If you search Imran Khan on social media today, you will find a surprising result. Twitter hates Imran Khan today. For every message supporting his “dharna” there are roughly a dozen which mock him, call him a taliban supporter or a selfish politician who is about to burn Pakistan down.
This is surprising. He is out today to do a sit in against USA’s drone strikes. We know from variety of sources that it should make him pretty popular these days. Pew research tells us that USA’s likability in Pakistan was at an all time low of 11% before their Abbotabad raid. After this raid, you can be sure the number is zero.
It is also difficult to imagine Imran Khan being so unpopular in social media. Typically he is more liked by youth and educated class. A Facebook survey asking “who would you vote for in next election” got a 100,000 plus replies, with 73% favoring Imran Khan. I know, this is not representative of general opinion but such huge sample definitely looks quite indicative of online Pakistan population to me.
In fact every single politician in Pakistan has read Pakistani opinion to be severely against drones, as is evident with all public statements.
Who, then are these people today who is so hating him on twitter and Facebook? And the answer to that is a bit more interesting than your expectation.
Imagine for a minute that you are someone with a lot of money and have an interest in influencing opinions online. Of course, it is conceivable why you would like to have that control. We have grown up with a respect for public opinion. If a lot of people are saying something they must be right. If you can “make” people hear a lot of same opinion they will probably start believing it as right. In a way if you can control popular opinions on twitter, facebook and comments sections of various newspapers, you get a kind of mind control capability.
So what would a rich power, with a lot of money, trying to control public opinion, by controlling social networks, do?
If I was one, I would build a software. I will call it umm… “Persona”. The software will “allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly (sic) consistent” or in simple words it will create false personalities on the web which will look coming from certain backgrounds. These personalities will be controllable in 1 to 10 ratio. i.e. one user will be able to feed thoughts which will look like 10 people’s thoughts on internet.
I would also take detailed steps to be efficient while looking genuine, “Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online personas from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms.”
I will also try and make operators of the service be aware of what they are talking about “The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.”
If it is becoming obvious to you that this RFP was really written by someone with a lot of money and not me, then you are right. Also, you don’t expect me to make so many spelling errors do you? This RFP was written by US military and was posted on USA’s federal business opportunities site. It has since been taken off the site but is still available here.
When a PR professionals site found out about it and considered this to be slightly off colored PR attempt, this is what US Airforce (original suspects of the RFP) had to say about it: “this contract supports activities at US Central Command, as opposed to the Air Force. The software supports classified social media activities outside the US intended to counter violent extremist ideology and enemy propaganda.”
So if you have missed what I have been trying to say up there, US Central Command has access to an online army of fake people, which walks, talks, looks like the people they want them to look like. These fake people, controlled by real people at the ratio of 1 to 10, publish twitter updates, Facebook profiles, comment on blogs, comment on news items and try to control your mind by controlling the popular opinion.
This is not a conspiracy theory. Its an above board public project. Why have you never heard about it to date? Because once US media questioned about it they were told that US citizens will never be targeted only bad foreigners will be tricked. Click here for reading this justification on Washington Post. This seems to have silenced US media, which led to a complete blackout on international media.
Could it be that Imran Khan became a valid bad foreigner today to attract this program’s interest? Seems that way.
By the way, when it comes to Pakistan, USA’s “personas” aren’t the only ones interested in influencing the opinion. I personally suspected for a long time that people commenting about Pakistan in major US news sites are a bit too enthusiastic and efficient. Doesn’t it look odd that on CNN, a benign story about Pakistan floods gets more comments than a story about university shooting in USA? While these commentators will have western names of John Smiths etc. they will typically have opinions and desires which suit someone in our neighborhood.
So I did a little experiment. I went to few of these comment sections and, using a fake persona of my own, engaged those commentators from USA (emphasis, commentators from USA). I also lured them to click on a link about the subject which agreed with their ideas. The link pointed to an empty page on my blog. Sure enough, with in 10 minutes my empty blog page got few hits. All from Indian IP addresses!
Quite obviously Indian program hasn’t been able to build enough counter-detection mechanisms. Courtesy to ASH & attemptingreason.
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Its not just about one issue, there are various places online where one notices such flaming that one is left wondering how could this be happening with such enthusiasm. Anonymity has its own perils. Combine it with a fact that most people form opinions based on what comments and postings they read - more like a crowd mentality.
