Have you ever chanced upon a poster in a forum or social media outlet whose opinions and public outlash seemed more like agenda based propaganda rather than honest civil discourse? According to insider testimonies and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, we now know that paid government “trolls” are carrying out “Psyops” on the public to push certain political agendas forward and to quash the legitimacy of certain suppressed information.
A compartmentalized group exists in the UK known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) This group is a specialized unit within the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). If it wasn’t for Edward Snowden, we probably still would never have heard of them. This particular specialized unit is engaged in some very “questionable” online activities.
An excerpt on a recent piece from media outlet The Intercept:
Though its existence was secret until last year, JTRIG quickly developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the unit had engaged in “dirty tricks” like deploying sexual “honey traps” designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down Internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda on to social networks and generally warping discourse online.”
We are made to believe that JTRIG only uses these techniques to go after the “bad guys” however it would appear that their idea of just who exactly these “bad guys” are may be very broad and very biased. When conducting operations against “extremists”, psychology-based influence techniques are among the tools that JTRIG uses to combat them online.
The following comes from one of the documents that was posted by Greenwald and Fishman in the The Intercept…
Put simply, these groups are trying to condition people's thinking to fit whatever agenda they are told to promote. Another document posted by Greenwald and Fishman…
Is it safe to say that some of the people that we may be interacting with on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are actually paid government agents that are purposely trying to feed us propaganda and misinformation? In Canada it has been publically admitted that the Government uses paid trolls to warp internet discourse. According to publication Natural News…
“You’ve probably run into them before — those seemingly random antagonizers who always end up diverting the conversation in an online chat room or article comment section away from the issue at hand, and towards a much different agenda. Hot-button issues like illegal immigration, the two-party political system, the “war on terror” and even alternative medicine are among the most common targets of such attackers, known as internet “trolls” or “shills,” who in many cases are nothing more than paid lackeys hired by the federal government and other international organizations to sway and ultimately control public opinion.”
“Several years ago, Canada’s CTV News aired a short segment about how its own government had been exposed for hiring secret agents to monitor social media and track online conversations, as well as the activities of certain dissenting individuals. This report, which in obvious whitewashing language referred to such activities as the government simply “weighing in and correcting” allegedly false information posted online, basically admitted that the Canadian government had assumed the role of secret online police.”
Even in the USA Gov Trolls have been caught manipulating polls, discourse on websites such as reddit and editing information on wikipedia continuously to leave out certain elements and to embellish others. Does it seem legitimate to you that government groups should be interacting this way with you and your loved ones? If this is truly happening we must start becoming our own human lie detectors and learn how to properly vet the information that is being thrust at us by stranger than strangers on the whimsical, world wide web.
