Stanford accused of rebooting CIA mind-control project with ‘news source trustworthiness ratings’

JTN: A proposal in a Stanford University journal for “news source trustworthiness ratings” would, if it advances, be like a digital reboot of the CIA’s psychedelic mind-control experiments from the Cold War era, says a former State Department cyber official who now leads a online free speech watchdog group.

The psychological manipulation used in the experiments – known as Project MK-ULTRA and the subject of congressional hearings in 1977 – is reflected in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety study, conducted by researchers at U.S. and Italian universities, says Mike Benz, the former State Department official who now leads the watchdog group Foundation for Freedom Online.

“The whole point” of the study “is you don’t even need fact-checkers to fact-check the story,” a labor-intensive endeavor across the internet, if social media platforms simply apply a “scarlet letter” to disfavored news sources, Benz told Just the News. By creating “the appearance of having done a fact-check, it’s deliberately fraudulent.”

Benz said he’s in discussions with House Appropriations Committee staff on attaching a rider to funding bills for federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation that would prohibit them from funding institutions that promote such activities.  more here