Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream – people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).
The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.
(All of the stuff above is basically the “standard” for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you’re above a certain size.)
The thing is, no one manipulated against their own values think they are. A quick glance at your upvotes* shows plenty agree, but among those are at odds with each other. And that’s fine, we just need to be willing to listen to other opinions, and recognize no one has a truth monopoly, and none are free of our own cognitive biases.
what are invites?
Autocorrect corrected now.
I swear between autocorrect and cut and paste help I really feel like computing jumped the shark.