Thread by @VigilantFox

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it actually happened.

And it should terrify everyone.

Joe Rogan’s guest just exposed one of the most sinister psychological experiments ever unleashed by Big Tech—and there's a good chance that you were part of it.

What Facebook conducted nearly 13 years ago makes government censorship look tame by comparison.

🧵THREAD

📍 Bookmark this post so you never forget what Big Tech did to us.

Let’s break it all down and roll the clips.

Joe Rogan’s conversation with Harvard professor and mind control expert Rebecca Lemov quickly zeroed in on one of his favorite topics: government interference in digital life.

Rogan opened the door with a warning that’s become all too familiar.

“Well, there’s so many different kinds of mind control.”

He continued:

“You know, one of the things we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast is, that an enormous percentage of what you’re seeing on social media in terms of interactions and debate is not real. It’s not organic.”

“It’s state run and state funded, and it’s whether it’s foreign governments or our government or even corporations, you’re getting inorganic discourse that’s designed to form a narrative and which is a form of mind control.”

Lemov jumped in and took it one step further—explaining that even when we know it’s fake, our minds still react like it’s real.

“Yeah. I mean, I think even on a basic level, people, it’s known and studies have shown that we respond as if it were organic and real.”

“Even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as, like, in-person interaction.”

It’s not just governments pulling strings.

The platforms themselves are wired to exploit how we feel.

“I think at the root, there is a kind of way that, on an emotional level, it’s not just manipulation of ideas, but there’s a kind of emotional engineering that’s built into the platforms and doesn’t even demand, you know, at first, government involvement.”

Lemov peeled back the curtain on DARPA—the government’s controversial defense research agency—and its role in shaping the digital world we now live in.

DARPA, she revealed, wasn’t just involved in building the internet. It may have laid the groundwork for emotional manipulation on a global scale.

“DARPA was involved in the development of the internet and of things like pattern recognition,” she said.

“The government has funded many, many studies.”

What worries Lemov isn’t just the tech itself—but how it’s being used.

“What I got interested in, in social media and how I connect it with the episodes of brainwashing—it creates states of emotional contagion that aren’t really about convincing people of a different way to think,” she explained.

She continued: “But more about how you feel about what you think.”

That emotional shift, she added, is straight out of the cult playbook.

“It’s not that it changed my thoughts,” she said.

“It’s how I felt about those thoughts.”

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Now, back to the story you came for.

That’s when Lemov exposed one of the darkest secrets in Big Tech history—a sinister Facebook experiment that quietly tampered with the emotions of 700,000 users.

And they never even knew it.

“There’s a famous Facebook experiment I read about that took place in 2012 and was published in 2014, where they announce that they’ve achieved, mass emotional contagion at scale,” Lemov told Rogan.

She explained how Facebook altered users’ feeds without their consent.

“Whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or AB testing. So this experiment exposed a group to a more—their newsfeed was altered in a negative direction emotionally, as measured by word counting software.”

And the results were disturbing.

“And they discovered that that group that had a negative exposure also responded in a more negative way, as judged through their posts and likes and responses.”

“The group that was exposed to a more positive newsfeed by altering the algorithm then had also a measurably statistically significant effect of more positive emotional response—and the control group was unaltered by this.”

In short, Facebook wasn’t just observing emotion—they were engineering it.

And nobody got a heads-up.

The full scope of the experiment only became public two years later, when researchers finally admitted what they had done.

Facebook’s data scientists had manipulated the feeds of 689,003 people—removing either all the positive posts or all the negative ones to measure the emotional fallout.

If your feed in January 2012 felt unusually bleak or suspiciously upbeat, you may have unknowingly been part of the study.

The team behind it, led by data scientist Adam Kramer, published their findings in a scientific journal and laid out the results in cold detail:

“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred,” the paper said.

It was hard proof that emotions are contagious—and social media could be weaponized to control mood at scale.

The study ran for just one week, but for those caught in the algorithmic crossfire, the emotional effects may have lasted much longer.

But here’s where it gets truly disturbing.

Lemov revealed that when the experiment finally came to light, the backlash was swift—and in some cases, tragic.

“But, so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 2014,” she said.

One user, Lemov recalled, had a chilling reaction.

“And on the Facebook page of the research group that that did the experiment, at least one user wrote in saying, could I ever find out if I was in that experiment.”

“Because I was in the emergency room at that time with, you know, threatening to commit suicide, and I want to know if my feed was altered and maybe that pushed me over, you know, into that that state.”

There was no way to know.

“Of course, they could never know and it can’t be traced backwards. And other people had a similar response.”

The scandal sparked an investigation by the British government, which considered sanctions over the international scope of the experiment.

“And there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally,” Lemov said.

But in the end, there was no accountability.

“Ultimately, there doesn’t seem to have been any sanctions that came out of in anyone associated with it, is mostly promoted.”

No one punished. No warnings given.

And we’re all left wondering: how many more experiments are happening right now—hidden in plain sight?

Watch the full @joerogan episode with Rebecca Lemov here:

@joerogan Thanks for reading. Follow me for more stories that matter.

—> @VigilantFox

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