[dogman144]

One has to believe there's a deliberate intelligence effort signal boosting this a fair bit, meshed within the various layers of accounts/platforms propagating it.

Similar example of practices: https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2020/07/ghostwr...

The above relies on a fair bit of identity building as well, so Q's source/breeding in more anon platforms helps all the better. Intense stuff.

[non-entity]

I never really believed the scale at which foreign (or domestic) actors could affect people politically. I thought the idea that ads or social media posts had any significant effect was laughable.

One time, however, I was browsing Twitter, particularly a political thread. It was relatively level-headed (at least as far as social media politics goes) until I saw one reply. Everything about this account was a perfect caricature of what I despised. From the profile pic, to what they retweeted. It was stuff that was genuinely disgusting and most people would be appaled by it.

Their profile said they were a writer at "some website" and I decided to check it out. The site itself was rather boring with multiple articles that really didn't make sense and seemed more like SEO blogspam content, so out of curiosity I did a whois on the domain. The site was originally registered a month prior. The Twitter account was the same age. I realized that this probably wasn't a real person and that I had been successfully baited into being pissed off. Can't say who or what is projecting it, but looking back a lot of accounts I've seen in the replies of Twitter threads are probably the same story.

I had an idea to collect a database of similar accounts, since they seem pretty easy go find, just so I could play around with the data, but ended up not doing anything.

[dogman144]

> writer at "some website" and I decided to check it out

Follows, per that campaign doc I linked. It's interesting how complex it's getting!

That threat intel report was dropped, I went to the website to scope out some of the "authors" that were attributed and saw their articles. I went back a day later and the authors' posts and profiles were down.

What also stood out to me was that website direct linked to some more substantial websites like Zerohedge. Zerohedge has long been iffy, but it still gets read by professionals for the financial analysis it includes. It has a good rep in this area per some historical research it produced.

Just in terms of tight network links, Zerohedge leads to Drudge leads to Fox, which. That's fascinating to me. Your description of that website sounds a lot like campaign's base website for its "authors."

[zozbot234]

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if 'intelligence' [sic] actors were involved in signal-boosting all sorts of wacky urban legends and conspiracy theories - so why not Pizza gate and Q as well?

[jkhdigital]

Kind of like how intelligence actors fabricated Russiagate from whole cloth?

[Grakel]

No that was a lot more than just signal boosting.

[dylan604]

If you flood the world with crazy conspiracy theories, when news breaks of an actual crazy conspiracy, nobody will notice. Raise the noise level in the signal, do your clandestine activities in the open.

[curtis3389]

Ah, my favorite conspiracy theory. The master conspiracy theory:

All totally crazy conspiracy theories are created by "them" to discredit the real conspiracies.

[dogman144]

What makes this an intellectually interesting argument is decently-sourced speculation tha for technical campaigns, IC uses botnets or similar network noise to hide campaigns within. Since technical campaigns seem to pull methodology from pre-technical IC days, that makes these grand conspiracy theories have a weird kernel of truth.

[dylan604]

You can't be a fan of conspiracy theories and NOT subscribe to this one. That just wouldn't make sense.

[kipchak]

It makes a lot of sense to me in the realm of experimental and classified aircraft. Easier to leak junk designs and call sightings UFOs than keep things secret squirrel. According to the CIA half of the UFO sightings in the 50-60s were U-2s and SR-71s.[1] There's plenty more too, like the tacit Blue, RQ-3 Darkstar, FDL-5, and GD sneaky pete that sure look like "UFOs" to the untrained eye.

[1]https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a3995/4304207/

[confeit]

I am convinced that Q, if not started, was quickly taken over and turned into a Russian psyop. I expected the Mueller report to validate this (gross online astroturfing campaigns by state actors), but unless it is in the redacted parts, it is not there. But even casually investigating banned Twitter accounts used for Russian propaganda, you see a lot of clear connections with the "totally organic" Christian MAGA Qanon soccer mom accounts.

Leaves me mere speculation: I believe Q was initially conceived in case Trump had lost the election. It was to be a group of useful idiots/unwitting agents protesting about the "rigged" election, maybe even riled up to the point of taking up arms. Then when Trump won it was repurposed to sow disinformation about child sacrifice and child porn rings by the elite democrats. 9/11 saw the same thing: Massive efforts by Russia and Middle Eastern countries to seed inside job conspiracy theories. With the result that many Americans now believe 9/11 was an inside job, and can't really trust their government anymore (social cohesion damaged).

I believe some of these unwitting agents are so impressionable and gullible, that they can be made to act as "manchurian candidates", doing the bidding of foreign intelligence agencies (spreading propaganda, muddying the waters with disinformation and conspiracy, picking up a gun and going out to free children from a basement of a pizza parlor). I believe these intel agencies are able to infiltrate grassroots movements and subvert their ideals to be hostile to their host countries. I believe these agencies are able to create fake online realities, where unwitting agents are made to be believe they are part of something big, and everyone agrees with them, while they are psychologically manipulated.

[dogman144]

> I believe these intel agencies are able to infiltrate grassroots movements

Yeah this happened, per Mueller. Very large BLM Facebook group that organized rallies is an example.

I previously thought most of the psyops efforts were lower level IRA trolling, per what was in un-redacted Mueller.

Digging into some of the private sector threat intel reports around semi-attributed campaigns (see the link), there's evidence that more deliberate operations are occurring.

Most of those complex campaigns I read seemed focused on border states between Great Powers, and CONUS campaigns focused on sowing nonsense, chaos and mucking up comms channels. But I guess it's no large feat, beyond boldness, to employ something with more structured narrative inside the CONUS digital sphere of influence.

I mean "of course this is a thing that happens," but it's still a seriously interesting read on paper, it could easily be employed in the US, and it's pretty bold to do.

[carry_bit]

> I believe Q was initially conceived in case Trump had lost the election

When would've that been? The first "drop" by Q happened on October 28, 2017.

[confeit]

Before the elections, when Putin thought that Trump would lose, and influence campaigns were designed to promote him as a detractor and divider, calling out the rigged elections and the deep state swamp. With Roger Stone laundering Russian "opposition research", like he did with Wikileaks, at that time a front for Russian intelligence.

4Chan has been very involved with these intelligence ARGs since after Project Chanology. Pedowood morphed into Pizzagate. "Seth Rich murder" was pushed hard on 4Chan, to detract from the fact that the Russians hacked the democrats. And it works: Instead of being insulted and angry that a foreign nation state so polutes the brains of your country and riles up the population to the level of riots and extreme polarization, some like to think that Hillary had Seth Rich assassinated for leaking. With so much smoke, who knows what to think? All the while you see artificial KONY2012-style meme campaigns accusing Mueller of being a deep state fixer, synced on Twitter, Facebook, and 4chan.