It’s important that you share this story with those Canadians that still live with the “fanciful” notion that they live in a democracy not a dictatorship. Our tax payer, publicly funded agency, The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has announced a contract with a social media intelligence collection firm based in the U.K. to obtain data on vaccine hesitant individuals in order to, get this, be able to deliver targeted messaging, also known as propaganda, to break through their hesitancy, contract details indicate.
So that’s where my tax dollars are going, huh, on a “sales campaign” to convince Canadians who by personal choice at great cost in some cases either financially or socially to not drink the Kool Aid, to know go all in and take the “safe & effective” pharmaceutical interventions! It’s not like we could spend tax dollars any more efficiently, like paying to relocate Justin Trudeau to North Korea?

“In preparation for increased vaccination education, promotion, and outreach, The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) is requiring the services of a consultant to analyze the vaccine related conversations on social media and PHAC social media initiative and campaign performance,” says the tender notice description posted online on Dec. 22.

So our federal government wants to pay a private company to monitor what Canadians say online about the pharmaceutical interventions and report back to Big Brother any naughty comments, so they can “re-educate sorry educate” those luddites, is that about the size of it?

The notice says the contract will be awarded to U.K.-based Pulsar Platform if no other supplier submits a bid meeting the requirements before the closing date. The estimated value of the contract is $339,000.

Pulsar describes itself as an “audience intelligence company” using artificial intelligence and “smart human minds” to comb through conversational and behavioural data on social media.

In case you’re wondering who these “smart intelligent minds” are, likely our demi-god experts who’ve done a remarkable job so far!

The notice says the consultant will need to analyze Twitter and other online sites and platforms spanning three years of historical data.

Three years’ worth of conversations!

PHAC is seeking to obtain information on individuals who are participating in and influencing online conversations about vaccination.

It wants reports produced by the consultant to “provide PHAC an actionable understanding of the vaccine conversation landscape online and the conversation participants, while determining a conversation baseline,” according to the Statement of Work.

Once this data is obtained, PHAC will run a tailored messaging campaign, which it says will seek to target “communities of interest,” such as “indigenous peoples and millennial males,” states the Advance Contract Award Notice.

Divide and conquer it’s worked for centuries folks!

The study is to be rerun within a three to four month period to “monitor shifts in attitudes and confidence levels,” says the notice.

Got to assess how the “sales campaign” is going and see if we need to ramp it up even more, right?,

PHAC lays out how the consultant must conduct its work, including the establishment of a “keyword-based social listening tracker to capture social media conversations around vaccinations in Canada.”

Data must also be parsed along conversation themes such as “experiences with long Covid, previous vaccine side effects, engaging with mis/disinformation, shift in perceived risk of infection.”

PHAC also seeks to obtain a breakdown of reasons for vaccine hesitancy for different regions and cities to allow more targeted messaging.
Reasons, you know what PHAC I’ll give you one and it’s on the house, maybe the reason folks are hesitant is they’re seeing what’s happening around them and it’s not comporting with what was promised.

Along with identifying regions, cities, and subgroups such as First Nations communities, PHAC is also requesting segmentations of key audiences to include “demographics, interests, affinities, online behaviours, and the leading topics of vaccine hesitancy conversation, per each sub-community.”

The Statement of Work provides an example of what the consultant should do once a sub-community has been identified.

It says that once a community of “Toronto University Students that indicate low confidence in vaccinations” has been identified, then some factors should be investigated.

These include their reasons for being hesitant and the topics of their conversations, the media they consume and the content they share, and the tone they use when discussing their vaccination status.

I’ve been in sales all my life, and I’ve learned something that’s good, simply sells itself, you don’t have to convince, coerce, or manipulate folks into buying it!

Out of curiosity PHAC, is this the first time you’ve done this and what safeguards do you have to protect the data from these private or should I say public individuals from being further exploited, and if it will passed around to other departments to do with as they see fit?

Last I checked don’t we have the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) did he sign off on this, you know before Big Brother started eavesdropping on Canadians? I’m thinking inquiring minds would want to know, in fact I would encourage you to send the office an email inquiring about this!

Now the folks at PHAC are not virgins when it comes to violating the privacy of Canadians, in fact they’ve been mixed up in a data collection-related controversy in recent months when it was revealed it was analyzing the anonymized movement of millions of Canadians through the tracking of their cellphones, unbeknownst to them.

I’ve got it, PHAC’s new motto, “What they don’t know won’t hurt them” what do you think?

PHAC had been obtaining the data from carriers like Telus and other cellphone tracking companies, but in December 2021 it sought a contractor to directly access data from cellphone towers to conduct its analysis.

The data has been used to measure the compliance of Canadians while provinces implemented COVID-19 lockdowns.

When this became known, MPs started examining the issue and the Commons ethics committee told the government last spring that Canadians should be allowed to opt out of the data collection program.

Isn’t that mighty benevolent of them, allowing us mere peasants the possible opportunity of “opting out”
Remind me once again who works for whom here, who pays the bills of these pontificating blowhards?

To date nothing further has been made public with respect to the investigation either by the OPC who indicated that they were investigating the matter, nor the PHAC.

Don’t hold your breath!