Thread by @ThatTylerPopp

The Manipulation of Reality in Society to Serve the Empire

A breakdown of how organisations like the Psy-Group, the Integrity Initiative, ARC, Albany, Zinc, and other companies work with governments to create alternate realities in order to manufacture consent, and undermine opposition.
This will not only reveal how past operations have been used to construct alternate realities in public discourse relating to international events, but also how the current Israeli operation in Gaza and the West Bank is being framed in the media as a understandable and benign action by Israel.
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Excerpts from OpHMGTrojanHorse leaked exposée, and Sage Journals' article entitled
"Propaganda through ‘reflexive control’ and the mediated construction of reality"

First let's examine the actions of this organisation as we know them in the Media.
The now defunct organisation was a private firm made up of former Israeli intelligence operatives. It was founded and directed by CEO Royi Burstein, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces.
The primary service provided by Psy-Group to their clientele was Perception Management

What exactly does that mean?
According to the US DOD:

Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator's objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection,[1] operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.[2]
'Perception" is defined as the "process by which individuals select, organize, and interpret the input from their senses to give meaning and order to the world around them".[3] This definition overlaps with the higher-order perceptual processes as defined biologically (the lower-order biological processes are not susceptible to management; these low-level processes include underlying perceptual categorization performed prior to conscious categorization.[4]). Components of perception include the perceiver, target of perception, and the situation. Factors that influence the perceiver include:

Schema: organization and interpretation of information based on past experiences and knowledge
Motivational state: needs, values, and desires of a perceiver at the time of perception
Mood: emotions of the perceiver at the time of perception
Factors that influence the target include:

Ambiguity: a lack of clarity. If ambiguity increases, the perceiver may find it harder to form an accurate perception
Social status: a person's real or perceived position in society or in an organization
Impression management: an attempt to control the perceptions or impressions of others. Targets are likely to use impression management tactics when interacting with perceivers who have power over them. Several impression management tactics include behavioral matching between the target of perception and the perceiver, self-promotion (presenting one's self in a positive light), conforming to situational norms, appreciating others, or being consistent.[3]

As far as Psy-Group's past exploits are concerned?

You may remember Cambridge Analytica:

Psy-Group owner Joel Zamel signed a memorandum of understanding with Cambridge Analytica on Dec. 14, 2016. Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, described entrapping political opponents with bribes and sexual entrapment on a Channel 4 expose, saying, "We use some Israeli companies ... Very effective in intelligence gathering." The Wall Street Journal confirmed that it was referring to Psy-Group.

And This:

Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist and campaign manager.

In February 2018, FBI agents assisting Mueller traveled to Israel to interview employees of Psy-Group, the company whose founder, Joel Zamel, pitched psychological operations to the Trump campaign in 2016. The Daily Beast reported that agents asked about Psy-Group's financial structure, its ownership, and its communications with Team Trump during the 2016 campaign. Mueller also subpoenas records for payments made to PSY Group's bank account in Cyprus.

On April 5, 2019 the Senate Intelligence Committee sent a letter to Walter Soriano, the owner of USG Security Limited based in Britain and Israel, for his communication with Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Psy-Group, Wikistrat, and Black Cube, Orbis Business Intelligence (a firm co-founded by Christopher Steele).

But it doesn't stop there.
This is where things become more relevant to current events.

Project Butterfly:

In February, 2016, Psy-Group started a campaign against Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions activists on U.S. college campuses. Psy-Group collected any "derogatory information" on activists from social media and from HUMINT sources. (Mossad is not allowed to spy on American citizens, but this does not apply to private groups like Psy-Group, which used ex−Mossad operatives.)

Psy-Group operated a now-defunct website, , which published information about B.D.S. activists and leaders. People working for "Project Butterfly" included former Israeli national security advisor Yaakov Amidror and former Mossad deputy director Ram Ben-Barak. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also became an adviser to Psy-Group for the project.

"Project Butterfly" showed particular interest in people connected with American Muslims for Palestine, including its founder, Hatem Bazian.outlawbds.com

Additional context on how this group has 'questionable' motives and directives.

In January 2017, Zamel met with Ahmed al-Assiri (who was implicated in the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi and Trump adviser Michael Flynn in regards to Iran. The subject of the meeting was regime change in Iran. Steve Bannon and Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, a representative of the United Arab Emirates, attended the meeting.

While Psy-Group officially was closed in 2018 as more of the clandestine operations they took part in became public knowledge through Bloomberg, the WaPo, and Times Of Israel, it is important to note that a new company was started to take its place, headed by the same man. Prepared long before Psy-Group closed its doors.

Bloomberg reported that there was discussion within Psy-Group to rebrand itself as WhiteKnight. WhiteKnight is a private intelligence agency based in the Philippines that has been reported by Bloomberg as being part owned by Joel Zamel and reported by the New York Times as having links to Zamel. Along with Psy-Group, which had an agreement with Cambridge Analytica, WhiteKnight has links to Cambridge Analytica and the Brexit Leave campaign.

WhiteKnight rose to prominence when George Nader turned to the company for information on the 2016 election. It was the second time he reached out to a company owned by Zamel, the first being Psy-Group, which was talked about in a high-level meeting with Nader representing Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and Trump officials including Trump Jr, Erik Prince, Stephen Miller, to assist the then candidate Trump to secure the election via social media manipulation against his rivals. In December 2016, Nader purchased a presentation from WhiteKnight demonstrating the impact of social media campaigns on Trump's electoral victory. Nader made a payment of $2 million to Zamel for his services. WhiteKnight stated that it is global in operations. On October 22, 2018, Senator Richard Blumenthal sent letters to Facebook, Google, Reddit and Twitter asking each company about companies associated with Joel Zamel including WhiteKnight, Psy-Group and Wikistrat and if they had purchased advertisements or used fake accounts on their platforms.

It is important to note here, that while this may seem nefarious, and it is, this has nothing on the Ukrainian connections to the Democratic party, and the revelations from the Podesta Files, the Clinton Emails, the leaked information to Wikileaks, and the January 6th event, of which more will be spoken of in other threads.


Those who know, know this was blamed on "Russian Hackers"
Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear
Who are, in fact, Ukrainian.wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/

Fine. We all know about Bots. We all know about Bellingcat lies. We all know about OpHMGTrojanHorse (see my Pinned tweet) and for more information on that check out Kit Klarenberg and multiple articles in the @TheGrayzoneNews
But we need to understand the mechanics of how we are being manipulated in order to combat them.
I hope you use the ThreadReader App.

This is where Sage Journals' article mentioned earlier has some important information for us all to take in.

"Propaganda and disinformation campaigns require direct employment of workers to produce and disseminate content, which has always been the case, but the strategies prominent today also depend upon mobilisation of different categories of users and audiences (many unwittingly) both as producers and spreaders of content and as generators of data for profiling and targeting. This article will argue that social media platforms and the broader political economy of the Internet create the possibilities for online interactions and targeting which enable a form of political intervention focused on the destabilisation of perceptions of reality and recruit users in the construction of new politically useful realities."

Not only do companies like Whiteknight and Psy-Group create false narratives, but they also manufacture support for these narratives through multiple layers of deception by dissemination. What do I mean by that? They have not only press-secrstarues and politicians repeat canned responses to journalists, but they also back that up by false "credible" witnesses, (Zoka, WhiteHelmets) but also through social media influencers, academics, military "experts", and former government officials from the Intelligence and Security industrial complex.

Re Propaganda
While propaganda was initially used to neutrally describe information dissemination, it has increasingly taken on a pejorative meaning associated with manipulation and disinformation (Welch, 2014: 4–5). Official and governmental definitions tend to position it as an activity of an adversary whereas one’s own agencies conduct persuasion (Kuehl, 2014: 12). To achieve desired responses, the propagandist tends to present information in two ways; by controlling the media as a source of information and presenting information which appears to be from a credible source (Jowett and O’Donnell, 1999: 42). The former might traditionally be achieved through the direct state control of media or through using legal or other measures to pressure independent outlets to transmit a particular message or censor their output. The latter would tend to work either through establishing a trusted source of information in a foreign territory which both provides useful information for local populations and propaganda (e.g. Voice of America, BBC World Service, RT) or by secretly embedding journalists in the employ of the propagandist to spread their message. Some have suggested it is more helpful to consider that propaganda (unlike persuasion) tends to appeal less to the rational will instead seeking to bypass the autonomous decision-making process of the target (Stanley, 2015: 62).

And this statement here is perhaps the most important so far:

"The distinction made by Stanley is somewhat stark but does highlight an often posed distinction between an ideal of an autonomous decision-maker and one whose decision-making capacities have been manipulated or impaired."

Information operations like the ones we in the West have been exposed to for extended periods of time on multiple levels - Academia, NewsMedia, Social Media, NGOs, Movies and television series, talk shows- leave us virtually incapable of determining fact from fiction on certain subjects. That is, until a preponderance of data is given to us in order to shift our worldview and accept that we have been deluded. Examples?
"Ukraine is winning."
"Criticism of Israel is Antisemitic."
"Jews who oppose the actions of Israel are self-hating Jews."
"Palestinians are terrorists."

To read the complete article click the link below.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14…

Quick link to some content from OpHMGTrojanHorse