The Federal Reserve wants to know what you are saying about it. In fact, the Federal Reserve has announced plans to identify “key bloggers” and to monitor “billions of conversations” about the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs. This is yet another sign that the alternative media is having a dramatic impact. As first reported on Zero Hedge, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has issued a “Request for Proposal” to suppliers who may be interested in participating in the development of a “Sentiment Analysis And Social Media Monitoring Solution”. In other words, the Federal Reserve wants to develop a highly sophisticated system that will gather everything that you and I say about the Federal Reserve on the Internet and that will analyze what our feelings about the Fed are. Obviously, any “positive” feelings about the Fed would not be a problem. What they really want to do is to gather information on everyone that views the Federal Reserve negatively. It is unclear how they plan to use this information once they have it, but considering how many alternative media sources have been shut down lately, this is obviously a very troubling sign.
You can read this “Request for Proposal” right here. Posted below are some of the key quotes from the document (in bold) with some of my own commentary in between the quotes…
@Auto: I think in light of recent developments (Awlaki assassination, etc.), there is no further doubt left that the US government absolutely intends to chill free speech on all levels. We’re quickly heading toward a situation where the smart people are going to get the hint and STFU while the stupid people who keep yakking end up getting hit with any of a million bullshit legal charges. The front lines of the assault was the corporate media, next are the smaller news orgs and independent journalists and preachers. Next in line will be online expressions of opinion through blogs and forums such as this. They haven’t got that far yet but it’s coming, mark my words. You can’t even get news online anymore. BBC used to have some wider-perspective stuff but now it’s just another outlet of “war on terror” bullshit. The meta-news search engines just return the same propaganda you’d get off the front of the NYT. Even a year ago, I could to go to Google News and click “World” and get a decent smattering of worldwide news not of US concern. Not today. Every single goddamn English-language news article on the net almost without exception is either about the US or something the US is doing to some other country. Predator drones. Assassinations. NAFTA. EU. ECB. UN. On and on. Even al-Jazeera - which used to be a good source of adversarial news perspective - has been taken over. Russia Today is one of the least-bad news sources still existing online but it’s only an accidental by-product of its being “anti-US” rather than “pro-news.” There has been a sharp, marked change in the quality of online news available in the English language over the course of the last year or so. I literally feel like I’m living in a complete news vacuum.
