2019-12-05

Social Mood 2020: White Van Terror and Tyranny

CNN: A Facebook rumor about white vans is spreading fear across America
Terrifying rumors initially propelled by Facebook's algorithms have sparked fears that men driving white vans are kidnapping women all across the United States for sex trafficking and to sell their body parts. While there is no evidence to suggest this is happening, much less on a national, coordinated scale, a series of viral Facebook (FB) posts created a domino effect that led to the mayor of a major American city issuing a warning based on the unsubstantiated claims.

The latest online-induced panic shows how viral Facebook posts can stoke paranoia and make people believe that spotting something as common as a white van, can be deemed suspicious and connected to a nationwide cabal.
As a signal of social mood, the factual content of a rumor doesn't matter. If this is an organic rumor zooming around the Internet, it speaks to what I've been covering here for years: the negative and declining social mood amid a depression masked by central bank intervention.

However, that the media jumped on the algorithm angle opens up the possibility that this is a "false flag" part of a broader government/media regulation effort. Tyrants do not like objective algorithms on Facebook and YouTube because they recommend popular content, even if that content is politically incorrect, dissident, or even completely fake (such as flat Earth). Facebook and YouTube seek increased engagement of users. They want users spending more time on their platforms, to sell them more ads. Their algorithms achieve this by serving up videos based on what works.

Rumors were around long before the Internet because there are many ways of transmitting information through society. Many in American society, mainly those who sit in positions of power in media, education, government and technology, want to use this tech to censor and eliminate competing information channels. This will turn America into something similar to China under the CCP.

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