[JulianMorrison]

It's my opinion that attempts to sway public opinion are spitting in the wind, but normally in the same direction as the wind, resulting in an illusion of efficacy. You can see their lack of real impact when they desperately try (and fail) to turn the public. Cf Trump.

Control of ideas is massively oversold by both proponents and opponents, who both have a vested interest in believing it works. The reality is that the public has beliefs which are more cultural than anything else, and so do the "influencers", and so they tend to push in the direction the public was already going. And the opponents find it easier to blame influence rather than a cultural rejection of their ideas.

[battlebot]

No, they're not, it is highly effective--I saw it firsthand during the run up to the Gulf War in 2003. I was on a message board and suddenly there would be all these "pro war" type members showing up posting basically propaganda and giving people a hard time and mostly creating chaos.

The latest time I saw this behavior was on Reddit during the just completed 2016 elections. And then my suspicions were validated when Correct The Record was outed as the group doing it.

This is ugly, ugly behavior--propaganda of the nastiest kind.

[JulianMorrison]

"I don't know how Nixon won, nobody I know voted for him". People live in bubbles. When you encounter a cultural clique with contrary ideas it can look like a villainous conspiracy simply because it's assumptions are so alien and yet so strongly held. Surely they must be shills, trolls, etc? No, generally not. People actually do have those beliefs and consider them worth grouping up and fighting for. Not the people you hang with, but elections in particular are great puncturers of bubbles; they count the real numbers.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Not the people you hang with, but elections in particular are great puncturers of bubbles; they count the real numbers.

An "election" that just "counts" which propaganda campaigns were more effective is worthless. You're really going to have to do better than just claiming that it's all bubbles and there are no propaganda campaigns.

[notahacker]

I think the burden of proof lies on people making extraordinary claims like "people that disagreed with me in 2003 did so only because they were part of an enormous, undiscovered government conspiracy"

[JulianMorrison]

I'm saying that everyone's propaganda campaign was equally ineffective. Opinions weren't swayed.

[greesil]

So paid-for propaganda in online comments didn't happen?

[notahacker]

I think it's more than a little unlikely the US government was so obsessed with making the case for war it launched (and successfully concealed from the public) a massive campaign to troll online forums without even being able to do basic stuff like make the official case for war a bit more competently and "discover" some WMDs to vindicate themselves afterwards.

It's not like there's any reason to believe that the millions of US citizens who passionately believed in the necessity of bringing down the "Axis of Evil" or just enjoy trolling liberals would recuse themselves from online debate in the build up to the war

[ConfuciusSay02]

Influencing opinion online is many orders of magnitude easier to accomplish than faking WMD's in Iraq.

[notahacker]

Paying enough people to troll enough web forums for there to be a non-trivial possibility the OP was interacting with several of them without being rumbled doesn't really seem orders of magnitude more difficult than paying a couple of "weapons experts" to lie for you, or getting some material your military possesses into a territory your military controls.

[ConfuciusSay02]

They tried that mate. But it turns out it's hard to find credible weapons experts that are total hacks with no qualms about lying. When it became clear that their chosen expert was going to expose the fact that there were indeed NO WMD's, he promptly died shortly before his report was due to be published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

By comparison, posting on online forums can be done very easily by anyone of any character.

[JulianMorrison]

Probably happened on a number of sides, as well as group organising on a voluntary basis to do propaganda, and individuals who were just that motivated, and so on.

My main point being though, black hat or white, pro Trump or pro Hillary, they were all spitting in the wind.

[gnaritas]

Your point is off the mark, propaganda works, it cost Hillary the election; that last minute FBI story swayed people and secured Trump as the winner despite the story being false.

[JulianMorrison]

It made the numbers move, but those are the same numbers that predicted a Hillary win. Clearly those numbers reflected more factors than absolute voting intention. For example: how acceptable it was to oppose Hillary in public.

Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.

[ZeroGravitas]

I remember the gulf war, I remember long established members of the boards I inhabited at the time, usually but not always with a right-wing lean, going absolutely bananas at the time. And even the more reasonable ones basically lost the plot. If you really want a conspiracy theory, I'd point to the government and Fox news being desperate to pivot from 9/11 to one of the wars they'd been planning.

I also remember Reddit during the last election. Political sub-reddits that only had Bernie fans and internet libertarians during non-election years suddenly got swamped by "normal" people, and the regulars started conspiracy theories about who all these people were with their "weird" opinions.

The fact is, reddit's demographics skew young & educated, any outside observer would expect them to be more liberal than the average American, and they mostly are, even accounting for the male skew and the pockets of reactionaries that make their home there.

The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate. I'm always saddened that I can't tell the difference between those who've been naively sucked in and those who repeat these things out of a political motive. I used to assume they were mostly in-the-know, but my faith in humanity has ebbed and I can no longer attribute to malice what is adequately explained by them mostly being brainwashed by the most feeble of conspiracy theories.

[jpfed]

>The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate.

Do you mind clarifying in what respects they were similar to you? I haven't heard much in the way of specifics re CtR, but pizzagate was just... zero percent true. Was CtR similarly untruthful, or were they similar in some other dimension you find relevant?

[ZeroGravitas]

Just like there really is a Ping Pong pizza restaurant, there is a Super PAC called "Correct the Record"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

As the name suggests, they thought that trolls spreading lies was a problem, and they tried to "correct the record".

In the darker corners of Reddit on the other hand, every opinion that disagrees with them is written by a shill funded by George Soros, who in their version is a Nazi collaborator, rather than a victim of the Nazis.

The fact is that the average American is fairly "liberal" by many measures. Lots of Democrat policies have broad support. Democrats have been winning the popular vote for a while. Elections with high turnouts favor Democrats etc. etc. Republicans win via the standard political strategies rather than by reflecting the will of the people.

And that's all Americans. Reddit is obviously going to have even more liberal voices due to the demographics. We don't need to invoke a conspiracy theory to figure out why someone would call out a false right-wing talking point on Reddit.

[codr4life]

Was it now :) Boy, are you in for nasty surprises once the truth hits the fan for real. It didn't bother you a tiny bit that the whole stinking pile of bullshit peddlers went into panic mode to cover everything up asap?