SPI-B are back. The Sage sub-group (Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours) are exploring the behavioural considerations of sinister interventions both old and new this autumn and winter.
In their latest paper, the architects of the original fear-based public compliance strategy for lockdown measures have, for the moment at least, toned down their Freddy Krueger-esque language, but that doesn’t mean they’ve finally removed their glove of knives. Quite the opposite: they seem to have acquired a sixth finger – Facebook.
That this team of psychologists and behavioural experts have been granted such excessive power not only to encourage the state’s new tyrannical approach to governance but institutionalise it is one thing. That they are drawing upon crude data collected and collated by the social media giant to accomplish this objective is beyond the pale.
From April 1 to September 22, Facebook collected self-reported data on Covid-19 related behaviours (symptoms, social-distancing habits, mental health issues, financial constraints etc) from users recruited to the survey via invitations at the top of their newsfeeds. SPI-B say they are in part formulating their current behavioural-intervention-based considerations upon this data, but the reference they provide points to a collaboration between Facebook and a clique of top US academic institutions published in June 2020, almost 16 months ago.
Potentially then, this global mind-mining survey has been running throughout the entire ‘pandemic’, and could have been initiated a mere matter of weeks after the first lockdowns, perhaps even at the same time. Little wonder that the word ‘plandemic’ rolls so easily off the tongue for those not entombed within the official narrative. That the results are being utilised by government agencies to help inform policies designed to crush self-determination around the world is indicative of Big Tech’s reaches of power and influence.
How many interventions of the last 20 months have been based upon simplistic ‘tap, scroll and like’ surveys on social media? On-screen prompts and nudges direct the user unwittingly to provide the statistical basis for preordained interventions.
Might SPI-B’s original spook-fest of social-adherence tactics have been based upon (other than input from Government’s own, and only part-independent, electro-shock therapists at the Behavioural Insights Team) self-reported reactions to the more violent offerings of Netflix from 2018, for example? This would not be surprising, as the public seem to embrace watching their own downfall unfold from behind sofas, with a delicious sense of trepidation. It’s all just one long series of Game of Thrones to many.
SPI-B’s latest report makes frequent reference to those deviants empowering and legitimising their own ‘anti-authoritarian narratives’ via their unwillingness to comply with behavioural directives. Perhaps this is the Behavioural Insights Team dropping their new manifesto into early autumn minds. As I wrote yesterday in TCW Defending Freedom, BIT says‘changing the behaviour of “potential superspreaders” [the unvaccinated essentially] may be one of the most important factors determining whether the UK navigates the challenges of autumn and winter successfully’.
This minority, who refuse to turn life into an unremitting seminar on utterly redundant public health control measures are, according to SPI-B, ‘gathering health information from alternative sources’. Evidence for this assertion is harvested from another social media-based study of 2021, which explores the growing concerns of the role that social media has in spreading ‘conspiracy theories’: misinformation which greatly impacts vaccine hesitancy (Big Tech and social media firms’ large-scale funding of propagandist fact-checker websites notwithstanding).
SPI-B promptly undo this argument several pages on by identifying that ‘healthcare professionals are one of the most trusted sources but when affiliated with central government, this trust decreases’. So what they seem to be saying is that if social media spreads misinformation, but Government health officials themselves are not to be trusted, only one course of action remains. That is to have as the engineers of policy those who virtually none of the public know to be affiliated with Government, as they do not know they even exist (SPI-B and BIT for example), and who will cherry-pick from the social media database both that which supports their paymasters’ agenda and that which refutes any public counter-argument.
Should this effortless, app-based approach to the garnering of convenient evidence become the norm, it will be yet another arm of science corrupted and reinvented in the name of the post-Covid Order. When Government want to enforce an intervention they will simply find the justification in Facebook surveys probably funded either by themselves, their sub-cronies, or Bill Gates and his cadre of demi-gods.
‘Trust increases when the public feels they are trusted to follow the guidance and not perceived as targeted or blamed,’ taunt the cognitive druids in their report. Except it seems they’re now bored with concocting their own potions: why bother when the recipes are all on Facebook?
