reddit's chief site architect had to send out a public twitter to the JIDF a few months back because they were manipulating the website (maybe the biggest forum on the internet?) in a pretty substantial way against the TOS. This type of stuff definitely happens, and far more than one would think.
Think how manipulative someone who was paid to monitor and 'steer' a couple different forums would be? They would have time and motive to more or less study the forum top to bottom and really get into the meta-aspects of its populations and culture. It's the same as intelligence operations but without all the risk and and nothing really to lose. It makes a lot of sense from an intelligence perspective; public 'discussion' formats are dying out to forums and podcasts pretty quick, so I think to assume that the intelligence community isn't already involved is kinda silly. Also, with all the focus on 'terrorism', spending time in fringe areas like internet forums has probably been optimized to be very efficient for groups like them.
Think how manipulative someone who was paid to monitor and 'steer' a couple different forums would be? They would have time and motive to more or less study the forum top to bottom and really get into the meta-aspects of its populations and culture. It's the same as intelligence operations but without all the risk and and nothing really to lose. It makes a lot of sense from an intelligence perspective; public 'discussion' formats are dying out to forums and podcasts pretty quick, so I think to assume that the intelligence community isn't already involved is kinda silly. Also, with all the focus on 'terrorism', spending time in fringe areas like internet forums has probably been optimized to be very efficient for groups like them.
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