(This article is broken up into several pages. Use the dropdown menu below or the navigation menu at the bottom of each page to be sure you read the whole article, it all ties together!)
It must be said at the outset that the behaviors and tactics described below aren’t limited by any means to the social media sphere other than the raw mechanics of using social media as the delivery mechanism for disinformation. Nor are they limited to high-powered international politics, or even professionally organized information management firms.
These behaviors are fundamentally those engaged in by those who see life as competition and are set out to win even if it hurts someone else along the way. Whether it’s musicians and comedians competing for ticket sales, actors competing for roles, nations competing for resources, politicians competing for office, there is a moral calculus in every decision as to whether one human being or the next, making the decision for themselves hundreds of times every day, chooses to compete against their fellow human beings, or to work with them against the greater challenges facing the species as a whole.
Those who choose to put themselves above others are absolute master artisans with these behaviors. Even to the level of family dysfunction and relationship abuse patterns, it all shows up the same way in the end, and it’s all corrosive to our individual and collective well-being and health.
That’s why It is absolutely crucial to understand and teach yourself to identify and reject social media disinformation. The damage done just in the last few years by this problem includes millions of lives lost.
One classic tactic of disinformation campaigns is “counter-intelligence.” This phrase gets thrown around a great deal in online conversation these days, often by conspiracy theorists and sovereign citizen types and the like, but it very much is a thing, and you are very much being bombarded with it.
I recently ran into a good example of aggressive counter-intelligence with a high likelihood* of being a deliberate and planned disinformation campaign via a message posted by a page labeling itself with leftist, anti-capitalist terminology.
*One of the core problems with online disinformation campaigns is that you can often never hope to be 100% certain that your instincts are correct. That’s why it’s critical that you keep them razor-sharp.
I won’t link to the page or the displayed content, but I don’t have to hide the page’s name, either. The piece immediately caught my attention, not because oh a swastika or I care what some neofash has to say, they all say the same things anyway. What caught my attention is that this page is “calling out” the Biden administration, treating this ridiculous and obvious display as thought it were in any way meaningful to a thoughtful consideration of…well, anything.
I didn’t even pay attention to what page this appeared on until after I’d commented, and while I wasn’t ridiculously aggressive I also minced no words. What I said was, in short: this is absolute nonsense for a million reasons. I laid my case out firmly, clearly, and without flinching, but also without profanity or threats or aggression.
I did this deliberately, and I try to do it consistently, because the first response of the source nearly always tells you everything you need to know. We’ll get into that, and more details about all the specific disinformation tactics being employed here, why I have a high degree of confidence that this is deliberate behavior by willful neo-fascists, and how you can be better equipped to wade through the onion-layers of online disinformation without falling prey to it.
So the first question, obviously, is “how do you know? Let’s look at that on the next page.
