The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies (2012)

Everyone wants to believe they're sizing up some psyops scheme. The dopamine chemistry is just too good: you've got an enemy, the feeling of being in a dramatic narrative where nothing's what it seems, the superiority of knowing that you've spotted something everyone missed, and a way of bucketing the stories you dislike as illegitimate. The threads are even worse, because if you've got an all-purpose argument for shutting down rebuttals, why not use it?

=== How To Be A Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist And Make It Impossible For Others To Criticize You === 1) Make a list of all the methods people use to criticize you. Such as demanding evidence, questioning your motives, calling you a conspiracy theorist. 2) Rename the list, "How to Control an Internet Forum, Rules of Disinformation, Techniques for Truth Suppression" 3) Mix in some legitimate methods so your agenda doesn't seem too obvious. 4) Publish list on the internet under…

Sometimes people who disagree with you just disagree with you, and are not astroturf spies sent by the CIA. If you hold an unpopular opinion, people may want to marginalize your opinion by claiming that you aren't a real person.

Brings to mind the secret psyops JTRIG group (part of the GCHQ), as revealed by Edward Snowden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig... Look at the presentation slides from below - scary to think we are subjected to their propaganda on a regular basis https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ Very wide breadth and depth of the tooling used by JTRIG https://www.schneier.com/gchq-catalog/