Thread by @ConceptualJames

Let's do another lesson on propaganda! It's so important to understand the various elements of propaganda in shaping opinion, especially on social media, where it can look very organic. I want to talk about two paired phenomena here: manufactured consensus and audience capture. 🧵

I actually want to start by talking about something the Communists did in Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, which, in the latter case, got described with the term "planned spontaneity." Manufactured consensus very frequently follows from orchestrated spontaneity.

The idea of planned spontaneity is that a planned event occurs in such a way that makes it look like an organic groundswell. Everyone is suddenly thinking it. Using George Soros's dialectical technology, it's called "reflexivity" today, but it's ultimately fake. It's propaganda.

The goal of planned spontaneity is to get the population at large to believe something is happening, popular, and the right way to go, something exciting and organic and real and important, even though it's centrally orchestrated for a particular central agenda.

The mechanism is achieved by creating conditions where some (actually rather many) paid agents initiate from undercover what looks like a grassroots movement in a particular direction while encouraging lots of organic involvement to jump in all over the place. Looks spontaneous.

In the People's Republic of China, planned spontaneity was usually achieved through orchestrated "popular" demonstrations and Big Character Poster campaigns, where everyday people joined in or made their own posters to add to the planted ones. Mass opinion is rapidly shaped.

The idea, according to cult expert Robert Lifton, is to create an almost magical sense that everything in society is suddenly moving a certain direction that everyone must move in together right now. It's what's happening. Again, Soros incorporates this in his "reflexive" model.

Soros's reflexivity works by exploiting the gap between belief and reality in productive ways, including by manufacturing the gap between belief and reality through the planting of what he calls "fertile fallacies." The goal is to get people to believe in the wrong belief.

The quintessential example of Soros's idea of reflexivity is a bank run or stock run. People believe it is going to crash, so they pull their money out, which causes it to crash. Soros's method often included creating false beliefs in booms or busts that became true by belief.

Social media is almost the ideal environment for planned spontaneity manipulations to create mass movements in particular directions, particularly through their (witting or unwitting) propagandists, "influencers." This tactic is very common in ideological groups.

The way it works most often is by creating conditions that "love bomb" and promote particular opinions and views while "ratioing" others. Obviously, things go viral or get ratioed organically too, but these phenomena are extremely easy to manufacture with chat groups and bots.

The Woke Left did this extensively, buying bot farms to make sure their opinion-makers got tens of thousands of likes and shares on their idiotic agitprop, and this was extremely influential for years until people started realizing it was fake. All ideological groups do this tho.

The perception is that tens of thousands of people are agreeing with a particular ideological worldview (like bomb), or that hundreds or thousands of people are angry about some criticism or violation of that worldview (ratio), which is in itself persuasive and reflexive.

Social media algorithms are actually at least partly tuned to reflexive campaigns too. That which is getting attention, positive or negative, even inorganically, gets promoted in the algorithm and therefore attracts more of the same, especially in viral campaigns.

Unbeknownst to most participants and observers, however, the like-bomb, virality, or ratio campaign was inorganically orchestrated in huge chat groups (e.g., discord servers and telegram channels), sometimes with tens of thousands of people, many with multiple accounts, or w/bots

The propaganda campaign is successful in creating the image that a particular opinion is what all people "like us" should hold or should not hold, even though it's mostly fake and manipulative. It's very effective propaganda but relatively easy to spot when it happens.

A second version of this phenomenon is manufactured audience capture. The exact same thing happens, following the CCP propaganda/operant conditioning strategy of "dripping." You're rewarded by the farm when you do what's wanted and ignored/punished when you don't, artificially.

In a sense, the operators behind the scenes create a false audience or even false cult environment in your replies, likes, shares, etc., that slowly condition you to do more of what they want and less of what they don't want. This is subtle and sophisticated manipulation.

In the PRC, this technique was utilized in thought reform (brainwashing) prisons. Guards would randomly reward prisoners with treats, cigarettes, privileges, without ever explaining why except that they were feeling generous, but these rewards followed desired behaviors only.

Prisoners were operantly conditioned to chase rewards usually without even realizing they were doing it. This is the idea behind "dripping." Rewards are "dripped" in when you do what they want, seemingly organically or randomly without explanation, and you seek more rewards.

The PRC/CCP is well known for doing this with money, as are many nefarious funders too. They give a little when you're doing what they want, maybe a little bit more when it's the right stuff, and fall to baseline or below (without explanation) when you've gone wrong.

You're trained to do what your handlers want and to chase it without ever realizing they're handling you, without ever being given any explicit instructions. You're led like by a Pied Piper to be their tool. Manufactured audience capture works exactly like this, and it works.

So, remember, social media is a permanent propaganda battlefield, and you're constantly being subjected to these forces and manipulations, so you should be wise to them, wary of them, and have your head on a swivel for manipulations of these kinds.

Ever since the Arab Spring, the big manipulators out there ("intelligence") has known the power of doing this kind of thing through social media and has been good at it. Massive wrongheaded movements can be manufactured and amplified through them. Why? For color revolutions.