'Controlled Spontaneity' - How the Government Uses 'Mind Control' During Terror Attacks

Controlling the narrative and public emotions

Can you trust anything, even if you see it with your own eyes?

This article by the Middle East Eye from 2019 discusses how the British government has pre-planned social media campaigns, politicians’ statements, vigils and inter-faith events prepared for terrorist attacks, aimed to control the narrative and influence public emotions. Carefully selected hashtags, Instagram images and “impromptu” street posters are all ready before an attack happens.

The government calls this “controlled spontaneity” because, as you can imagine, they hate real spontaneity, and this has been used in every recent terrorist attack.

The measures drawn up in advance of the Olympics were intended to “corral the Princess Dianaesque grief” that was expected to emerge after any mass-casualty attack - a reference to the public mourning that followed the death of the royal in a car crash in 1997. This person describes those measures candidly as an attempt at “mind control”.

As with most ‘noble lies’ they start out with good intentions but how do we know this “mind control” could not be used in reverse, to further any government agendas in the future. This is just speculation but if “controlled spontaneity” can quell an uprising, it could also cause one.

“This job has changed significantly from planning for organic, people responses to tragedy, to being told: ‘We would like the people to do that, how do you get them there?’”

Examples of “controlled spontaneity” in the article include:

• a media campaign that was swiftly deployed after British and American aid workers were beheaded by Islamic State militants in 2014;

• the use of hashtags, posters and vigils after the London Bridge attacks of June 2017, in which eight people were murdered and almost 50 injured;

• a Twitter, Facebook and mainstream media campaign that was employed later that month, shortly after a man drove his van into a group of people outside a mosque in north London, killing one person and injuring 10 others.

After the murder of British aid worker, Alan Henning, by Islamic State in 2014. A controversial propaganda unit - the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) used various proxy companies to get the tabloid newspaper, The Sun, to dedicate its whole front page to an image of a woman wearing a Union Jack hijab. Inside, it “devoted a further six pages to coverage of political leaders and members of the public who said that they were making a stand against Islamic State terror”.

Internal RICU documents seen by MEE say that the unit is working “at an industrial scale and pace” to develop messages that aim to “effect attitudinal and behavioural change” – particularly among Muslims. The involvement of the UK government is rarely acknowledged.

After the London Bridge terror attack, a team of men arrived in an unmarked van and were admitted behind police cordons to plaster walls with posters and hashtags.

The men doing this work declined to tell journalists who they were, or where they were from.

When the cordon was eventually lifted and the public were able to return to the scene of the attacks, they found themselves surrounded by apparently impromptu signs of public defiance and unity.

It appears that they also coordinated 100 imams to stand on the bridge and condemn the attack and organised Muslims to hand out red roses.

Sometimes, these interventions can back-fire. After a lone Islamophobe attacked a mosque in north London, a couple of men restrained the assailant before they were joined by the mosque’s imam. Journalists were approached by a woman who introduced them to a man called Shaukat Warraich who impressed upon them the role the mosque’s imam had played.

All the media reports focussed on the imam which caused ill-feeling in the area as the role of the two men who restrained the assailant had been overlooked.

“They were proud that they had done the right thing, but believe that they were then portrayed as a lynch mob,” said one person who prays regularly at the mosque. The young men are now rarely seen at the mosque, he added.

“But a number of the people involved in the advance planning of “controlled spontaneity” clearly have some misgivings about how emergency planning for the immediate aftermath of terrorist attacks is being combined with propaganda techniques that are intended to influence public responses”.

“the fight rhetoric has gone too far” and it is a mistake “to insist that the first message should be ‘we shall overcome’ as if the enemy was on the beaches.”

Others feel that by deceiving the public, there is little debate as to the actual cause of the hatred.

“The government wants the Twitter storm or the Facebook storm to be in its gift, and of course it can’t be - but you can distract people by putting up a photograph of a French flag or whatever”.

“But we’re not going to get to the bottom of terrorism by socially engineering a response. We’re not doing the difficult debate. And what that stops, is true learning.”

As I said, this noble lie can seem like the right course of action to take but meddling in complex systems, just creates more problems. By socially engineering people, they will feel cheated or misled with their emotions supressed until a later date. It may be a sticking plaster in the aftermath of an attack but may cause far worse problems in the future, with concerns ignored and truths distorted.

And if this propaganda machine got into the wrong hands, it could be used to manipulate public attitudes the other way, in order to further a particular agenda or to pass legislation.