Firehose of Falsehood

Rhetoric is "the art of persuasion", essentially the art of changing people's minds through words and has systematically studied since the ancient Greeks, at the least.

Propaganda exists when large scale bureaucratic organizations attempt to persuade - ie, it's an extension of rhetoric and it has existed in a modern form since you have had modern bureaucratic states and organizations (large ancient organizations arguably wielded it).

The thing here is that the various labelings of the rhetoric-by-large-organization, from journalism to public relations to "information warfare" to disinformation etc, that have surfaced over the last, idk, 150 years, are themselves rhetorical forms. Our side "provides journalism", their side "spits out propaganda".

Moreover, finding a new colorful phrase for instances of propaganda has a couple important rhetorical uses - it gets people's attention and it makes people think some new and somewhat isolated phenomena is happening. "The big lie", "disinformation", "fake news", "extremist information" etc all might have a slightly different flavor to them, focusing on a given era, a given enemy and so-forth but they generally conceal more than they reveal. They're certainly rhetorical and I'd generally see them as propaganda.

And the topic of the current article? That too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric

In an iterated game, the counter-measures described look like a 'firehose of falsehood' too. This is an under-appreciated fact and it is very much like what happens in a physical conflict. If you walk in late, all you see are two people throwing punches. If you get them to stop, both will try to convince you that the other started it.

The wikipedia article's use of the word 'false' and seeing this as a tactic of just one side in several examples is both concerning and suspicious.

The Countermeasures listed strike me as insufficient mitigation. I think it’s pretty clear that Twitter/FB/Reddit etc are fundamentally prone to this kind of DDOS.

Globally writable lists/trees are probably just the wrong data structure for online interaction.

The citation for Trump using this "method" points to CNN as the authority. It's a battle for opinion-share and authority, fought on Wikipedia. Few would have expected Brian Stelter to become the king of historical authority.

It’s somewhat ironic that most of these examples are about Russian disinformation, while we hear constantly in American news and on social media sites about Russian disinformation.

The wiki article itself kind of reads like someone has an axe to grind.

As an example, see early reporting about the Rittenhouse case from the mainstream media