Here's the link to the full article on how Snowden's documents have made these practices come to light and are now confirmed. I've included a readers digest version of the article.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
How agencies control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse.
Western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction.
Surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they've been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.
Two of the most common tactics are:
(1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets
(2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.
Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, Destroy, or Deceive
Further dissecting how human beings can be manipulated online using “leaders,” “trust,” “obedience” and “compliance”:
These agencies’ refusal to “comment on intelligence matters” – meaning: talk at all about anything and everything they do – is precisely why whistleblowing is so urgent, the journalism that supports it so clearly in the public interest, and the increasingly unhinged attacks by these agencies so easy to understand. Claims that government agencies are infiltrating online communities and engaging in “false flag operations” to discredit targets are often dismissed as conspiracy theories, but these documents leave no doubt they are doing precisely that.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
How agencies control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse.
Western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction.
Surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they've been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.
Two of the most common tactics are:
(1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets
(2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.
Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, Destroy, or Deceive
Further dissecting how human beings can be manipulated online using “leaders,” “trust,” “obedience” and “compliance”:
These agencies’ refusal to “comment on intelligence matters” – meaning: talk at all about anything and everything they do – is precisely why whistleblowing is so urgent, the journalism that supports it so clearly in the public interest, and the increasingly unhinged attacks by these agencies so easy to understand. Claims that government agencies are infiltrating online communities and engaging in “false flag operations” to discredit targets are often dismissed as conspiracy theories, but these documents leave no doubt they are doing precisely that.
