Last edited Wed Feb 12, 2014, 12:01 PM - Edit history (1)
We are not talking about "trolls" out for personal shits and giggles. We are talking about hired harassment within online gathering places that serves the same purpose as pepper spray at Occupy rallies. Hired posters dispense corporate talking points and disinformation, divert from discussion of important issues, and harass and smear efforts to organize against what is being done by corporatists to this country.
States that turn authoritarian always create a propaganda machine to gradually take the place of the free press they systematically dismantle.
What we are observing in this country right now is nothing short of chilling. From the implementation of a spying infrastructure whose capabilities dwarf that of any totalitarian government the world has yet known, to the systematic assaults on whistleblowers and the attempted criminalization of investigative journalism itself, we are living in very scary times.
And now we also get to see, for perhaps the first time in its full flowering, the scope and depth and relentlessness of the propaganda machine they are building. It is omnipresent, down to discussion boards on the internet.
It is difficult to recognize America anymore. I hope it is still possible to save it.
Governments that turn authoritarian find people by the hundreds who do not hesitate to sell their morality and human decency in order to shill for policies that exploit, imprison, impoverish, or murder human beings by the millions for the profit and power of a few.
Some may eventually find their conscience and regret their complicity. In general, though, I suspect that this line of work attracts those who rarely struggle with such internal voices in the first place.
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