These Are The Same Tactics That Are Used In ALL Of Our Countries...
As the empire is playing US ALL like a Giant Game of risk...
How SAGE and the UK media created fear in the British public...
By EvidenceNotFearPost
27 June 2020
COVID-19 started registering with most of the British public around late February and early March.
Many were concerned but not particularly afraid.
Only weeks later people were terrified to leave their homes or go near other human beings.
How did such a dramatic shift in public perception happen
So quickly?
In early March 2020,
The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)
Produced a document for the UK Government highlighting methods for rolling out new social distancing rules.
There seemed to be some doubt as to whether the public would comply with the upcoming measures
So SAGE outlined a methodology based on known
psychological
behavioural
modification
techniques.
SAGE is an advisory group to the UK government
Responsible for making sure decision makers
have access to scientific advice.
The identity of individual committee members themselves were initially kept secret,
purportedly due to national security.
Some names were eventually released,
largely due to efforts by UK businessman Simon Dolan and his legal challenge campaign.
Nevertheless, two members remain anonymous.
Psychological techniques for behavioural change...
The document itself, titled....
Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures,
was drafted by SPI-B, the behavioural science sub-group for SAGE.
SPI-B highlighted nine broad ways of achieving behavioural change in the public:
Education
Persuasion
Incentivisation
Coercion
Enablement
Training
Restriction
Environmental
Restructuring
Modelling
In the document, SPI-B focused on the methods most relevant to their stated goals and set out ten options that were evaluated on six criteria.
The six criteria, under the acronym APEASE, were:
Acceptability
Practicability
Effectiveness
Affordability
Spill-over
Effects
A key part of SPI-B’s behavioural change strategy that seems to have been adopted was to
‘persuade through fear.’
The Persuasion section of the document states:
A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.
Clearly, the psychologists felt that, as of late March,
the public was still not afraid of COVID-19.
It therefore suggested that the government increase the level of fear:
The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent,
using hard-hitting emotional messaging.
Appendix B of the document lists ten options that can be used to increase social distancing in the public.
Option 2 advises:
Use media to increase sense of personal threat.
In hindsight, this explains the tone of
government sponsored
social media
and physical billboard advertising campaigns
that started appearing around April.
SPI-B recommendations to increase personal threat and use hard-hitting emotional messaging are on display with eerie imagery coupled with taglines such as:
“"Anyone can get it.
""Anyone can spread it.
““Don’t put your friends and family in danger.
““Stay home for your family.
""Don’t put their lives in danger.
““If you go out, you can spread it.
""People will die.“
Hysterical news headlines
During the first week of April 2020, the InProportion2 project noticed a change in the BBC headlines and posted the article,
BBC: Informing
Or scaring?
The article compared hysterical BBC news headline from the first week of April 2020 with those from 2018, when mortality rates were peaking due to a bad flu season.
It found no references to flu or excess mortality on the BBC home page during the 2018 peak.
InProportion2 asked, “Do the headlines reflect the gravity of the situations in an equivalent way –
Or is additional fear being stirred up in 2020?“
Persuasion through
shame
and approval:
Covidiots
And Heroes
SPI-B psychologists knew that fear on its own would not persuade everyone.
Messaging needed to be tailored to take into account different ‘motivational levers.’
Some people will be more persuaded by appeals to
play by the rules,
some by duty to the community,
and some to personal risk.
It therefore suggested using both
social approval
and disapproval,
with compulsion (legislation)
as a backup:
Option 6: Use and promote social approval for desired behaviours
Option 7: Consider enacting legislation to compel required behaviours
Option 8: Consider use of social disapproval for failure to comply
We can see the obvious approval-disapproval dialectic with the
‘Heroes
and Covidiots’
narrative that soon began to surface in the news.
The term ‘Covidiot’
appeared around March with
The Economist’s 1843 Magazine
describing covidiots in this way:
Even in a pandemic, many of us are prone to judge others and find them wanting:
the term “covidiot”
describes
any
and every person
behaving stupidly
or irresponsibly
as the epidemic spreads.
Sometime in early March the word was born,
and,
almost as fast as the virus spread,
so did instances of covidiotic behaviour.
Although it’s not clear how the term came about, it was quickly adopted in UK mainstream and social media.
At the same time, we began seeing
praise for heroes who ‘did the right thing’
by complying with the government measures.
The METRO article below shows all three options in play:
"Social approval: “These local heroes have been doing amazing things…
”Social disapproval: “Lake District closed…because covidiots won’t stay away…
”Compulsion: “Matt Hancock threatens to close beaches…”
An incentivised media
These psychological techniques would have been impossible to deploy on the public without a compliant media.
How did the government convince the media to go along with the plan?
Increased UK government media spending.
Digiday, a media and marketing industry publication,
reported in April that the government is becoming UK news publishers’ most important client.
In the 20 April 2020 article for Digiday, Lara O’Reilly wrote:
…the government is spending more than usual, judging by their bookings.
The publishers also pointed out that the lack of activity from other advertisers in the current market means the government campaigns will have an outweighed share of voice compared with normal times.
Source: Digiday, 20 April 2020
During that period, the British public started seeing coverage across media outlets with the unified
“In this together” messaging.
O’Reilly pointed out that the campaign was worth
£35 million over a three month period.
Last week, the government and newspaper industry launched a three-month advertising partnership dubbed
“All in, all together.”
The campaign — worth approximately
£35 million ($44 million) for the full course, according to sources —
kicked off on Apr. 17,
with all the U.K.’s national
and regional
daily news brands running
near-identical
cover wraps
and homepage takeovers,
which carried the copy,
“Stay at home for the NHS,
your family,
your neighbours,
your nation
the world
and life itself.”
So, we ask again:
how did the government convince the media to go along with the plan?
The answer is simple and obvious:
with lots of money.
Psychological techniques to change behaviour
We can see that the UK Government has a public document outlining psychological techniques to change the behaviour of the population.
We see a unified mass-media campaign that falls in line with these techniques.
We then see a dramatic shift in public perception and behaviour.
What else can we call this but
‘brainwashing’?
Despite the open nature of what has transpired, it seems to have gained little coverage in the media.
This is of no surprise since it was clearly complicit in spreading fear in the public.
https://evidencenotfear.com/how-sage-and-uk-media.../
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