Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream – people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

(All of the stuff above is basically the “standard” for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you’re above a certain size.)

https://archive.is/PoUMo

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksOP
    1221·
    2 days ago

    Also this,

    “The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”

    So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.

    “All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

    https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review

    • dangling_cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      901·
      2 days ago

      Everybody is focusing on LA so nobody is reporting The One, Big, Beautiful Bill or the court case of 2024 voting machine tampering.

      • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        they needed a manufactered distraction, and this was it. no coincidence talks of the tariffs has suddenly disappeared from MSM, then the BBB was reported for like a week or 2 and then dropped. to focus on trump based distraction.

          • NotKyloRen@lemmy.zip
            20·
            2 days ago

            Yup. Knew this would come to light one day, as soon as Trump thanked Elon for being “so good with the voting machines” and saying he couldn’t have won without him. Because he can’t help but brag, even when he thinks he’s being cryptic (he’s not).

          • nailingjello@lemmy.zip
            25·
            2 days ago

            The federally accredited testing lab, Pro V&V, that signed off on “significant” changes to ES&S voting machines—which are used in over 40 percent of U.S. counties—“vanished from public view” after the election, according to the Dissent in Bloom Substack.

            Yep, that seems pretty serious.

          • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksOP
            22·
            2 days ago

            Thanks, I hadn’t come across that yet. Newsweek is hiding these kind of articles form their frontpage, I have no idea why. I appreciate you taking the time to source it well.

            • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
              151·
              2 days ago

              Unfortunately, it just doesn’t matter. The GOP playbook has been: accuse the other side of doing the bad thing, and then do the bad thing, so that when you get accused it sounds like more of the same.

              It doesn’t matter if we have 1000 independently verified videos of Elon himself paying vote counters to fake results while holding the newspaper of that day up next to his birth certificate. People against trump will say “yeah, we know”, and people for Trump will say, “he won, get over it”.

              It’s the same reason the courts found Trump guilty of falsifying records, and then did nothing: that’s not how this situation resolves itself.

              • Pringles@sopuli.xyz
                81·
                2 days ago

                There will never be a time where truth does not matter, whether you believe it does or not.

                • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
                  5·
                  2 days ago

                  That’s funny you say that, because this whole ordeal has made me realize that truth does not matter at all, and it’s a privilege to be able to live as though it does. But in most countries and throughout most of history, what is true doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is what people believe to be true. And only if you work very hard as a society, and get lucky, do those two things coincide.

                  Case in point: it could have been the case that Obama was a perfect president who made the best possible decisions to most effectively care for all constituents. But that doesn’t matter if right wing media convinces half the country that he’s a radical communist terrorist who is ignoring the constitution to enrich his deep state. Regardless of what Obama did, what happens in response is what people believe he did.

                  🎶No one else was in the room where it happened🎶

          • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksOP
            3·
            2 days ago

            The economic times is rated as somewhat sketch on a few bias checkers. I’m not familiar with it. It’s out of India?

      • stinky@redlemmy.comEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        The person being quoted (“Once we isolate key people”) posted this on TikTok to tell the people what’s going on. They work for the conservative machine but they are playing double agent so we know their strategy.

        Or did you mean OP?