lower the “misinformation” alert.
Find intentional online (and real) communities of real people who can respect and embrace different points of view and don’t play for an identity politics “team”. I am amazed that a rather vibrant and modest (about 200 member) community we established called Our Neighborhood Earth (ONE) on the Mighty Networks platform was able to host a very supportive community of people spiritually, politically, and metaphysically open while still be open to our various choices— no trolling over masks, vaccine, political ideology, but rather a real curiosity about each other and a desire to learn. That is how it should be when the intention AND EFFECT is to connect with and honor others rather than use them.
It does seem like much of this top-down manipulation is coming to resistance and rejection. The division and manipulation of major players, the dominance of billionaires in public discourse and information, the lack of intimacy and good faith, has actually fostered unlikely alliances, which I will talk about in later essays. I have been surprised by the successful collaborations I have made across cultural and political ideologies against the oppressive “big-bully” pressure from above. I will be doing a couple more essays on new-found respect and connections between progressives, libertarians, conservatives, and liberals in my community. We are actually finding reality-based ways to embrace each other’s values and find common-ground. We both have been oppressed by our respective former “allegiances” and now we are finding a higher calling and connection in one another.
May this continue and bring good things!
Thanks to you Zeus! They have been doing this for the last decade and longer - that is what these platforms were designed to do! All brought to you by the "intelligence" agencies that we pay taxes for. I encourage everyone to get off these platforms and start living with limited use of screens, "smart" phones and all these systems designed to mind control and socially engineer humanity and begin connecting to others from your HEART, even writing letters and actually speaking to them instead of all these unregulated systems that take data ( your whole on-line life!) and use AI to re-program the world.
The leap from homo sapiens to homo sapiens sapiens is the ability to question how we think. Assuming everyone here is HSS then this is a must read article to take back our HSS place as critical thinkers in the world! We are being used and manipulated at virtually all levels of life and have passively agreed through pure exhaustion and data overload. Your 6 points to critical literacy are a perfect take away.
Also, I was thinking it might be a fun family experiment to record shows, particularly news, and watch only the commercials, breaking down the implications of each ad’s placement in a given program to help the kids gain power and media literacy.
We’ll done!