Copypaste made elsewhere, will edit to improve at some time:
"Information warfare" is the current establishments weapon of choice.
This battlefield involves manipulating the spread and amplification of pieces of information across a terrain.
I used to mostly post my theories about this stuff on the wikileaks sub, before my less-directly-wikileaks-related submissions started getting raided by shills, hence I started posting primarily on wayofthebern, where Fthumb unapologetically doesn't give a shit.
"Falsifiable" rumors going viral very quickly should itself be a red flag that something is going on, I'd compare it to smoke in the "where there's smoke, there's fire" expression. Such things are commonly done in information warfare when a side wants to avoid criticism by promoting falsehoods.
When an organization defends itself from leaks like that to discredit critics and keep "plausible deniability" it's called "steganography", though this tactic has evolved in a more aggressive way as of late, with forgeries spread by shills.
How it works
The first case I'll cite is something I've spammed more than enough already, but it is still an important read.
Greenwald's now-deleted-by-Salon piece, which some ingenuous bastard managed to restore an archive to:
https://archive.vn/bUsr5
FEB 11, 2011 05:12 ET
The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters
BY GLENN GREENWALD
...The leaked report suggested numerous ways to destroy WikiLeaks, some of them likely illegal -- including planting fake documents with the group and then attacking them when published; "creat[ing] concern over the security" of the site; "cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters"; and a "media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities."...
Emmanuel Macron's tech team claimed (but didn't) do a variation of the same thing when his email team was hacked as a defense.
They didn't even have to point to a single forgery before getting the MSM greenlight to insist that "many of the emails were fake", despite them being taken by surprise, and Wikileaks finding no forgeries.
https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/861181086445047808?lang=en
OMG. The Macron campaign planted fake emails for WikiLeaks to leak. Then made WikiLeaks look like idiots.
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1109978399756480515?lang=en
- NPR falsely claimed that WikiLeaks published inauthentic #Macronleaks during the French election when WikiLeaks published authentic leaks after the election. Other media falsely claimed the French government attributed the leaks to Russia. Retracted.
A bunch of idiots who tried to minimize discussion on Hunter Biden's emails did the same thing, claiming (without evidence) that there were forgeries pushed inside of the content, despite that not happening.
I absolutely despise this sort of MSM gas-lighting, which is why I made an older post trying to point out (and rebuild credibility) around the news with Tara Reade, and the DNC primary rigging in this post:
https://archive.is/j4dIR
...Why does this even matter? The rumor of CNN removing the clip from google play store is potentially disinformation, information that is intentionally false (but closely resembles something that's true) with the goal of discrediting a group.
...Something happened to Sanders supporters as the valid vote-rigging claims in Iowa (February), which was largely covered up and forgotten thanks to the Illinois disinfo distraction in March:
WATCH: Illinois News Airs Biden-Sanders Primary Results Day Before Election
By Stephanie Dube Dwilson
Updated Mar 16, 2020 at 6:49pm
WATCH: Illinois News Airs Biden-Sanders Primary Results Day Before Election...
The reason a hidden character would intentionally spread a rumor like that is BECAUSE it is falsifiable, and thus is expected to discredit fact-based similar appearing claims
Not a great look: Failed Iowa caucus app is deeply linked to self-declared winner Buttigieg… and Hillary Clinton
4 Feb, 2020
A similar attempt was made a while back when John Conyers had leaks about sexual assault allegations by a political activist Mike Cernovich, he was targeted and given a (false)/[forged] disinfo piece about Schumer...
Anyways the key point to learn.
Pay attention to the details of "falsifiable" information going viral, and consider the after-effects. The "fact-checking" industry does not serve a pro-social purpose possibility of something being falsifiable, and if it is suspiciously falsifiable.
As an added bonus: Once you understand this part of information warfare, you will understand the movie inception.
https://archive.is/tUnt7
I was thinking about the OPCW the other day with respect to information, credibility, and political consequences.
I was thinking about this quite a bit, and I realized that the OPCW (ironically) actually serves to provide a platform incentivizing for chemical attacks to occur, rather than objectively trying to prevent chemical use on civilians...
...A historical comparison would be the Japanese Epidemic prevention and water purity department, a group that on paper was focused on PREVENTING outbreaks of diseases, and I'm sure most of the affiliates actually thought that's what they were doing, yet some hidden compartments of that group were the ones intentionally deploying weaponized diseases on civilians
...I find it so much easier to deal with idiotic/manipulative BS like this when I understand the motivations/agendas of people promoting it.
Psyops nonsense is certainly annoying, but it's not even close to being all powerful.
I like to think of "Lucid dreaming" as an analogy to post-Psy-ops thought.
In order to build awareness for lucidity within a dream, people learn how to test their environment for congruence. Disinfo and psyops pushes are like a very poorly designed, un-creative, boring excuse for a "dream". Except this "dream" is designed to indoctrinate people into believing smears on a target.
Understanding how it works is essential to collapsing it.
The information warfare/dreams connection is coincidentally enough also made in the plot of Inception, though I arrived at my own analogy in a divergent manner and noticed this after the fact. But this "dream collapsing" scene is great.
The real life parallel is very interesting as well, information warfare is very much interweaved and arguably inseparable from psychological warfare. This scene for example is a clear analogy for information-warfare mercenary groups:
https://youtu.be/V3-a58Wt2tk?t=27
A corporate parallel to compare it to would be this ebay case:
http://archive.vn/38wz9
...Prosecutors said the plan was two-fold. First, the eBay members allegedly harassed the couple who published the newsletter with online deliveries at all times of the day and night and sent threatening messages. Then, the eBay team would contact the couple so they could proclaim that eBay noticed the harassment and offered to help them get out of the threatening environment eBay itself created.
Prosecutors called this the “White Knight Strategy.”
"In essence, the plan was for eBay to arrive to 'rescue' the Victims from the very harassment that the defendants and their co-conspirators had themselves created in order to earn the Victims’ good will," the prosecutors wrote in criminal information filed in court.
MSM do this tactic much, much more often, which I'll have to elaborate on separately.
But rewatching inception while understanding this will dramatically change the movie so that it actually make sense, when you understand you're seeing the perspective of mercenary info-warfare trained intelligence agents, that the infiltration and such involves intelligence espionage. The films use of "inception" is defined as an indirect, undetectable indoctrination to guide and modify the victims behavior, and is accurately described as the much more difficult task.
there doesn't seem to be anything here