Thoughts on censorship through Impact Manipulation and Sentiment Pollution

Tree

Tree

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kiwifarms.net
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Oct 2, 2020
Prepare for the obvious to be stated at length, as a record of sorts.

I was thinking, what makes us feel it's worthwhile to share funny memes, hot takes, or our own thoughts online? It must be because at some level both (1) we want what we're sharing to have an impact and (2) we believe that it will.

There are many smart people who do more talking than doing. That may sound diminutive, but these people have a lot of impact in the current year. Many are paid to generate words with given agendas. Cable news talking heads, university professors, or NGO think tank brains come to mind. But here we're concerned with non-regime approved messaging and the controls placed on it.

Whether it's from dissident scholars directly or a meme brigade, if the messaging is silo'd away from the people who involve themselves in the world, from people who make decisions which affect other's lives, by being banned off facebook or algorithmically cut off from people within three degrees of decision making or an authoritative opinion, then their influence is shot. This can be business owners, judges, political aids, managers, or just any guy who commands the respect of others. There are people in all strata for which reaching them has an outsized impact. Filtering what people hear with this in mind constitutes "Impact Manipulation".

Populism happened because the internet enabled valid complaints about the current regime to spread unabated. Since the Trump era, there are ongoing operations funded for the purpose of searching out troublesome sentiments online and counter signaling them. This targeting allows for skewing the passing reader's perception of the public sentiment around a topic, as well as injecting vat grown regime approved ideas into the conversation. This is "Sentiment Pollution".

Through the use of Sentiment Pollution and Impact Manipulation, among other tactics, like literal federal agents being on corporate moderation teams, the brief anarchy and freedom the internet provided has been deliberately massacred to maintain the current order.

The complaints have been entirely ignored. They were known before they were voiced.
 
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Call it what it is--shilling. And internet shill brigades are nothing new. Apparently the first major, sustained internet shill campaign were the CCP's paid shills, who started almost 20 years ago. Western internet shills I don't think started until the late 00s and it was all corporate stuff like fake fanboys for vidya shit or offline shills moved online (i.e. street teams for shitty bands no one's ever heard of). But what this did was it made me suspicious about user-submitted content like reviews, because I remember thinking as a teenager that user-submitted reviews and forum discussion was always more reliable than what some magazine/journo thought about it (since everyone knows those guys are fake). Turns out it's just as easy to manipulate user-submitted content..

Political shills definitely existed but I think it was CTR-type shit which both parties did through PR firms. Best example is if you search "Renfamous" here on Kiwifarms and you find out this obese blue-haired commie back in the early 10s worked as a paid shill for daddy's PR firm, and one campaign she did was spam websites advocating for California's gay marriage ban (hard to believe now that was actually a thing, or just how well it did). The big difference now is that it's legal to propagandize American citizens thanks to Obama quietly repealing a certain law in 2013--before then it was just American glowies spamming Arab websites and probably Russians and Chinese with pro-West shit.

My guess is the deep state thought they had it in the bag and could win the old-fashioned way by increasing CTR/ShareBlue/etc.'s budget, but when that didn't work in 2016, that's when they brought in the actual regime propagandists like the Chair Force over at Elgin AFB or the FBI injecting anti-Russian conspiracies into random discussions on 8/pol/ as that court document showed. I think you have a mix of all it, like I believe we have ShareBlue shills here and after registration reopened, I guarantee Elgin and FBI are shilling here too. It's all a very subtle sort of manipulation, and also a very good delay tactic since every minute you spend arguing with these retards is a minute you aren't posting valuable content.
 
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NerdShamer said:
People would rather mock about how there's an retarded pink elephant in the room because they believe that it'll eventually off itself from verbal abuse instead of actually putting it out of it's misery
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Well it's just that, telling the difference between mucking about and meaningful communication. I think it's healthy to not particularly enjoy fruitless interaction. I think we have a crisis of being able to identify what is and isn't worthwhile online, especially as things have become more subtly adversarial with things like Impact Manipulation and Sentiment Pollution.

And then perhaps terminally so as AI is employed to do both. I hate how it inclines people to warm to the idea of digital IDs, despite the fact that these tactics will continue to be used by the regime who can issue their agents as many IDs as they need.
 
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What is meaningful communication, anyways? Is it wasting Null's precious server space to bring awareness to it? Is it seizing the initiative to spread the truth on social media? Or perhaps is it solely participating in long-winded debates in order to discover the exact type of mindset of what drives people to do idiotic acts?
 
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