It looks like the CIA is doing more to fight the information war than banning subreddits and commanding bot farms.

  • @redtea
    link
    31 year ago

    You’re probably right. And actually, I think you’re more likely right then I am. But, I am going to do something terribly academic:

    (Tbh I don’t know the writer in the screenshots.)

    I was using ‘op’ in a figurative sense, I think. Not to say this story was drafted by a secret service agent. I was more pointing out that we should be hesitant to accept the truth of the story because it’s effect will be to cause paranoia and may stop people from writing anti imperialist texts on the internet. Others have since made the point more clearly than I did.

    At the same time, while it would be strange for a secret service agent to target a single writer on Quora, there are others online who would make threats that could push someone to this level of paranoia, fleeing their country.

    Events like this could be seen through a wider lens that includes the hostile environment in which even the mildest leftism is subject to the harshest ridicule. That environment is curated and has the backing of the state, the media, and almost every other capitalist not already implicated in the state and the media.

    So if random right wing trolls are encouraged by the general atmosphere to victimise a single writer on Quora, it is partly because a wider, officially sanctioned system facilitates it. A few publicised cases of left wing people fleeing for their lives are a successful element of a capitalist defense mechanism. In this sense, stories like the one in the OP are the outcome of an ‘op’.

    I’m not suggesting that I spotted the problem at first. I’m fact, I was as sleepless as @CannotSleep420. I didn’t even want to comment until others had highlighted some of the issues. My instinct was to regret ever having written anything online about Marxism and to leave the internet immediately, forever. If this was not an op, it should have been.

    Having had and read through this discussion, though, I will be more suspicious of what I may now recognise as state-backed ‘gangstalking’.