[iamadog1029]

This was discussed years ago, but it's been a reality for a long while. There are articles dating back to 2007 kind of dabbling into this, and I remember years ago a whistleblower, I think she was a journalist employed by one of these companies, and if I recall did a TED talk exposing a commercial enterprise built to both whitewash and smear people, and probably companies alongside it. One of their mediums was Wikipedia. Maybe someone here has a better recollection of it than I do?

But yeah, I don't see that this is novel. There's been both the architecture and the motivation for individual, commercial, and political disinformation since the inception of language. The rise in scale isn't even that alarming, they're probably actually just uncovering activity that started long ago, I mean this is just radical PR or propaganda, which has been around unobserved for centuries. I'd readily agree that the pre-liberal Catholic church, and the clergy under it, were staked so highly in justifying Divine Right that it became a sort of disinformation that had the added benefit of lining the pockets of the Pope down to the parishioner. Dumas and Hugo both had asides in their books, Monte Cristo and Hunchback respectively, both of which expounded that truth is fickle. And if Hugo was being intellectually honest, he had reason to believe that even in the 15th century Paris was rife with disinformation.

It's good to see these sort of things published from time to time, maybe it will breed some more skeptics, but mostly it'll be a talking point.

[dd36]

What is history’s solution?

[iamadog1029]

Not history's, but the present's solution to history is the Lindy effect. I don't think it can be dealt with in the present, truth must necessarily be sieved out and separated from the limitless chaff.

[rbanffy]

> This was discussed years ago, but it's been a reality for a long while.

This is technically true, but the damage unleashed in the past decade is unprecedented, multiplied by social networks that didn't exist in the past. Just from the top of my head, we see the defamation campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, the coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Trump's election and the subsequent erosion of American democracy, the continuous propping up of far-right extremists in Europe and the election of a fascist lunatic in Brazil that caused record-breaking COVID mortality and unprecedented rainforest destruction.