This would be tremendously comforting. After reading the book 'Linked', I have been worried. It presents a possibility that I hope no one is immoral enough to

This would be tremendously comforting. After reading the book 'Linked', I have been worried. It presents a possibility that I hope no one is immoral enough to pursue. If it's claims of how social networks cluster, and how both important and fragile the most critical edges in those networks are in terms of enabling the society-wide spread of information/viewpoints/etc are all true.... it opens a very dangerous door. In the book, they claim that something like 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' works not because of those heavily-connected nodes, but primarily because of nodes which bridge mostly-disconnected clusters. So like a member of a biker gang who plays bridge with his elderly aunts knitting circle on Sundays would be an example of that. Ideas can flow from the group of bikers to the group of elderly knitters pretty much only through him. And almost by necessity, those links are weak. Once broken, for information to travel from one of those groups to the other immediately becomes extremely difficult. So conjecture that there were an organization that had the ability to observe the social network of peoples communications. Conjecture that they also felt that they had a mandate to protect the status quo, at least on the largest scale, and to do what was within their power to prevent things like widespread social unrest, formation of disruptive political movements, etc. If they had the ability to interfere with those communication networks even in a very mild way, they could affect the most successful and quiet oppression in history. By bouncing a few emails, dropping a few packets here and there, communication between these weak links would break down pretty easily. And once mostly-connected clusters only talk amongst themselves primarily, it becomes fundamentally impossible for widespread social change to occur. Now this is a very 'blind' approach, of course. You don't get to pick which ideas get isolated and which are permitted to spread. But, you do gain a guarantee that even if an idea is very powerful, it can never spread far enough fast enough to gain widespread acceptance. Sure there might be "large groups" that get very loud about it... but they wouldn't have an 'inside man' to introduce the idea in ways acceptable to the mostly-disconnected group, so it simply wouldn't spread. I've been wondering for several years now if this kind of manipulation would leave telltale fingerprints.