[dQw4w9WgXcQ]

> Powerful groups will mass populate the internet with fake content to skew public perception.

You're naive if you think this hasn't been happening for at least 8-10 years now. All of Reddit and Twitter are heavily targeted by nation states to foment various anti-America and disunity agendas. The power of the United States is its unity, so they will take any and every opportunity to strike at that. The most obvious being Russia attempting to influence election outcomes.

There are certainly organic humans caught in the mix, but all that antiwork, LateStageCapitalism, "America is so divisive", Marxist BS you hear repeated constantly across Reddit and Twitter is broadly manufactured far more than it is truly organic.

What's unfortunate is you scatter enough seed and eventually it will find roots somewhere. The earlier the better when it comes to influencing middle school kids, etc. Capture the undiscerning early who don't consider their sources or motives behind information and they just gargle it as truth and start regurgitating it because it feels right or confirmation bias takes over.

If people truly knew how many of their aggressive political "views" were primarily driven by manufactured echo chambers it'd be embarrassing.

[spupe]

> There are certainly organic humans caught in the mix, but all that antiwork, LateStageCapitalism, "America is so divisive", Marxist BS you hear repeated constantly across Reddit and Twitter is broadly manufactured far more than it is truly organic.

What evidence do you have of that?

[npteljes]

I don't have evidence of that, but you can look at one superpower's effort to influence the people by the internet, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

Or, an incident where one country's patriotic page was run from an entirely different country: https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/10/01/usa-facebook-page-ukr...

I think the situation with content is similar to protests. There are all sorts of people at a major protest. There's a good chunk of "organic protesters", who are there for the original cause. Then some are there because they like the feeling of something happening, the buzz of a crowd, the hype. You could call this the bandwagon effect for example. There will be people there, leader types, who see it as an opportunity to further a goal of theirs. There will be people who want to fuck things up, and feel that this will be a good opportunity for them to let go. And there might be people, who are planted there to start an actual riot - for example, in order to dismiss the original group as being overly violent and thus their goal reprehensible.

It's hard to guess what percentage of that whole crowd is "organic" to the original cause. But it can be seen that a good lot of them aren't.

[spupe]

This is evidence that state actors influence the internet, which I think is uncontroversial. However, the specific statement here was that these left-wing communities were the result of this influence, which I find highly doubtful and in itself perhaps an attempt to de-legitimize their cause.

[dQw4w9WgXcQ]

> What evidence do you have of that?

What evidence do you have that's not that case?

See, I can write a throwaway comment too that adds nothing to the discussion.

[spupe]

When you make a claim, the burden of proof is on you. Uncovering the fact you have no evidence actually contributes to the discussion in my opinion.

[dQw4w9WgXcQ]

Well then, good thing this is a fucking discussion board and not a dissertation defense where I'm on the stand and you're the committee. You can toss your hat in the ring and explain your views as well, still waiting for you to add something to the discussion Socrates. Let's uncover another fact which is that you've said nothing substantive so far and the absence of my desire to explain things to a zero-effort internet poster doesn't therefore rationally conclude the evidence doesn't exist.

[akomtu]

Not really. All he needs is to convince the readers, and not all of them need a peer-reviewed study published in a reputable journal as a proof.

[spupe]

Sure. Some readers are convinced by pointless claims, others are more discerning.