I think your post could do with a less harsh tone.

If you want empirical evidence of groups and organizations employing these tactics it might be better to simply ask or search for it, than to paint your debaters as paranoid bullshitters.

I think you don't get it if you ask: what value is there in derailing a conversation?

Ask instead: what value was there in spamming a certain religious Usenet channel? What value is there in getting a Wikipedia article deleted or locked? What value is there for a reputation management company in pushing away negative, but legit, search results for a client? What value is there in employing trolls to counter terrorists online? What value is there in the 50 cent army? What value was there in the Wikileaks slides, where it was opted that journalists would be smeared or false information would be leaked as to discredit Wikileaks? What value is there in persona management software and upvote squads? What value is there in controlling virality?

For humor, I started to read responses here on H/N to see how they match up.

> I had problems reading all of this because the tin foil hat I'm wearing kept slipping down over my eyes.

From the article: "5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues."

Overall, well-done on this post.

In support, I would say that it is fairly easy, depending upon your perspective, to apply most of the various "rules" in this article to about everyone's post.

I read that piece more in the sense of how one could go about using disinformation and other techniques to disrupt a conversation in a hostile manner, rather then whether someone aka "the Government" actually were. To me it is at least arguable that there are powerful incentives today to do exactly this, disrupt discussion and tone down activism, making them look like lunatics on the fringes. Given such a situation where someone is inclined to do this, isn't it also arguable that these techniques might be of some effect?

The thing that I find interesting is whether these techniques might be countered. I mean, along the lines of building a better platform for discussion that is more robust towards this kind of manipulation from an hostile minority. Now that is something that's interesting for the HN crowd to discuss, isn't it?

As a counterargument, if one is able to get past their own internal paranoia about why other people are doing the things listed here, the information laid out is quite good for what makes a bad poster bad, how to avoid them, and how to not be a bad poster.

You could argue that this stuff shouldn't be framed in the conspiracy theory idea, but then it wouldn't have gotten as much attention, which could start a discussion about the most direct way to present this information, but then if you don't give it some controversy how is it going to get the necessary exposure for people to read and listen? You might have a better manual, but if nobody reads it, it's useless.

On that note, who else wants to try writing a better manual than these guys? Is it even worth it? After all, the most important thing is to get people thinking on the right track, and stuff like this is at least a step in the right direction.

Yes, it's a helpful article when we put aside the mention of "spooks and feds" and humorless tone. Because it does discuss common problems. Like: "By implementing continual and non-related postings that distract and disrupt (trolling) the forum readers they are more effectively stopped from anything of any real productivity."

I've frankly often imagined that government agents just amuse themselves by passively watching activists infight online. (In fact, intervening would probably be discouraged because it ruins bets on who cracks next.) There's more than enough hobbyist trolls, entryists and egomaniacs to add that single drop of blood into the water, to get the carnage started. Many wisely exit the forum, while those who remain have their time and energy stolen forever.

Virtually all (or at least most) of these problems are easily preventable ailments. Sensible moderation goes a long way.

(Of course, activist groups are commonly infiltrated, and those infiltrators may prod people into doing foolish things. One joke is that social movements would collapse without infiltrators, because they're the only ones paying dues on time. Just important to take sensible steps, rather than overreact.)

I wonder how many groups end up with only infiltrators in them, like in G.K Chesterton's "The Man who was Thursday". There was a case I heard of few years back (although I cannot find a reference) of UK and French police importing drugs to the UK entirely by accident as each thought that the other group was the actual criminals.

I believe that when Anonymous hacked into HBGeary's email server they found software products being pitched to businesses and government agencies that was designed to support astroturfing forums.

I'm not sure exactly what the intent of the OP is, but it is clear that the US government is employing these tactics, or similar ones. How do I know? They've explicitly said so! There was an article a few days ago on wired.com about this very issue. The program is called "Viral Peace", and aims to "annoy, frustrate and humiliate denizens of online extremist forums."

I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned this, as I was sure I had read the the wired article via HN. In any case, here it is:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/counterterrorism-tro...

> I'm not sure exactly what the intent of the OP is

I saw the link on cryptome, read it, and decided to test hacker news with it. I feel like a pt. whore, but I am pleased with the results:

# my submission was not censored (far from it!)

# I learned some of the history of this meme

# People honestly discussed a variety of dimensions to the issue

# The community that thinks about these challenges expanded

Thank you all.

You're welcome.

Nice try, obvious CIA forum influence suppression operative

The fact that it's hard to prove is what makes it so effective. People blatantly post CIA-created propaganda on HN all the time, and even then it's virtually impossible to prove that they actually work for the government, so imagine how much harder it is when people are actually being more subtle.

Could you give some examples of "blatantly CIA-created propaganda" here on HN? If it's virtually impossible to prove, how are you so sure?

Examples of CIA doing 'impossible' things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#History_in...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mkultra

I acknowledge this is not proof of shinanigans on HN.

Citing economic data from the CIA World Fact Book isn't exactly propaganda.

Ever wonder why it is that the CIA says that the US has a 99% literacy rate, despite the fact that this is vastly higher than the Department of Education estimates?

To quote from Jonathan Kozol's book Illiterate in America, "For one hundred years, starting in 1840, the census posed the question of the population's literacy level in its ten-year compilations. The government removed this question from its survey in the 1940 census. The reason, according to a U.S. Census Bureau publication, was a general conviction that 'most people [by this time] could read and write ...'

In 1970, pressured by the military, the Bureau of the Census agreed to reinstate the literacy question. Even then, instead of posing questions about actual skills, the census simply asked adults how many years of school they had attended. More than 5 percent of those the census reached replied that they had had less than a fifth grade education. For no known reason, the government assumed that four fifths of these people probably could read and, on this dangerous assumption, it was publicly announced that 99 percent of all American adults could read and write. These are the figures which the U.S. government passed on to the United Nations for the purposes of worldwide compilations and comparisons."[1]

In short the CIA world factbook is basically propaganda in order to make the US look like the best country on earth in order to justify a foreign policy based on subjugating people of 'inferior races'. I'm not saying that every single person who cites it is either a government shill or a white supremacist, but where there's smoke there's often a fire.

[1] http://eserver.org/courses/spring97/76100o/readings/kozol.ht...

I have no dispute with the idea that statistics have biases.

However, the fact is that most of the time the parts of the CIA World Fact book quoted on HN are GDP, GDP/capita, life expectancy etc. There are often biases in these figures as well, but the CIA World Fact Book is really just acting as a convenient aggregator of these numbers.

Again, with emphasis added:

Citing economic data from the CIA World Fact Book isn't exactly propaganda

The beauty of US-style propaganda is it isn't done through state organs, but by covert infiltration of private organizations. Elements of propaganda are introduced this way into otherwise legitimate content. The propaganda exists as a parasite on a host of legitimacy and ends up being unwittingly spread by citizens themselves. By influencing popular media, the propaganda elements influence the tone of culture.

If there is one thing I hate about conspiracy crackpots, it's that they could not, in their wildest dreams, imagine that somebody simply disagrees with them, even if their life would depend on it. No, he must be a 'shill', paid by the CIA, the Mossad or some other evil entity.

The crackpots are the shills, and they effectively discredit the idea of shills, thus allowing shills to operate effectively at lower levels.