The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies (2012)

Unfortunately, there really are dedicated and heavy operations by government organizations and corporations to try and sabotage debate. These operations are well recorded, especially corporations such as Microsoft and Samsung who are well known for it. It's just a fact of online forums. Of course, it's also a fact that a lot of people obviously hold diverse opinions. It is just plain impossible to be able to reliably tell the difference between astroturfing, trolling and genuine opinions.

Honestly, the best solution is simply to state your argument and leave as back and forth debating is generally useless. This applies in both the case where you are arguing against someone who appears to be astroturfing and where you are in the position of having an unpopular opinion. You're just wasting both your time and others with pointless arguments. HN is pretty good on this point by having that 'deep thread cooldown'.

If an opinion echos the line pushed by propagandists and PR firms, would you be more likely to be skeptical of it? Would you start looking for the polished turd, the pig with lipstick on? After all, if nobody was influenced to parrot those lines, the PR firm would find itself out of business.

Yeah, sometimes that is true but off topic of the linked documentation which outlines in detail how to derail discussions, much like your point. You are peripherally correct but off topic and easily refutable, so many points! Well done sir.

> Some people here scoff at the idea that COINTELPRO-type operations are still under way

Given the sheer scale of pseudonymous commentary in internet fora in recent years, the attitude that "it can't be happening" is naive to the point of utter ridiculousness. Quietly steering the public conversation is an obvious and attractive idea to any existing power. And inexpensive to try out.

It helps that US recently passed a law that allows the government to spread propaganda in US. And you just know that when something like that gets passed, it's probably been happening for at least 5-10 years.

John Young has been at this for years, and has drawn flak from all governments from the information that he has been posting to his site, so I wouldn't call it black propaganda (nor take everything presented here as an absolute guide), but I pretty much agree with everything else you said. His self proclaimed "amateur"[0] ways seems to me to be quite effective especially when sensitive information does get posted (which are cached,copied elsewhere, and removes the motive elements that are with other organizations/people that do similar things) before he gets the take-down requests. Though I have to admit, some of the things that have (not) happened to him compared to others like him make me wonder…

[0]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20011106-281.html

Definitely black propaganda. None of this comes from GCHQ. The original for the first part of the document is on DailyPaul [0], published in 2008 (before the alleged Cryptome 'leak' in 2012.

Reddit user /u/itsnotlupus found more sources for the rest of the document. [1]

[0]: http://www.dailypaul.com/60831/techniques-for-dilution-misdi...

[1]: https://pay.reddit.com/r/conspiratard/comments/wzg2i/i_think...

I wonder if there is a database or list of known forum accounts who have practiced these techniques? Would be useful for modelling.

A detector for such techniques would make a wonderful standard tool for all forums everywhere.

Run all media through it. Assign a "bullshit rating" to stuff.

Correct but the 2014 PDF links at the top of the page corroborate this info and as far as I know, they are both Snowden leaks. The gchq-online-deception.pdf is particularly scary to read in terms of how the information is presented, let alone the subject matter.

Later leaks including Snowden have further corroborated this foil hat nonsense.