I have had a Facebook account since 2009 and later I created a group with the name MPSYM, to share views on psychology.
My accounts on Facebook, including MPSYM, have been blocked for about six months, every year, since 2018. According to Facebook I violated their Community Standards.
I don’t trust and believe their “Independent Fact-checker” and I certainly resent their intrusion, control and constraint on my topics and views. For these reasons I have deleted my Facebook account and have no longer access to the MPSYM group too. I am sorry and sad for this as, over the years, several followers found the content of the posts informative and beneficial.
On a psychology note, I feel that psychologists are ignoring what really have been major experiments in the last 90 years.
How can we ignore the manipulation and mind control experiments that have taken place on many occasions in history? An article from the “Express” states – “Government accused of using Covid fear tactics to inflate anxiety levels of British public. The government has been accused of using covert strategies to keep people in a perpetual state of heightened fear to make them obey Covid-19 restrictions. A group of 47 psychologists has claimed this amounts to a strategic decision “to inflate the fear levels of the British public”, which it states is “ethically murky” and has left people too afraid to leave their homes for medical appointments. Led by former NHS consultant psychologist Dr Gary Sidley, the experts have written to the British Psychological Society (BPS) claiming the strategy is “morally questionable.”
PSYOPs are “planned operations that convey selected information and indicators to target audiences (“TAs”) to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behaviour of groups, and individuals.” PSYOPs are designed “to create emotions, attitudes, or desired behaviour that support the achievement of (political) objectives.”
The success of PSYOPS depends on some key factors. First is motivation. If the public can be made to feel that the leader’s ‘motivation’ is the same as that of themselves, the key to success is in the leader’s pocket. (Boris and Prince Philip “had Covid”). Second is ‘awe and shock’. The action must come without any notice whatsoever to create shock and awe for the leader in the public mind. Third, it must set forth a process of ‘transference’. The process of transference begins to take shape in a make-belief ‘therapeutic setting’ between the leader and the public and the process embraces much more as it progresses over time in a non-linear trajectory to the next operation. Fourth, the operation should capture the ‘hearts and minds’ of the public.
To do this, it employs media to influence the emotions or behaviour of the public. It ‘weaponises‘ information through embedded journalists, co-opted TV anchors (these used in Hypnosis and by Mentalists), compromised news agencies and especially social media.
Humans carry flaws in deciding what is or is not real. The internet and other technologies have made it easier to weaponize and exploit these flaws. And artificial intelligence will likely be used to exploit these weaknesses at an unprecedented scale, speed, and level of effectiveness. [Source: Rand corporation]. Social scientists, including psychologists, are involved in various aspects of PSYOP–from helping with strategic planning and threat analysis to selecting PSYOP personnel.
But, experts say, psychology needs to play an even greater role in making these operations more effective. In fact, that’s a major goal of Scott Gerwehr, an analyst at Rand, a public policy think tank, and a psychology PhD candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Lockdown is the world’s biggest psychological experiment – and we will pay the price [Source: World Economic Forum, 9/04/2020]. They often use the word – experiment.
Currently, an estimated 2.6 billion people – one-third of the world’s population – is living under some kind of lockdown or quarantine. This is arguably the largest psychological experiment ever conducted.
The media successfully stoked fear with a ceaseless barrage of phony death tolls, misleading spiky graphs, and unrepresentative images of morgue trucks and people hooked to respirators.
A fearful, passive public swallowed these figures, images and tropes hook, line and sinker. Most people failed to think critically. They lived like hermits, avoiding even grocery stores. They rode alone — masked — in cars, or wore masks in otherwise deserted outdoor spaces (in the woods or on deserted beach). They crossed streets to avoid passing other human beings on sidewalks. They meekly obeyed a wide range of patently arbitrary rules. Even though most knew no one whom the virus had supposedly killed, they succumbed to mass psychosis.
For the vaccine, the Media have swerved away from the word experiment and they have used, instead, the word trial.
Max Procaccini 