Why do you think this?
I had never heard this before, and to be honest it immediately gave off whacko vibes, so I Googled it and found this article that says it is false - https://theconversation.com/theres-a-conspiracy-theory-that-...
> But a C.I.A. document, recently declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, provides a detailed account of at least one instance in which the agency mustered its propaganda machinery to support an issue of far more concern to Americans, and to the C.I.A. itself, than to citizens of other countries.
> “Conspiracy theories,” the cable went on, “have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit circulation of such claims in other countries.”
> Among the arguments that the agency suggested were that the Warren Commission had conducted “as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition.”
> “Point out also,” the cable directed, “that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.”
> These critics and others, the C.I.A. said, should be depicted as “wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in,” politically or financially “interested” in disproving the commission's conclusion, “hasty or inaccurate in their research, or infatuated with their own theories.”
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191121033812/https://www.nytim...
I think there is a terminology problem in this discussion and it will cause lots of us in the comments to chase our tails.
I think the credibility word is too subjective to be useful in this discussion. I think most conspiracy accusations are unprovable by most of us (unless we are federal prosecutors) so I assume that both logic conspiracies and fantasy conspiracies must be evaluated with equally few facts.
I think the myth that the CIA created/empowered the term “conspiracy theory” has lots of the same symptoms of fantasy conspiracy theories themselves. It apparently empowers the powerful and gives additional persecution claims to those who are labeled “crazy”.
The most interesting part of your comment was to get me thinking about the role of bots (and AI in the future) in crafting both hypotheses and researching them. I’m curious if social media bots may give us the tools to effectively test the psychological traits of people who are more likely to adopt theories about less coherent conspiracies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
tl;dr: the USSR started the conspiracy theory that HIV was created in a US lab.
Among other tactics, they wished to be able to use the term as a dismissal of anyone who got information about their real operations. This is very well documented, and is common among intel agencies of many countries.
It is also well documented, that the CIA and others (KGB etc.), have intentionally spread disinformation, from AIDS to Apollo hoaxes, in the same channel as (limited) legitimate information. This tactic is called "poisoning the well," the limited real info is a "limited hangout." If you put those terms into any search, youll find reams of documents detailing examples. Usually, these are the actions of some foreign service, analysed and released for the public service.
When the author began to align obviously false information with more credible things, what he is seeing are these intentional networks of lies that our own services have created. These things are not organic. He identifies common psychological features in these posters, because the intel agencies strongly select based on personality.
Also, how many of the accounts he investigated are bots? Was he able to prove that real individual people were doing this?
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Its been debunked already!