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Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

This actualy came up in yesterday's congressional MKULTRA hearing. Somebody at the hearing pointed out the absurdity of the CIA claiming that MKULTRA was a dead end when we have 20 years of social media scandals and lawsuits showing that social media corporations are intentionally creating products that can manipulate large groups of people on an individual level. Clearly the hypotheses the CIA was testing were not all wrong so the mere existence of Facebook, reddit, etc seem to point to the CIA lying on some level about their research.

There's no hard evidence that Facebook et al are a direct continuation of the MKULTRA program but even if they aren't it should be very concerning that they are deploying similar techniques on a planetary scale.

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> MKULTRA

> There's no hard evidence

There are thousands of manchildren living in moms' basements, with corkboards festooned with scraps of photographs that are connected by colored yarn and pushpins, and they would all vehemently argue to the contrary!

MKULTRA was about using _drugs_ to alter state. It has literally zero other than pop culture memes and conspiracy theory in relation to what facebook is doing.

The facts are basically: Facebook's own researchers and independent researchers presented real harms caused by Facebook's algorithms, and they fired them, ignored them and took the datasets away and continued doing as they want.

You don't need to go to any conspiracy anything; that just makes the claims sound crazy aby unnecesary ssociation.

Honestly, I'm about 10% of the way towards "Meta's social media people wrote this comment and astroturfed it to the top so that the case against Meta looks crazy."

MKULTRA was about using drugs to alter state and produce uninhibited truthfulness.

Social media has a direct impact on dopamine and uninhibited oversharing.

The mechanism isn’t even ambiguous, which is exactly why there’s a case, about the production of a deliberately addictive substance. The chemicals and effects differ, but it’s deliberate use and production as the same exact means to an end do not.

There’s zero ambiguity here of the alignment on an end goal.

Side note: is META hiring and can you refer me?

yeah, sorry, associated the two is an attempt to degrade the validity of the claims against meta.

That sounds like something somebody hopped up on social media would say.

Nice fedslop but teddy k was never given any drugs.

Im glad you agree with me on the stuff about Facebook being evil. im not sure i understand why you said this was not a conspiracy immediately after describing a series of events perpetrated by facebook which could easily form the basis of a criminal conspiracy prosecution.

associating a well researched and backed claim about facebooks harm with a poorly done research about drugs and mind control by intelligence services since discredited and made apop culture meme does not aid in taking down facebook. its a bizarre association that looks purely like grafting the two as things only nutjobs would consider.

in reality, facebooks effects on its users has at least a decade of academic and independent research both commissioned by facebook and in spite of them. it is not a conspiracy theory about mindcontrol.

>since discredited

LMAO what are you even talking about? MKULTRA is a historical fact. The CIA even admits it was real. You can't just handwave something away by calling it "discredited".

There have been congressional hearings and documents produced from it. The only reason it's poorly documented is because the CIA illegally destroyed its own documentation. The little documentation we do have was produced after the CIA said it had already destroyed all of its own documentation to prevent its employees from ever complying with congressional subpoena. They have lied at every step, and even if they were telling the truth they would still be violating the law with an aim towards covering it up.

>in reality, facebooks effects on its users has at least a decade of academic and independent research both commissioned by facebook and in spite of them.

thats my point. For at least a decade they have been doing the same sort of thing MKULTRA was doing. I explicitly said in my first post that there's no hard evidence that there was a relation between the two but the similarity is striking, especially since it is well documented that Facebook regularly colludes with the United States federal government. If you aren't open to even considering that it's not a coincidence then you're either a shill, an LLM, or an idiot.

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