We today are well ensconced in the realm of double speak, half truths and distortions. Ethics, principles, values and goodwill are being constantly undermined by humans who have no love in their heart, due to their loss of connection to family, community and society as a whole. When this happens the whole community is forced to awaken to respond. Therefore the 'evolutionary driver' to impel us as a species to awaken to what we need to address is becoming more pronounced by the day.
Yet, with the Occupy movement and the 99% who have being manipulated, the forces of unity and goodwill are gathering in greater strength and numbers as we awaken to our destiny in this life, and that we are spiritual beings breaking free of the mindset of living in physical bodies that we have in so many ways been programed to be 'Gods of Limitation' when in fact we are the total opposite!
Opt-TIM-istic
Astroturfing
Are commercial teams employed by 'special interests' to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them. Sending constant emails to news papers and forums etc arguing their particular bias. They are a real threat to internet democracy by their online sabotaging of intelligent debate by constantly arguing against pressing issues such as grass roots change, i.e that global warming is now being super seeded by global cooling and not to worry. That Iran is building a nuclear program to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Tobacco and smoking risks are not a bad as they say. etc.
Perhaps the most disturbing revelation is this. The US Air Force has been tendering for companies to supply it with persona management software, which will perform the following tasks:
a. Create "10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent … Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms."
b. Automatically provide its astroturfers with "randomly selected IP addresses through which they can access the internet" (an IP address is the number which identifies someone's computer), and these are to be changed every day, "hiding the existence of the operation". The software should also mix up the astroturfers' web traffic with "traffic from
multitudes of users from outside the organisation. This traffic blending provides excellent cover and powerful deniability."
c. Create "static IP addresses" for each persona, enabling different astroturfers "to look like the same person over time". It should also allow "organisations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organisation."
Software like this has the potential to destroy the internet as a forum for constructive debate. It jeopardises the notion of online democracy.
Comment threads on issues with major commercial implications are already being wrecked by what look like armies of organised trolls – as you can sometimes see on http://www.guardian.co.uk.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/dec/13/astroturf-libertarians-internet-democracy?showallcomments=true#comment-fold
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/feb/23/need-to-protect-internet-from-astroturfing
George Monbiot said:
After I wrote about online astroturfing in December 2010, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them.
These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy.
As I see in threads on my articles, the online sabotaging of intelligent debate seems organised. We must fight to save this precious gift
COURTESY : George Monbiot
ps I don't agree with Monbiot on a number of things, Nuclear power for one, but these two above links explains things well.
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