The military and corporate campaign to destroy social media

[Bragi]

There have been several threads here of late about military and corporate campaigns to mount social media PR campaigns that involve using multiple sock puppets to push PR messages.

For example, here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4775085

Personally, I don't think the social media campaigns of the military and corporate interests are really intended simply to insert their PR messages into the online peer-to-peer conversation using paid-for fake personas.

Rather, I think the real goal of these ostensible PR campaigns is to proceed with them relatively openly, knowing that media will start to write about these campaigns, and people will start to hear about this.

The idea is that as people generally become more aware of these campaigns, they will realize that they can't actually trust social media to deliver unfiltered, peer-to-peer exchange of information, ideas, conversation, etc. the way they might have thought previously.

Instead, people will increasingly become suspicious of social media channels, and confidence in them will decline.

And that, I think, is the goal here.

Wikileaks and social media and the recent rebellions in the Arab world have all confirmed the real-world potential empowerment that can flow from peer-to-peer use of the Internet and social media.

This is why the military and corporate interests are mounting these campaigns. Their long-term goal is to make peer-to-peer communications via social media an unreliable and discredited platform.

Since exposing these PR-bots actually helps to sell the core message that these platforms are not credible, I'm not sure what should be done to counter this strategy. I'm interested to know what other DUers think about this.

[Bragi]

1. Self-kick

(A sad attempt to get some traction for this topic.)

[golddigger]

2. K&R

[jberryhill]

3. Nothing beats developing critical thinking skills

And there is a difference between critical thinking, paranoia, and meta-paranoia.

[Bragi]

4. Not sure I understand your point

Yes, critical thinking is important. However, I'm not sure how that might protect social media from erosion of credibility due to deliberate efforts by big-monied government and corporate interests to sabotage its credibility by an invasion of sock puppets.

Let me put it this way: if you and I, or a third party observer here, begin to question if the other persons in a discussion are secret paid hacks (which we have no way of uncovering) then not only is the discussion over, but the credibility of this platform to support future peer-to-peer conversation is reduced.

That's what bothers me so much about undercover sock-puppet military and corporate social media campaigns. The end result is to undermine the efficacy of social media, which should be and could be an empowering peer-to-peer communications tool.

[azul]

5. This is a complex situation of challenging the truth.

For revolutionaries looking for information and communication and organization to stage some event, suspecting that they might be being set up could disrupt their activities.

For controlling authoritarian followers the truth and its sources need to be made questionable, then the orthodox truth can be given from the authority source and other possible truths can be ignored or refuted. "Even if that is true, I still don't believe it." -emotion or fear of being kicked out of the group overrides reason.

And that uncertainty of any truth and its source also works to divide just about all people. The tendency to hear what you want to hear and see what you want to see has many people searching for alternative news sources when they see contradictions or lies from regular sources. Then you get people entrenched in their notions and suspicious or disdaining of other views of the facts.

And letting the truth slip away allows criminal behavior because there is not authoritative reporting the facts objectively that can expose them.