Yeah, it's basically just a conspiracy theorist's screed, poorly disguised as some kind of "COINTELPRO training manual". This part tells you the person's mindset:
> A second highly effective technique (which you can see in operation all the time at www.abovetopsecret.com) is 'consensus cracking.' To develop a consensus crack, the following technique is used. Under the guise of a fake account a posting is made which looks legitimate and is towards the truth is made - but the critical point is that it has a VERY WEAK PREMISE without substantive proof to back the posting.
Someone on a conspiracy forum posting a weak argument? Obviously that's just more proof of the conspiracy!
But related, what I believe does happen is that most media outlets employ not dissimilar techniques m.
People can not keep up with the pace of news. This means news sources can promote topics they want seen either by having them as "breaking", or emphasised on the front page. Simply given an enticing title.
Many people skim the title and perhaps a short blurb. You can editorialised here even if the article is nearly irrelevant you can give a biased view.
Who gets to decide the narrative? Well whoever you like. With balance being brought in vague terms "Smith says that this is an abuse of power and is unconstitutional, he likens it to slavery. Although some disagree" I see this pattern so common it's absurd.
Has more data arrived that makes the situation less inflammatory? We'll fix the article but now you can bury it cause it's less interesting.
Anyone who looks through the media's records as a "newspaper of record" sees an impeccably accurate and unbiased document. Anyone living with it gets intense bias.
This is how just about all rolling news services operate in my experience.
My solution is to prefer print media, they get one chance to produce the news and if it's biased in retrosoect I move to another source.
I get more than enough news from the economist (biased but not hiding it) and FT Weekend (trust me Saturday edition is great).
> CONCLUSION
>
> Remember these techniques are only effective
> if the forum participants DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THEM.
> Once they are aware of these techniques the
> operation can completely fail, and the forum
> can become uncontrolled.
A humorous site depicting various user modes [1] which had a message board for a long while and for a few years a forum - users submitted all sorts of information including iirc, a couple versions of the above, but mostly a wide range of observations including tactics to deal with (as a mere user) certain situations they might encounter.
