Social Media

They're learning so much about us through social media I doubt they need to do human testing right now.

- Neuvillerl

Misdirection

Misdirection. Some real sh*t goes down and we're preoccupied by things on purpose. Remember that "this is the calm before storm" awkward statement from Trump? If not, it's because within 4 days kneeling became the alleged top concern of our entire country.

Your comment made me think of Melania's "I Really Don't Care" jacket. There is absolutely no way she or their team didn't know it was going to be an outrage and all people would be focused on for days.

The panama papers thing just flew right the hell under the radar simply because no major news organization said a word about it. That's all it takes for something that huge to be buried, is CNN doesn't talk about it.

- zennz29

23 And Not Me

23andMe!!!

Hear me out: the FBI and CIA have been known to secretly sponsor programs similar to this. Not only are they getting DNA samples of their citizens but they're getting citizens to PAY for it.

In the contracts for them, it says that the company owns your DNA sequence.

- wildmonkey5232

The "Boring" Stuff

All these borderline conspiracy theories, while mine is pretty mundane: Military and Intelligence.

No one had any idea about the B-2 Stealth Bomber or the SR-71 until they were used (and not even for a while after that, with the SR-71), and there's still plenty of things we don't know about them! Lots of theory crafting on how to get a spy network or just intelligence in general into other countries, both friendly and enemy, because knowledge is power.

Y'know, the "boring" stuff.

- TheK1ngsW1t

#ThrowbackThursday

I've always been a fan of the conspiracy theory that the government was behind #ThrowbackThursdays as some sort of social experiment to get people to digitize and upload old pictures of themselves online so that they could use them to make facial recognition/age progression algorithms better.

- -eDgAR-

Mood Manipulation Through Media

Manipulating what we see and how we react:
Show people sad stories, they get sad & post sad stories. Show them happy ones, they get happy and post happy.

Facebook already got in trouble for doing this without user consent. I have zero doubt the government was either in on it, and/or is still doing it. I'm surprised but not surprised that so many people are unaware of this. I remember a few years ago there was a different article posted every day about a parent leaving their child in the car and that child dying. That shit was shared connnnstantly! You never hear of it anymore. It still happens, but it's not as public. Facebook isn't favoring those stories in their algorithms at the moment.

This stuff even predates Facebook. Remember 2001's Summer of the Shark? For a whole summer, the media was absolutely obsessed with shark attack stories, despite no increase in actual attacks.

- AlphaTangoFoxtrt

It's Still Happening

Everything we have caught them doing in our recent past is still believably going on because we haven't really given our government a reason to change.

That includes illegal human experimentation, editors from major publications (like the NYT) being on the CIA payroll, mass surveillance by the NSA, torture at blacksites...

- QuarterOztoFreedom

The Hawaii Scare

I'm about 99% convinced the nuclear scare a while back in Hawaii wasn't an accident at all, but a dry run to gather data in case we get to a point where the real deal might happen.

What if it was a real threat, but the government handled it before it happened. Then they just play it off as an accident.

- Shrekquille_Oneal

The Solution Is Worse Than The Problem

Geoengineering. So that if we don't get our act together before global warming gets out of control, we can do something like blast monatomic sulphur into the stratosphere or into strategic points in orbit to reduce the amount of sun hitting the planet and cool the earth if all else fails. And as we don't seem to be getting off our duff as a species really fast, it just might.

Sadly, this is one of those SyFy Saturday Night solutions, right up there with Sharknado, where one "solution" breeds 100 unexpected and deadly side effects that taken together could be even worse.

Up to the point where the concerned scientists try to storm Mission Control to stop the launch screaming NO NO NO while President-for-Life Pence presses the button and launches the rocket. And everything looks great for about two days until the shit starts coming down.

- Tall_Mickey

Learning Your Patterns

Cryptography and statistical/entropy analysis of online users to be able to identify someone by their speech and text patterns online, regardless of any other connections between profiles or websites.

Banks and other sensitive companies use this type of analysis to prevent fraud. They build a profile of how each user interacts with their platform and flag suspicious activity when usage changes. (e.g. Time of day, ip address, scroll wheels vs scroll bar, Common clicks, amount of time it takes to type password.) They even temporarily make the cursor disappear to prompt the user to shake their mouse to find it, giving a distinctive mouse movement pattern. The combination of all these data points gives companies high levels of confidence to determine if each user is who they say they are. Here's a link from the NYT.

- Person_from_Nowhere