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> I also suspect that many of those artfully worded and subtly manipulative email forwards of the late 90s and 2000s May have been Russian psyops experimenting

> I also suspect that many of those artfully worded and subtly manipulative email forwards of the late 90s and 2000s May have been Russian psyops experimenting with viral information. They were always just a little too clever and effective while trying to look colloquial and organic, and I always suspected it was some PR outfit somewhere cranking them out, but could never divine a reason for the non-political ones. But maybe it was psyops testing and learning techniques in a long game just coming to light now. How can you possibly post comment on the elderly not having highly attuned bs detectors and then close with that paragraph? What irony!

QuotedForTruth 8y ago
What part of that sounds like BS? We know they have industrial scale operations to post propaganda now. [1] Obviously this had to start somewhere. I'm pretty sure many intelligence agencies have been researching how information spread on the internet ever since it was created. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll-factory.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll...
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  The US has been running its own industrial propaganda machine since at least the end of WWII. Carl Bernstein and other journalists uncovered a number of "influencer" and cutout operations in the late 70s which placed CIA-sourced stories in the supposedly respectable and independent mainstream media. The line between honest journalism, state propaganda, and fake news has always been a very porous one. In fact there are different propaganda modalities for different demographics. Rather like advertising - if you think a message is transparent, clumsy, and ridiculous, that doesn't mean you're clever enough to be immune to manipulation, it means you're not the target audience for it.
SkyMarshal 8y ago
>How can you possibly post comment on the elderly not having highly attuned bs detectors and then close with that paragraph? What irony! Are you saying you think all those email forwards during that time period were all organic and none were the result of PR/propaganda/psyops operations? I'm honestly not sure which is the null hypothesis here, and thus who owns the burden of proof.

QuotedForTruth 8y ago

What part of that sounds like BS? We know they have industrial scale operations to post propaganda now. [1] Obviously this had to start somewhere. I'm pretty sure many intelligence agencies have been researching how information spread on the internet ever since it was created. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll-factory.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll...

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
The US has been running its own industrial propaganda machine since at least the end of WWII. Carl Bernstein and other journalists uncovered a number of "influencer" and cutout operations in the late 70s which placed CIA-sourced stories in the supposedly respectable and independent mainstream media. The line between honest journalism, state propaganda, and fake news has always been a very porous one. In fact there are different propaganda modalities for different demographics. Rather like advertising - if you think a message is transparent, clumsy, and ridiculous, that doesn't mean you're clever enough to be immune to manipulation, it means you're not the target audience for it.

SkyMarshal 8y ago

>How can you possibly post comment on the elderly not having highly attuned bs detectors and then close with that paragraph? What irony! Are you saying you think all those email forwards during that time period were all organic and none were the result of PR/propaganda/psyops operations? I'm honestly not sure which is the null hypothesis here, and thus who owns the burden of proof.