Other – Page 100 – Tim Boucher

Prohibited Misinformation on Tiktok

On 9 June 2021

Thought these prohibitions around misinformation were interesting & worth keeping from Tiktok’s Community Guidelines section on Integrity & Authenticity:

Misinformation is defined as content that is inaccurate or false. While we encourage our community to have respectful conversations about subjects that matter to them, we do not permit misinformation that causes harm to individuals, our community, or the larger public regardless of intent.
Do not post, upload, stream, or share:
* Misinformation that incites hate or prejudice
* Misinformation related to emergencies that induces panic
* Medical misinformation that can cause harm to an individual’s physical health
* Content that misleads community members about elections or other civic processes
* Conspiratorial content that attacks a specific protected group or includes a violent call to action, or denies a violent or tragic event occurred
* Digital Forgeries (Synthetic Media or Manipulated Media) that mislead users by distorting the truth of events and cause harm to the subject of the video, other persons, or society
Do not:
* Engage in coordinated inauthentic behaviors (such as the creation of accounts) to exert influence and sway public opinion while misleading individuals and our community about the account’s identity, location, or purpose

Now, I’m someone who likes to find the edges of policies like these. So there are certain things my brain automatically zeroes in on while reading…

“misinformation that causes harm” – where harm isn’t clearly identified… means the door is potentially fairly wide open to interpretation apart from their enumerated types in the list that follows.
“attacks a specific protected group” – the definitions of protected groups or classes often tend to be somewhat narrower than people think. A Facebook leak from 2017 showed the … complexity of these kinds of definitions when the rubber meets the road.
“denies a violent or tragic event occurred” – does this mean denying happy or non-violent events occurred is also forbidden? Status unclear.

I wonder what they would think of RealNewsChan.

Misinformation is just another front in the Hyperreal Wars.

What’s the deal with the Mandela Effect?

By Tim B.

On 8 June 2021

In Other

Found these two videos last night. I remember the Froot Loops one kinda? But not the other one…

I’ve written about my thoughts on the true cause of the Mandela Effect here. Very mysterious all around!

No Password Sites & The Hyperreal

By Tim B.

On 7 June 2021

In Other

When running a hyperreality campaign online, I’ve found that one of the key things to do is to diversify your posting strategy. You should use not only a combination of diverse platforms & multiple user accounts on each (if possible), but you should also include different grades of platforms. That is, use both sites that require full accounts with logins and passwords, but also use sites that don’t require any credentials at all to post.

Some common ones are:

Write.as
Telegra.ph
Txt.fyi
Justpaste.it

There are many others if you do Google searches, and some have greater & less longevity both as platforms, and for the content itself. Meaning content posted may be ephemeral (short-lived) or permanent, at least as long as the platform stays up.

Generally speaking, these sites have little or no filtering or other oversight. Perhaps unless they receive a legal take-down notice or similar official complaint. While this may be good or bad depending on the content, generally speaking in terms of the hyperreal it is somewhat of a boon to creators.

The only drawback of course is that Google tends to not rank the content of such sites very highly in search results. So long as you’re aware of that, they can still be very useful tools for seeing hyperreal contents. One of the best uses I’ve found has been for cross-linking. So if you have something posted on a more mainstream site requiring an account, you can link out from that somewhat legit looking account to apparently corroborating information posted on these other shittier sites. It certainly won’t pass the sniff test of determined OSINT investigators, but most people are not concerned enough to follow links or uncover sources in the first place. So it’s really not a big deal.

This technique pairs well with false backdating, spoofed sources, cross-posting into Reddit, and making archived copies. I’ve also used it pretty extensively with text spinner variations of target content, which I’ll post about some time soon (some of these examples below used text spinners, FYI).

Here are some example posts & archived versions from various hyperreality campaigns:

Oh and if you make use of Justpaste.it, you can also generate a PDF version of any page you create, which I did here with the 84 True Facts About Ancient Quatria PDF (archive).

Archive Sites & The Hyperreal

By Tim B.

On 7 June 2021

In Other

One classic trick when working in the hyperreal online is to post your target content onto the social platform of your choice.

Then use archive.is, archive.org, or any similar public archive site to make an archived copy of that post.

Then delete the content from the platform you originally posted it on, and tell people on social media that it was “censored” by the platform, and link them to the archived version.

An easy but effective trick. Plus has the added bonus that if your content actually does get blocked, you have a backup of it.

What if UFOs are alive?

By Tim B.

On 7 June 2021

In Other

Okay, this one there is actually a lot of good evidence for. So I’m pretty sure it must be at least partly true…

Are UFOs actually AIs from the future??

By Tim B.

On 7 June 2021

In Other

This seems either unlikely or so unlikely that it’s probably true. One of those two. I can’t decide which!

Inside the Secret UFO Cave System

By Tim B.

On 6 June 2021

In Other

Wow, totally blown away by this:

Is there a secret UFO base in Antarctica?

By Tim B.

On 6 June 2021

In Other

According to this video, there is!

Narrative Warfare & The Hyperreal, Part 16

By Tim B.

On 6 June 2021

In Other

Have been thinking a great deal on the similarities between folklore and conspiracy theories, as being grassroots stories we tell ourselves and one another to make sense of the world. I maintain that folklore, conspiracy theories, and what we call “disinformation” etc. are all part & parcel of the same phenomenon: the hyperreal, where the blending of fact & fiction are seamless and more or less indistinguishable.

Have also been reading Corkery’s excellent 1924 classic, “Hidden Ireland,” which has lead me to fill in a lot of gaps around my knowledge of Irish history, such as the Flight of the Earls, the Plantation of Ulster, the Tudor Conquest of Ireland, the decline of the Bardic Schools, and so on. There’s a story in Irish history which was used for centuries to establish or challenge the legitimacy of rulers, that of the founding of Ireland by the quasi-mythical Milesians.

From the Wikipedia:

Professor Dáithí Ó hÓgain writes that the “account of how the sons of Míl took Ireland was a literary fabrication, but it was accepted as conventional history by poets and scholars down until the 19th century”.^[3] For centuries, the legend was used in Ireland to win and secure dynastic and political legitimacy. For example, in his Two bokes of the histories of Ireland (1571), Edmund Campion tried to use the myth to establish an ancient right of the British monarch to rule Ireland. […]
Geoffrey Keating‘s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (written c.1634) used the myth to promote the legitimacy of the Stuart claim to royal authority in Ireland (related to the origin of the Lia Fáil), demonstrating that Charles I was descended, through Brian Boru, Éber and Galamh, from Noah and, ultimately, from Adam.

Whether we call this narrative warfare or just another example of the hyperreal, the end result is the same: people using stories – and changing stories – to justify their own position or to attack the position of another. It all sounds eerily familiar, and it’s clear how deeply penetrating these types of stories can be as guiding myths in cultures.