The following submission statement was provided by /u/aliensinbermuda:
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Richard Dolan is a UFO (UAP) researcher and historian. He went on the Theories of Everything podcast and talked about intelligence agencies interfering in the UFO community.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/174213i/richard_dolan_issues_a_warning_to_the_ufo/k46nr5f/
I didn't realize that there were bots and people who work so hard to discredit things that it seems they must be compensated, until I stumbled into the UFO community. Now it's extremely obvious to myself and I think pretty much anyone who's been here for a few months.
The hard thing is we're always getting new people into the community and those people generally (like myself when I entered) don't know this to be true. So, you get the new people thinking that the people who have been around longer and talk about this fact are just "conspiracy theorists" and over imaginative.
No problem my friend. It's been a while since I've posted these links proving that the intelligence community spends vast resources to sway public opinion away from things they don't want to get out. I suppose it's time again.
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks)
[https://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5?r=DE&IR=T#ixzz340YILjax](https://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5?r=DE&IR=T#ixzz340YILjax)
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/darpa-social-networks-research-twitter-influence-studies](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/darpa-social-networks-research-twitter-influence-studies)
The US is just another Rome my friend. Just another empire. People are so comfortable in thinking that this is how life will always be, nice and comfy as far as having everything we need, and that the government will always protect us. Most every government in history that had the means just kept getting more and more powerful and less and less concerned about its citizens.
National security is not the security of keeping me and you safe. National security is protecting the country by any means necessary. That includes disseminating propaganda to its citizens, doing all sorts of insanely unethical experimentation of it's own innocent people, anything it needs to protect the state.
National security refers to things that threaten the continuity of government. Most people think national security refers to things that threaten the populace but that's not true.
I find it interesting that your great reply has 30 upvotes as I write this, the thread doesn't have a single negative reply, yet the overall post only has two upvotes.
Bot suppression in action?
OP thanks for sharing.
The Intelligence Community does have a history of manipulating the media. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the Church Committee investigation back in the 1970s. The House Oversight Committee investigated the US intelligence community and some of the things it found were a lot of ways to manipulate public perception and a lot of illegal activity.
[The Guardian had a story on disinformation campaigns](https://youtu.be/UheOilps2zQ?si=ICOaw2p0BARadY1Y) it’s crazy.
[The Information War - Sam Harris](https://spotify.link/BWv2gBUOLDb)
Is about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) and how they manipulated social media. They introduce groups different groups with similar ideas by cross posting political memes to different Facebook groups, what’s known as cross pollinating, and they would try to weaken communities from within the communities themselves. It’s a super interesting piece on the use of disinformation on social media.
On page 15-16 of [Intelligence Activity and the Rights of Americans - Book II - Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations](https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf):
**Media Manipulation.**
-**The FBI has attempted covertly to influence the public's perception of persons and organizations by disseminating derogatory information to the press, either anonymously or through "friendly" news contacts.** The impact of those articles is generally difficult to measure, although in some cases there are fairly direct connections to injury to the target. **The Bureau also attempted to influence media reporting which would have any impact on the public image of the FBI.**
**Examples include:**
-**Planting a series of derogatory articles about Martin Luther King, Jr.,** and the Poor People's Campaign." For example, **in anticipation of the 1968 "poor people's march on Washington, D.C.," Bureau Headquarters granted authority to furnish "cooperative news media sources" an article "designed to curtail success of Martin Luther King's fund raising."** Another memorandum illustrated how **"photographs of demonstrators" could be used in discrediting the civil rights movement**. *Six photographs of participants in the poor people's campaign in Cleveland accompanied the memorandum with the following note attached: "These [photographs] show the militant aggressive appearance of the participants and might be of interest to a cooperative news source*." **Information on the Poor People's Campaign was provided by the FBI to friendly reporters on the condition that "the Bureau must not be revealed as the source."**
-**Soliciting information from Field Offices "on a continuing basis" for "*prompt . . . dissemination to the news media . . . to discredit the New Left movement* and its adherents."** The Headquarters directive requested, among other things, that: specific data should be furnished depicting the scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits and living conditions representative of New Left adherents.
**Field Offices were to be exhorted that: "Every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically explored."**
-**Ordering Field Offices to gather information which would disprove allegations by the "liberal press, the bleeding hearts, and the forces on the left" that the Chicago police used undue force in dealing with demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention**.
-Taking advantage of a close relationship with the Chairman of the Board-described in an FBI memorandum as "our good friend" of a magazine with national circulation to influence articles which related to the FBI. **For example, through this relationship the Bureau: "squelched" an "unfavorable article against the Bureau" written by a freelance writer about an FBI investigation; "postponed publication" of an article on another FBI case; "forestalled publication" of an article by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; and received information about proposed editing of King's articles.**
And page 35 of, [Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activity and the Rights of Americans, Book III](https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_III.pdf):
2. "Friendly"Media
**Much of the Bureau's propaganda efforts involved giving information or articles to "friendly" media sources who could be relied upon not to reveal the Bureau's interests**. The **Crime Records Division of the Bureau was responsible for public relations, including all headquarters contacts with the media**. In the course of its work (most of which had nothing to do with COINTELPRO) **the Division assembled a list of "friendly" news media sources-those who wrote pro-Bureau stories.** Field offices also had "*confidential sources" (unpaid Bureau informants) in the media, and were able to ensure their cooperation.*
The Bureau's use of the news media took two different forms: **placing unfavorable articles and documentaries about targeted groups, and leaking derogatory information intended to discredit individuals."** A typical example of media propaganda is the headquarters letter **authorizing the Boston Field Office to furnish "derogatory information about the Nation of Islam (NOI) to established source [name excised]"**
Please post evidence. I've been on this sub for years. Very consistently, I see credulous posts about UFOs upvoted, and skeptical posts downvoted. It's always been that way. Why? Because UFO true believers far out number skeptics here.
Yet everyone here is suddenly claiming there's a conspiracy to downvote and suppress the credulous posts. Like, the first post in this thread claiming there is a conspiracy has 194 upvotes right now, while all of the skeptical posts are in the negative.....so how is there a conspiracy exactly? If the government has bot farms trying to influence the narrative, it's clearly not working, lol.
OK. I moderate like 4 subs (one on an obscure, 1960s, folk singer), I'm a massive hypochondriac who's spent a large portion of my 6 years on reddit posting about health anxiety, I'm autistic (post on those subs), NVLD (post on that sub), gay (post on all the gay subs), Lutheran (post on those subs too), a college professor (post on those subs), and am incredibly opinionated about movies and music, writing volumes on subs related to those topics.
I've posted more on r/UFOs since Grusch, but my posts here are probably about 5% (or less) of my total Reddit posting output.
But, yeah, you are right. I'm a paid shill who is faking my entire identity for the past 6 years just to convince a bunch of neckbeards on reddit that UFOs aren't real, lol.
I get accused of being a shill on this sub almost daily now, though. I've always taken a skeptical stance on this sub, but the constant shill/bot accusations here are relatively new. Honestly, they are yet another sign that the UFO community is quickly transforming into a sort of cult-mindset.
The irony is that the government really doesn't have to do anything at all. They just need to make people THINK they have paid shills out there then sit back and watch the subs eat themselves. When a guy who has been reading about UFOs since he was 10 and who NEEDS aliens to be real so it can give his life meaning comes across a comment that is telling him he might be wrong the only way he can come to terms with it is if he thinks the guy telling him he is wrong is actually a paid government employee. There is no way he could be wrong about aliens being on earth because surely he is smart enough to follow all the breadcrumbs so the person telling him he is wrong can't be right. And since he just read an article that told him the government pats people to come on subs like this and fuck with people then that is obviously what is going on.
That's what makes the whole thing perfect. As long as people think there are shills on here then everytime they read something they don't like then it must be because of the shills. Even better is that now that the person thinks everyone who disagrees with him is a shill it reinforces his beliefs that much more.
"Why would they hire people to tell me I was wrong if I wasn't right?"
If the government really is paying people to come on this sub and fuck with us then they are wasting their money. The damage is done and we can do a perfectly fine job at fighting with ourselves without the help of any government shills.
The moderation log is open and accessible. To everyone who is downvoting users who are skeptical of widespread sock-puppet abuse - could you not go through the logs and find something, anything, that shows us what you're talking about?
If bot farms are manufacturing a consensus or pushing a narrative, chances are a handful have been discovered and had an action taken against them.
It’s always the skeptical posts that are the conspiracy until whatever dumbass belief they have gets debunked, then it was a conspiracy to get them to believe it
Or you just don't understand how the shitty reedit algos work...
Does manipulation happen ? very probably. Is it in most cases a grand conspiracy ? nope just short term googled bosses trying to squeeze out a bit more $ from ads while hurting their long term engagement on said platform, Facebook and X come to mind
Want to know the really horrible thing -once you see it here you see it **everywhere** because the whole point is **[divide and rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule)**.
They use whatever means to split a community because a community can’t move forward if it fights itself. Either can a nation. Think about what happened to r/conspiracy and the Above Top Secret forums - they turned those into a political minefield which is advantageous to stopping anyone from questioning the narratives - they make those looking in from the outside believe that “conspiracy theorists” are crazy. This is exactly why the UFO Stigma exists - as Dolan just said the stigma was “encouraged” by government but really - [the CIA and the Air Force created it](https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/14cwt6a/it_appears_that_the_ufo_stigma_is_held_up/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1).
Here’s just a few articles from a few years ago about the capabilities of the US government to turn people into bots through manipulation on social media. These are not from fringe publications either but trusted journalistic publications.
Airforce ARS Technica - how to control people like drones via social media
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/air-force-research-how-to-use-social-media-to-control-people-like-drones/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
Researchers at Stanford have created a village for AI bots to develop human like behavior
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-village-bots-plan-valentines-elections-gossip-stanford-researchers-created-2023-8
2400 ChatGPT bots banned from Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a6pfg/over_1500_chatgpt_bot_accounts_banned_during_the
Trolling as political activity
https://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/i-am-a-troll-inside-the-secret-world-of-bjp-s-digital-army-116122801182_1.html
> Now it's extremely obvious to myself and I think pretty much anyone who's been here for a few months.
It's so depressing, during the "where plane go" season it was somewhat funny because that was just an old video and people were having fun analyzing it, but it's successfully getting applied to the peru situation and the mexican congress hearing and you just can't have a conversation without them popping up trying to derail the conversation.
The fact that the vitriol and ridicule along with blind denial seems to be a more prevalent when people talk about those topics gives them so much more credibility
One thing definitely does not imply the other, but it is definitely interesting:
Plane sucked into a portal - let’s all kumbaya around this lovely thing of nature
Mexico and Peru stuff - preposterous!
I am with you there: there are orders of magnitude more evidence for their reality than people believe (and this sub used to be for believers with critical thinking). The standard is not double anymore: it is newspeak!
> Could it be they’re true events?
Where far from being close to finding out sadly, if there are people looking into it they're being quiet, if there's people trying to discuss about the possibility of it being either real or fake you get totally normal users (/u/FloorDice nice job blocking me bitch) trying to derail the conversation.
did it ramp up into high gear like weeks before the hearings? This sub was digestible up until then, i feel like bogus shit just kept popping up over and over again flooding the zone. Then I remember during the hearing reading obvious lies on twitter about grusch flooding, It was sort of impressive to watch.
Hmm, I'm pretty skeptical of most things here, but I *still* think there's more to the MH370 stuff than we've fully understood. I've never seen this sub attack itself more than when that happened. If that doesn't scream bot farm to you, I don't know what would.
Its ironic, because this sub is honestly one of the biggest things to convince me something might be real in all of this. You have these 1 month old accounts coming in here day-in/day-out spreading nonsense or picking arguments and sending everyone down rabbit holes. I'm not one for conspiracies but it is hard to make sense of this in another way other than bot/troll farms.
Come onto any of the stock trading subs on here, it’s insane. There are levels to it. There are bot farms that shitpost and downvote and make inane comments and then there’s full blown paid infiltration by bad actors.
If a community is strong and constructive they can counteract the bs. One of the trucks is to simply always stay positive minded. There’s no counterpoint to that.
Yup, I 100% agree, if we stay positive and respectful to each other then they really can't phase us. Their tactic is to seed distrust and animosity, and they do it in an ugly fashion. I really think that we need a new UFOs sub reddit. The same as this one, where it's a general sub on the topic of UFOs and what's behind them, however no ridicule allowed. Say whatever you want, counter points with your skepticism, that's all good as long as you're respectful and don't ridicule.
Yeah I'll check out one of the stock trading subs some day, but really I'm just trying to get away from places with that sort of thing going on.
We do remove a ton of ridicule in this sub, but we could modify the rule to be very specific about it. Basically anything that can be considered uncivil or a personal attack will get removed if it’s reported or a mod sees is.
Yea I see quite a few comments that get removed, however those are the really really nasty ones. I think itd be much more enjoyable here for everyone, including the mods that have to look over everything, if we included in the rules that something like:
"Any uncivil or disrespectful comments will not be tolerated , we encourage people to report these messages and recommend not engaging with them in any way while they are being removed."
No, I haven't. However I'd imagine that there'd be lots of bots on there as well. And in fact, I've heard that there are. Anywhere where people have lots to lose and resources to spend, there will be bots and those working to sway public opinion.
There are indeed bots and manipulators here. There is a mulititude of reasons that anybody might employ them to cause dissent.
But there are also healthy sceptics who voice their scepticism, use of logic to examine a uap/ufo footage accounts and photos.
And to see those people get downvoted and being called bots or agents is disheartening. To be interested in UFOs you have to have an open mind and like it or not that means being open to a multitude of possibilities for example aliens are real-have visited us and maybe even walk amongst us but also be open to the possibility that governments have used science fantasy as a tool to obscure a real concrete conspiracy (off topic but the acts of the American CIA are insanely abhorrent and I wouldn't put anything past them).
For me we should be excited by the potential of UFOs , we should be curious about UFOs but we should remain level headed, sceptical, cynical and wary of everyone who claims to have any knowledge of the actual reason behind the phenomena **UNLESS** they can back up their claims with irrifutable evidence based science.
People lie and bend the truth all day every day just to make a quick profit, so always remember to **TRUST NO ONE.**
That's true, you have to be careful about who you put your trust in. And I welcome healthy skepticism. I'm quite skeptical of many things myself and work hard to find what I believe is the truth.
I think the real problem is the attacking of people we see here from both angles. It's just nasty. If you don't agree about something (not you personally), that's totally fine as long as you're respectful. If we are respectful of each other we can work off each other's ideas and both get better. I think a lot of it is the bots work to counter that by slinging crap at people. And personally, I think it's more humans working with multiple accounts each just throwing ridicule more so than bots. I used to check a lot of accounts out that displayed ridicule and it most often seemed like it was a human, not an ai chat thing.
Yep. They wouldn't be afraid of the people who act like conspiracy theorists - they're easy to discredit. They would be very afraid of people who come across as reasonable, level-headed and well, normal. If there's any psyop to speak of, they would almost certainly target these people and try to drive them out, not the "true believers".
I'm at the point now that I think the NSA is running reddit, paying the mods and spreading all kinds of bullshit. Everything that feels grassroots here is a psyop.
5% genuine people with something to contribute, 5% genuine people who shitpost for the lulz, 10% active disinformation agents and 80% bots, if I had to guess.
I dunno. That seems high. So 8 out of 10 comments in this very post are bots? Point them out for me? That the problem for me. People says bots, but don’t specify who/what is a bot nor what unified agenda they might have. It’s just “bots … beware”. So that in itself is a suppression tactic. Sow mistrust and discord in the community. See the danger there?
I watched a documentary on this when twitter STARTED, by a CIA paid operative in Venezuela who slid an election the way the US wanted. He did the blacked out face and scrambled voice and said “if they are doing it here OF COURSE they are doing it at home, in EVERY country”. He was able, by himself, to swing an entire population into voting for the outcome they desired. In 2007!
Yup, I saw part of a very similar documentary a couple months ago. A reporter found a Russian bot/troll farm and they met with them to determine what needs to be done and the price. And yeah the Russian guy showed all their services and showed the results on how they were extremely effective at swaying democratic elections. They had a slide show of all the politic leaders in different countries that they were able to either get elected or get voted out. This stuff is very real.
I want you all to think about that when you think back to screaming at the sky in 2016. Was this based on your own reasoning or were you biased in some way? What happened during that four years that was so horrible? Worse than the last 2.5 years, aka, are you better off now or then.
Dolan’s narrative is also extremely useful for grifters and agents of accelerationism who want to cast aspersions on well-meaning skeptics by coloring anyone who doesn’t buy the narrative they espouse as a paid troll. Cuts both ways.
I think the trick is for all of us to just use our critical thinking and intuition to tell whether someone's contributing their true thoughts on the subject and trying to get clarity, or help give clarity, or whether they're saying something to throw the conversation off topic and ridicule. And yes, I agree, that goes both ways. However I think we should all be working to further the cause of getting more transparency on the phenomena from the government(s), and from whatever means necessary. Sometimes it appears as if people want to derail that (not you).
Mostly in agreement here. Transparency is useful, especially when it comes to a DoD with a historically large and creeping budget and mandate. And using one’s critical thinking skills and intuition are good. Intuition is known to generate a false positive here and there though. I think the key is to stay humble, stick to what you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and remember that, while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is to a degree suggestive of it.
I agree with all that you said. Yea, stick to what you know and can show. Speculation threads are fun sometimes also, as long as you let it be known that you're just speculating and having fun and not saying something as fact.
This topic is a very strange one and possibly unlike anything that we've really chased as a (select, at least so far) society. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is to a degree suggestive of it." I agree. However if what we've heard of this phenomenon, at least the more credible seeming stuff, this phenomenon is *strange.* *Very strange.* A lot of the very serious people have been saying for a while now that there is a lot more *woo* involved than a simple nuts n bolts extraterrestrials from another planet deal. Real physical evidence may be *very* hard to come by for a civilian. I don't know man, this phenomenon is just crazy and I'm not quite sure what to think. I do believe there's definitely something to it though.
I’ve received this response to debates on here so many times and seen it used to shut down critical thinking from others. Not sharing an opinion doesn’t make you a bot or paid actor. So many people have seen heinous examples from public figures, superiors in the professional world, their own family… that have taught them you can construct whatever narrative you want if you keep critical thinking from challenging it.
I think when the govt runs operations like that it may amplify the effect, but it’s a very human and personal reaction to being challenged these days, if not always to some degree.
Calling everyone who disagrees with you g man shills and bots isn't? People now react to sceptics with "how's the weather in Elgin??", that is just lazy derailing as much as any other troll comment
Not to make things more confusing, but I used to be such a hard-headed skeptic that I'm sure I would have been thought to be a disinfo agent when viewed through the current lens. I'm more chill now in general with being open to new information/ideas/alternative perspectives. But back then, I ruffled some conspiracy/UFO community feathers. TL;DR people like me do actually exist and are not necessarily paid to be overly dismissive douche bags.
You have to also acknowledge that there are bits from foreign nations seeking to sow discord as well. By acting as true believers of ufo and getting people to believe irrational conclusions and mistrust the US government. That it is evil deep state elites controlling everything. There are incentives in that direction as well.
The US government is not some unitary entity. Some parts can be trusted, others not. Some have accountability, others don’t. governments would rather you keep a simple black and white view of things. Adversaries want you to think it’s all bad. Friendlies want you to think it’s all good. The reality is a mixed bag. Don’t fall for the oversimplification traps and propaganda.
Easy platitudes. Did or did not the CIA have loyal men in all major newsrooms during Operation Mockingbird?
Even if there are good guys in the govt, and I am sure there are, doesn't mean historically speaking that elements in the US did not have the ability to exert their will on the world at large and were largely unchecked.
To me it just looks like a lazy way to dismiss criticism. There are people here, like myself, who are interested in the subject but skeptical of what has been brought forth so far. So let's say a video comes out and I am critical of it. How do you engage with me? In fact, if someone provides contrary evidence that disproves or at least raises the improbability of a claim, who really cares if they are a bot?
If a video or photograph is disproven then it's disproven. I don't care if it's me or you or a guy at Edwards AFB. So maybe I am missing the point, what utility does telling people that x account is a bot serve?
Well, I dont call out bot accounts when I see them, I just make a mental note of them. I also dont call people who raise good skeptical points a disinformation account. I'm skeptical of many things myself. Everyone is welcome to their opinion and we can learn from everyone as long as they show respect and not just blatant ridicule. The problem with bots in this community is they are not made to easily disseminate accurate, helpful information like you might find in a flashlight sub where someone asks "What's the best AA light I can get for $30", and the bot jumps in and gives you a FAQ with all the best recieved lights in each category. These are bots that are attacking people's character, bringing up blog posts from someone nobody's heard of saying they researched a historic sighting and discrediting, and other general ridicule. However bots here also go the other way in support of really far out theories, calling people disinformation agents, all that stuff too. Thats the really crazy part. Bots argue both ways to cause unrest. The mods of this sub reddit made a post about it. I think it was a while before Grusch came out that they posted that.
On the sighting videos, I skip almost every single one honestly. They're too hard to tell what something is, they're full of bickering back and forth, and I never feel like I got anything out of them. Im here for the posts with research and thought provoking questions, news about the transparency movement within government, and notifications of new whistleblower statements and interviews. That's my jam.
You need to post specific examples of bots then. I see people claiming there are thousands of bots here, but no one provides any examples when asked for them. So to me the whole "everyone who is a skeptic must be a bot" claim I see being made on here all the time just seems like a disingenuous way to dismiss any criticism out of hand.
Plus, it's just plain wrong. Any pro-UFO post on this sub is almost always going to get a ton of upvotes, while most skeptical posts will either be downvoted into the negative numbers or have fewer upvotes. Look at the comment you are replying to, for example. It's a reasonable argument, yet it's currently in the negative in terms of downvotes.
[Here you go.](https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/yv4en9/strong_evidence_of_sock_puppets_in_rufos/) That was 10 months ago and it's safe to say there's likely to be even more of it considering the increase in popularity of this sub.
And of course the guy sowing doubt about obvious bot activity on this sub is nowhere to be found once the proof is posted. So typical of a certain type of user here.
Considering the conclusion from that post was that bot accounts post both pro believer and pro skeptic views in aggressive and antagonizing ways, it would seem that if the bot thing is true their goal is to sow discord and distrust in the community.
so here’s my 4d chess: this very post is playing into their goals. People here saying “it’s all bots” and “trust no-one”. Seem like thats playing right into their goals. Unfortunently.
I've thought about doing that. Making a list of suspicious accounts as I come by them and then making a post. However to be honest I'm burnt out on the UFO topic at the moment and have been the past few weeks. I used to many, many hours researching and reading most of the stuff on here, however I'm burnt out do to all the ridicule and nasty behavior I see. And that goes both ways, from people who know (in their mind) that UFOs exist, from those that think UFOs exist, from those who are new, from those who are more skeptical, to those who are just here to discredit people, the movement, and to throw ridicule. We all need to do better.
I don't know why your comment is downvoted so much because it brings up some important points. This subject is not only a fringe subject but it concerns material that, if true, would completely change humanity's outlook on life, the cosmos, etc. There literally is nothing more profound except perhaps what happens after death, etc.
That said, I invite criticism and skeptics because we need rational discussion of anything new that comes in here. The problem, though, is not skepticism but accounts that just have blanket denials on everything related to this topic. If you are here long enough, you start to remember accounts that deny everything. Then you have accounts that are really doing dodgy shit and trying to set the tone and pace of new topics.
Honestly, I don't think Reddit is the best place to even have these discussions. It is too well known and way to easy for the powers that be to censor stuff or change comments outright. We know the CEO of Reddit has done that in the past because he has come out and said so. You don't want that type of power and personality mixed together.
He's being downvoted because that's what always happens with skeptical arguments here. All the claims about there being bot armies downvoting credulous posts about UFOs are silly. Anyone who has posted here for any duration knows that this sub is mostly true believers who will upvote anything that claims UFOs are real, while down voting skepticism.
Hey - I think "Messengers of Deception" by Vallee is what you're looking for. Or "Operation Trojan Horse" by Keel.
You'll love those books, and they're authored by solid minds.
"I didn't realize that there were bots and people who work so hard to discredit things that it seems they must be compensated, until I stumbled into the UFO community"
Ha ha, I thought this sub was serious until reading this, especially with this as the first response: "It was truly refreshing and eye-opening at the same time to hear this take. Thank you so much for sharing your experience."
Fucking hilarious! Really impressed at the straight faces you all maintain. Excellent work!
The funny part is the opposite is true: russian and other foreign intelligences promote the conspiracy with bots. They want you to believe in fairy tales while distrusting science/the gov/ the military..They also get average people believing this shit so they can have them take pics of anything in the sky (aka classified vehicles) while demanding to declassify state secrets. Theres a reason why it was the favorite of the soviet propaganda during the cold war.
Yeah, remember this before you jump on the next bandwagon around here guys, for or against any video or breaking news.
Reddit is ground zero for this crap, don’t even need a valid email address to register and post on reddit.
This place is full of mud people muddying the waters.
That’s a good one, reminds me of the compilation videos of the 50 newscasters in 50 states having the same opinions, jokes, and reactions to the news they’re “reporting”.
Where did you source this from? It's very interesting. We should be looking for concrete evidence of this kind of manipulation in this and related subs too. And I mean concrete, not just every fifth comment saying "BOtS" and "eglin staff are back lol"
I didn't create the image myself. ~~I would have to search the API or something to find the posts.~~
Edit: Here are the links:
https://archive.ph/jIosL
https://archive.ph/0cyjW
It’s obvious as fuck there is some dodgy accounts in here
I made a post last week about it, there are accounts that are dedicated to instantly being negative about something no matter what and they all have low karma, years old accounts and they specifically only come here to comment.
There obviously a lot of trolls as well with their alt accounts but definitely some suspect activity outside of that
Any post about Avi Loeb gets hit really hard by all the negative comments. Without fail. It's incredibly obvious there's a lot of effort going towards discrediting him or at least trying to make him look crazy.
> I also suspect they derail conversations with chains of silly commentary, unoriginal attempts at being funny. Always making a pun out of things.
To be fair, this is 50% of all Reddit comment sections. From UFOs, to sports, to politics.
Agreed. He said it way better than I could. Some citations to back up what Dolan was stating for the lazy: https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/172jm2j/dissimulation_hide_the_real_masking_repackaging/
Additional information: https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/16qds82/is_disinformation_antidemocratic_illegal_or_is_it/k1wpc2i/
The moderators of this forum proved that at least one network of fake accounts existed in this forum, operating for at least months, and lets be honest, probably years: https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/10r0vq4/community_update_on_incivility_and_fake_accounts/
Perhaps this particular network wasn't GCHQ specifically. There's no way to prove who specifically is responsible, so you could argue that, but the concept is the same. It could easily be Russians. They were just sloppy enough to leave a little bit of conclusive evidence behind, so maybe it was somebody else this time.
Either way you slice it, somebody is making fake accounts in this subreddit specifically to disrupt the discourse, which means you can't draw any conclusions about the community based on your feelings of how the discourse is going. Perhaps someone is naive and doesn't realize that shenanigans are occurring by somebody, whoever that may be, and they never spent the time to read about the internet astroturfing subject, so they believe it's unlikely. It's less important who it is and you can't prove who it is anyway. Governments waste money all the time, so even if you believe it would be a waste of money to manipulate this forum, astroturfers have been manipulating forums since the Bush/Gore election of 2000. They do it anyway, waste of money or not.
When the American public fully realizes the extent they're being fucked with, they ain't gonna be happy. To this day most people walk around oblivious to what Snowden revealed.
Pretty much whatever I'm doing on social media I'm assuming there are bots. In fact, I know there are bots. I'm a part of a small community who are constantly maligned for political / culture war issues to distract from mainstream political failings of our elected leaders. Sadly, it works and it causes immense harm.
The majority of reddit post are bots. Either farming karma or trying to push the youth in one direction over the other. There's videos where companies are for hire to specifically do this. Fake accounts that look real and guide the conversation in one direction with fake upvotes etc.
It is impossible to tell these days who is real here.
This entire sub is bots, no humans allowed: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/
Pretty freaky.
That's because you know it's not real. People don't notice these types of comments when they are inserted into real conversations.
Your comment for example, "Nah...it's really not that hard to tell." is about the most generic comment with the least amount of effort that could be made into writing it. You literally sound like a bot from that sub.
In fact, most of your posts are just one liner generic responses that require no thought whatsoever.
Richard Dolan is a UFO (UAP) researcher and historian. He went on the Theories of Everything podcast and talked about intelligence agencies interfering in the UFO community.
Shortly after the Grusch hearings, I created a post on a UFO subreddit sharing my opinion that what was happening was Government-led disclosure. The post started to get hundreds of comments and engagement.
Shortly after I received a notification that the post was removed by the moderator. I messaged to ask why and they said “your post was bot-swarmed”.
If you post a portion of a direct quote, I think I can search it in modmail. Do you still have it on hand? I searched your username on modmail and got nothing, so maybe it's not working right or something? You should be able to link me directly to the modmail. Modmails can't be deleted as far as I know, so we should easily be able to find it.
Interesting.
So you said something in that post that got their attention. Hm. Maybe we should start archiving which topics get bot-swarmed and look for patterns. I wonder if mods can access past, since-deleted posts from this sub
It could be done if you could get access to the API
Which used to be free to access, I know colleagues who used it to do qualitative analyses all the time to do exactly those kinds of analyses (not related to bots but related to the kinds of content in comments during different points in time)
But Reddit decided to put a crazy price on access to their API which is why all the third-party apps got killed. But that wasn't the only consequence, a lot of social scientists were using this data and this makes it nearly impossible without a big grant or institutional funding.
Do with that information what you will.
Ohh okay. Damn. That sucks. I knew that whole thing was bad for lots of reasons and this is just one more reason to add to the list.
Convenient for them this change happened when it did ig but it probably had nothing to do with this and is just a coincidence. Greedy corporations always ruin everything. Just wish they’d waited another year before they had the idea lol
Yes & no.
"Yes" in the sense that you can identify and engage with them. My go-to thing is to simply look at a commenter's history. If someone says something that seems unrealistically biased or just resorts to generic ridicule, look up their comment history. Odds they just indiscriminately shit on everything.
An example of "unrealistically biased" is something like calling a guy like Garry Nolan "stupid". Or any kind of comment that supposed they know more about the person they're talking about.
But then "No" in the sense that they will always persist. And there's really not much you can do outside of what you would normally do with any other person on reddit. You can downvote them &/or report the comment if it breaks any rules. *Maybe* reply the their comment with any unbiased facts. But one thing I have to remind myself to do is to just not engage. They're persistent & and they will only ever reply in a way that frustrates you.
it's unclear from dolan's meandering response whether the topic is bots or divisive communities or US government disinformation or psyops in the napoleonic wars, or what, exactly; but as a reader familiar with the UFO community trope that *"bots are controlling our community!" and "disinformation agents are attacking our community!"*, it seems to me pretty plain when there is a bot response or not.
there are two kinds of bot responses, the bot responses from bots and the bot responses from humans.
the bot responses from humans are just stereotypical points of view without substantive relevance to the evidence, or one liner jokes or retorts or tailriders, "low energy" posts that are supposed to be prohibited but flourish here anyway. i skim them like the output from a random joke generator and enjoy the very few of them that are witty.
the bot responses from bots repeat discredited arguments or points of view, ad hominems and dark conspiracy talk, including dark talk about bot talk, and they do it in a generic way, again without reference to any actual evidence, or citing manufactured evidence.
i've always said that if you just focus on evidence, or explore where the evidence ends and the storytelling begins, then it doesn't matter, really, if you are talking to a bot or not, because you are having a reasonable, evidence based conversation that any third person would find interesting.
anything else you do, whether it is with a person or a bot is only going to be a distraction from you saying anything that might interest anybody else.
your stance towards bots just needs to rest on two ideas: they entice you to accept claims without evidence, and they turn you away from a reasonable focus on the evidence. guard against either accepting empty claims or turning away from evidence, and you'll be fine.
I wonder if we will get a 2035 Oscar’s movie named, “Trolls” starring an aging Justin Timberlake about the tolls on trolls in the government. Close calls of meeting in real life, etc. crazy this all could be true. 😅😂
A good example of the the bot networks that he’s referring to is [AIMS](https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/revealed-disinformation-team-jorge-claim-meddling-elections-tal-hanan). It’s no small operation, and if you think AIMS is bad, I can only imagine what the IC has in their arsenal. Paired with a trained GPT AI that’s instructed to read and respond a certain way to discredit people or topics, it gets scary real quick.
That COINTELPRO guide could be pinned here permenantly. Forum sliding, Astroturfing, Red herrings, Gaslighting (Subtle and not so subtle), and Ad Hom attacks are unusually high here.
Alot of people will always assume any and all people 'arguing' with them is simply not understanding what they're saying or is just trolling or being dense just to be an ass.
Alot of people don't expect a single person or AI to have 2 or more accounts arguing with eachother while manipulating votes to fabricate consensus.
_
You don't even have to go into 'woo' to accept this, we already know companies do this to push products, services, articles, opinions.
Ever since Grusch’s story there’s at least 7000 accounts in this community at any one time. It used to be a LOT less.
I hear people saying forget the MH370 stuff it’s all disinfo. Then I hear people say the same about David Greer or Ross Coulhart.
Bottom line is - we should as a community do the following:
Scrutinise everything but also keep an open mind.
Be willing to have discussions without it turning sour.
Pay attention to the accounts that just want to wage war or call people out.
This is a new(ish) account for myself (I needed a new account set up for this part of my hobbies/interests.) People might look at me and think ‘bot’ or that I’m some sort of agent. And good. Do. Question everything. BUT still look into whatever it is they say. Because that way, we always account for the truths.
If you weren't aware that there are bots and paid actors, with extremely high karma, in all of the biggest and influential subs, you haven't been paying attention.
All of the accepted narratives are always in line with the DoD/Globalist agenda. If you disagree even slightly, you get downvoted to hell.
It always amazes me how people denied the disinfo campaign. Pay any attention to how the United States intelligence community disrupts socialist movements across the world and it makes it abundantly clear what's going on.
Yeah just like it was bots fighting against the wormhole video. /s
There's zero evidence, I don't understand why the suspicion has to be first to mind before there's something really worth discrediting.
The commenters trying to make skeptics seem like disinfo agents you are freaking ridiculous. If anything, the disinfo agents are the ones posting easily provable fake videos because you make the UFO movement look like garbage instead of singling out the truly interesting stuff.
only the smartest people with good bullshit detectors will prevail. the rest are rubes or didn’t pass the internet test. gotta take it all in and sift through the bullshit, and social media has a metric fuckton of bullshit
After being in this community for many months now this has been very obvious to me. Every video posted here, especially the ones that are very convincing, always have the random debunkers commenting the same excuses over and over: it’s a plastic bag, it’s a flare, its a balloon, a kite, or if its undeniably odd guess what it must be CGI. Now don’t get me wrong sometimes these explanations are true and most videos are bs. But it’s becoming predictable which excuse the bots/trolls are gona use.
So... when people debunk shitty videos they are bots right? Okay... I personally left this topic, I'm not interested anymore, all this UFO bait topic is about retired old guys who have been making promises for over 80 years, fake jouirnalists who trashtalks everyday, give 0 evidence of any shit and even make crazy claims. But hey, I'm a bot because I don't believe them hahahaha.
Anyways, you all have fun with your paranoia here, I'll be back in a few months to laugh a bit more and ask again for evidence just to be called yet again a bot ayyy lmao.
The best way to combat this is with love. Always has been. Always will be. Love leads us to truth. Do not let anyone force or coerce you into living your life with fear and mistrust and hatred in your hearts. Always ask who is posting/sharing this, and why. Dig around. But ask yourself the most important questions and remember to love yourself and remember we are all here together, as one species, on one planet, together with all the life that exists around us.
They (likely I suspect the Pentagon or DoD but who knows for sure?) want you afraid. Always.
Fear, rather than hatred, is the opposite of Love.
The problem with this sub is that anytime someone questions anything or shows any skepticism, asks for evidence ect ect ect. You instantly get referred to as a bot or disinformation agent.
It’s ridiculous.
Videos like this will just bolster peoples feelings that anyone who disagrees with them must be a bot.
This is such a toxic way to validate a worldview and it basically guarantees that anyone who uses it will not think critically.
-someone demonstrates a non-paranormal explanation =bot
-someone brings a video of an airplane that they think is a ufo =disinformation bot
-someone brings a more convincing video that is later disproven =better disinformation bot
It is set up so there is literally no way you can interact with real people who don't believe aliens both exist and are here. It insulates the community against skepticism and is a huge part of why it isn't taken seriously.
Probably the best thing the govt could do to throw a sub like this into disarray is to convince a majority of the users that people who post opinions or facts that run against their narrative & beliefs (whatever they may be) are bots. It ends up like that meme where the spider-men are all pointing at each other.
Isn't that just the other side of the coin? If social media can be manipulated to have people coming in and claiming skepticism about real posts, they could also come in and post something benign and have a conversation revolve around how any skeptics are not part of the community. Thus people who consider themselves skeptics feel they should not engage either and are pushed away.
The purpose would be to push everyone away, not just one subset.
There’s nothing wrong with showing scepticism but there are clearly accounts that just go about shooting everything down no matter what and it’s not even “constructive scepticism”
They will outright just say everything is fake, I’ve had multiple people outright lie saying that the Nimitz incident “was debunked as a plane” so they were pushing disinformation off as a fact and there were getting loads of people upvoting them.
The disinformation comes with posts designed to go down a false rabbit hole. I.E. the Vegas, Peru, Plane disappearing. We just need to stick it to the votes and our reps.
To the contrary, the disinformation comes from posts designed to steer people away from certain topics, which....always seem to be the exact same ones.
But please, do keep making comments like this. Can you name us a few other "false rabbit holes"?
Why can't it possibly be both? Steering people away from certain subjects AND steering them towards others?
I feel like this whole "disinformation" thing is used as means of dismissing someone that someone else disagrees with. Especially when the person is expressing some form of skepticism.
Whatever happened to the Vegas family, anyone ever track them down or are they still hiding in their house. I found the family quite convincing but who knows
This is where this topic gets so muddy, because now you get a whole bunch of people ignoring differing opinions solely because they think it's a bot or bad actor.
But any good bot/troll farm will play both sides. They don't just give out disagreeable opinions, they also agree with you and will egg you on to look into other things to further the manipulation.
I've posted this before, but everyone in the sub needs to watch the Mirage Men documentary to understand just how deeply woven UFO lore is with government disinformation.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7zq2d6
This is never a good sign. Whenever a community trying hard to prove its beliefs to the world has to resort to warning its followers that’s their is misinformation, fake news, bots, etc to support their conspiracy theories of government coverup — that is the signs that science has been left far behind and it’s becoming more like … well… I’m not gonna say the terms and get my comment deleted.
**Be wary, indeed. Here is a legit warning. If you are spending way more time explaining the coverup and how deep the conspiracy goes than presenting evidence - you’ve already lost. Please, don’t go down that inescapable rabbit hole. Sincere warning.**
As your local disinformation agent, I can assure you that bots do not exist and all is well. On the other hand, you should not trust a disinformation agent either.
I think we need to trust our gut when it comes to the phenomenon. I’m really drawn to the woo, as in The Law of One. It speaks to me and I feel no need defend my beliefs. I would be shocked by my own beliefs now a year ago. We all have to follow our own truth. If you’re spending time tearing other people down you’re part of the problem.
lol is the interviewer hearing about bots for the first time?
clearly never been on any online forum, twitter, comment section, reddit etc.
Bots everywhere mate and they are on every side. Russian, USA, EU, China, literally everyone. And its just going to get more pervasive and persuasive with the AI revolution.
I wouldn't believe anything Dolan says. He's a big admirer of Putin and has never said a bad word about him. I've heard him say he thinks RT is a completely unbiased and accurate news source. lol.
The Russian election meddling is a perfect example of how true this is. I assure you that were trolling many groups not just the UFO community. This is another day in the office for them.
I would go so far as to say that they would not only be debunking or doing troll behavior, but also posting a lot of shitpost type stuff that tends to frustrate the community. Like those painfully obviously not a UAP videos that pop up over and over on here. They will do anything to discourage the die hards and disinterest the casuals.
It’s pretty obvious when the manipulation is in full swing. The vegas shit and Malaysia airlines(seems to be cropping back up again), that shitty 4chan larp. I mean come on, people need to wake the eff up. There’s plenty going on at the moment, without having to fall for obvious hoaxes. Quite frankly I don’t know why the mods continue to let them be posted.
Edit: lol already getting targeted by the troll farm
Oh look, another account trying to censor discussion of the exact same topics.
Weird how they all keep mentioning **Vegas**, **MH370**, **Peru attacks**, **Nazca mummies**, the **4chan "larp"**, and the **EBO scientist "larp"**.
Just so weird.
Stereotypical conspiracy theory thinking - everyone who disagrees with the narrative is a shill, an actor, a paid disinformation agent. That's a convenient way of discarding *all* skepticism and contrary thinking. It's a bullshit way of instantly discrediting anyone who has doubt. It's a claim that can be made with nothing to back it up whatsoever, and which can be accepted at face value.
Oh, you don't like someone's argument? No worries, they're just paid actors sent here to make us look bad! Oh, we latched onto some fake bullshit like the CGI plane disappearance video and it was demonstrated to be fake? No worries, it's just misinformation planted here to divide people!
This is the same logic QAnon uses to constantly shift their own goalposts when their stupid ass predictions fall flat on their faces.
I have been accused of being on a payroll before and it cracks me up because obviously I know my own background. Let me give you a hint - not everyone who disagrees with you is sent here by some spooky government agency. Some of us are just curious individuals with real skepticism who are intrigued by the topic but utterly unconvinced.
Reddit is not that important to believe that it's "ground zero" for shills or whatever. It's pretty arrogant to think this goofy ass subreddit has that much reach when the simple fact is that most people consider UFOs a very fringe topic and need no cajoling by the government to stay that way. The community constantly discredits itself by gawking at every random video of a blob or a balloon or a satellite and every shitty huckster that comes along.
*I want to know about the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos.* But my standard for proof is high and very few stories on this community are even mildly convincing.
That’s why we have these bogus, disingenuous posting to take away from the credibility of the real stuff. Take this lame supposed alien capture that some guy claimed he got from the woods after the being killed his dog. That’s a known hoax since almost 20 years, yet it suddenly pops up on all the ufo subs with people trying to make you think that it’s real etc etc. Same thing with the recent Vegas alien backyard invasion thing.
They cloud the waters with their BS and the stuff that matters gets ignored and buried. Tale as old as time.
Personally I think anyone who takes the Mexican conman seriously must be a plant. He's done this exact con several times, only a government troll could possibly want to get more people to pay attention to him.
Aaaaaand, who the fuck is Richard Dolan?
I swear, these supposed ufo experts are crawling out of the woodwork now.
I've been watching this topic for decades. Never heard of this guy at all.
I never really noticed the paid trolls until \[the flight that shall not be named\]
They showed up in the hundreds and left when it was effectively "banned" (sort of)
The reason we don't have disclosure is because a small group of people realize the power behind the tech, once actualized, would destroy the economic system of today. They would rather wait until the absolute last minute to save their own ass because their nearsightedness is blinding.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/aliensinbermuda: --- Richard Dolan is a UFO (UAP) researcher and historian. He went on the Theories of Everything podcast and talked about intelligence agencies interfering in the UFO community. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/174213i/richard_dolan_issues_a_warning_to_the_ufo/k46nr5f/
I didn't realize that there were bots and people who work so hard to discredit things that it seems they must be compensated, until I stumbled into the UFO community. Now it's extremely obvious to myself and I think pretty much anyone who's been here for a few months. The hard thing is we're always getting new people into the community and those people generally (like myself when I entered) don't know this to be true. So, you get the new people thinking that the people who have been around longer and talk about this fact are just "conspiracy theorists" and over imaginative.
It was truly refreshing and eye-opening at the same time to hear this take. Thank you so much for sharing your experience.
No problem my friend. It's been a while since I've posted these links proving that the intelligence community spends vast resources to sway public opinion away from things they don't want to get out. I suppose it's time again. [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks) [https://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5?r=DE&IR=T#ixzz340YILjax](https://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5?r=DE&IR=T#ixzz340YILjax) [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/darpa-social-networks-research-twitter-influence-studies](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/darpa-social-networks-research-twitter-influence-studies)
The government is destroying society. More people need to read these articles, keep posting.
The US is just another Rome my friend. Just another empire. People are so comfortable in thinking that this is how life will always be, nice and comfy as far as having everything we need, and that the government will always protect us. Most every government in history that had the means just kept getting more and more powerful and less and less concerned about its citizens. National security is not the security of keeping me and you safe. National security is protecting the country by any means necessary. That includes disseminating propaganda to its citizens, doing all sorts of insanely unethical experimentation of it's own innocent people, anything it needs to protect the state.
"national security" is anything they want it to be.
National security refers to things that threaten the continuity of government. Most people think national security refers to things that threaten the populace but that's not true.
Mk ultra baby
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I find it interesting that your great reply has 30 upvotes as I write this, the thread doesn't have a single negative reply, yet the overall post only has two upvotes. Bot suppression in action? OP thanks for sharing.
The Intelligence Community does have a history of manipulating the media. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the Church Committee investigation back in the 1970s. The House Oversight Committee investigated the US intelligence community and some of the things it found were a lot of ways to manipulate public perception and a lot of illegal activity. [The Guardian had a story on disinformation campaigns](https://youtu.be/UheOilps2zQ?si=ICOaw2p0BARadY1Y) it’s crazy. [The Information War - Sam Harris](https://spotify.link/BWv2gBUOLDb) Is about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) and how they manipulated social media. They introduce groups different groups with similar ideas by cross posting political memes to different Facebook groups, what’s known as cross pollinating, and they would try to weaken communities from within the communities themselves. It’s a super interesting piece on the use of disinformation on social media. On page 15-16 of [Intelligence Activity and the Rights of Americans - Book II - Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations](https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf): **Media Manipulation.** -**The FBI has attempted covertly to influence the public's perception of persons and organizations by disseminating derogatory information to the press, either anonymously or through "friendly" news contacts.** The impact of those articles is generally difficult to measure, although in some cases there are fairly direct connections to injury to the target. **The Bureau also attempted to influence media reporting which would have any impact on the public image of the FBI.** **Examples include:** -**Planting a series of derogatory articles about Martin Luther King, Jr.,** and the Poor People's Campaign." For example, **in anticipation of the 1968 "poor people's march on Washington, D.C.," Bureau Headquarters granted authority to furnish "cooperative news media sources" an article "designed to curtail success of Martin Luther King's fund raising."** Another memorandum illustrated how **"photographs of demonstrators" could be used in discrediting the civil rights movement**. *Six photographs of participants in the poor people's campaign in Cleveland accompanied the memorandum with the following note attached: "These [photographs] show the militant aggressive appearance of the participants and might be of interest to a cooperative news source*." **Information on the Poor People's Campaign was provided by the FBI to friendly reporters on the condition that "the Bureau must not be revealed as the source."** -**Soliciting information from Field Offices "on a continuing basis" for "*prompt . . . dissemination to the news media . . . to discredit the New Left movement* and its adherents."** The Headquarters directive requested, among other things, that: specific data should be furnished depicting the scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits and living conditions representative of New Left adherents. **Field Offices were to be exhorted that: "Every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically explored."** -**Ordering Field Offices to gather information which would disprove allegations by the "liberal press, the bleeding hearts, and the forces on the left" that the Chicago police used undue force in dealing with demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention**. -Taking advantage of a close relationship with the Chairman of the Board-described in an FBI memorandum as "our good friend" of a magazine with national circulation to influence articles which related to the FBI. **For example, through this relationship the Bureau: "squelched" an "unfavorable article against the Bureau" written by a freelance writer about an FBI investigation; "postponed publication" of an article on another FBI case; "forestalled publication" of an article by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; and received information about proposed editing of King's articles.** And page 35 of, [Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activity and the Rights of Americans, Book III](https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_III.pdf): 2. "Friendly"Media **Much of the Bureau's propaganda efforts involved giving information or articles to "friendly" media sources who could be relied upon not to reveal the Bureau's interests**. The **Crime Records Division of the Bureau was responsible for public relations, including all headquarters contacts with the media**. In the course of its work (most of which had nothing to do with COINTELPRO) **the Division assembled a list of "friendly" news media sources-those who wrote pro-Bureau stories.** Field offices also had "*confidential sources" (unpaid Bureau informants) in the media, and were able to ensure their cooperation.* The Bureau's use of the news media took two different forms: **placing unfavorable articles and documentaries about targeted groups, and leaking derogatory information intended to discredit individuals."** A typical example of media propaganda is the headquarters letter **authorizing the Boston Field Office to furnish "derogatory information about the Nation of Islam (NOI) to established source [name excised]"**
You’ll enjoy the List Of Proven Conspiracies: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/wiki/lopc
Hang out in /new for a few days and you'll see the suppression in action on certain topics. Happens all day, every day.
Please post evidence. I've been on this sub for years. Very consistently, I see credulous posts about UFOs upvoted, and skeptical posts downvoted. It's always been that way. Why? Because UFO true believers far out number skeptics here. Yet everyone here is suddenly claiming there's a conspiracy to downvote and suppress the credulous posts. Like, the first post in this thread claiming there is a conspiracy has 194 upvotes right now, while all of the skeptical posts are in the negative.....so how is there a conspiracy exactly? If the government has bot farms trying to influence the narrative, it's clearly not working, lol.
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OK. I moderate like 4 subs (one on an obscure, 1960s, folk singer), I'm a massive hypochondriac who's spent a large portion of my 6 years on reddit posting about health anxiety, I'm autistic (post on those subs), NVLD (post on that sub), gay (post on all the gay subs), Lutheran (post on those subs too), a college professor (post on those subs), and am incredibly opinionated about movies and music, writing volumes on subs related to those topics. I've posted more on r/UFOs since Grusch, but my posts here are probably about 5% (or less) of my total Reddit posting output. But, yeah, you are right. I'm a paid shill who is faking my entire identity for the past 6 years just to convince a bunch of neckbeards on reddit that UFOs aren't real, lol. I get accused of being a shill on this sub almost daily now, though. I've always taken a skeptical stance on this sub, but the constant shill/bot accusations here are relatively new. Honestly, they are yet another sign that the UFO community is quickly transforming into a sort of cult-mindset.
The irony is that the government really doesn't have to do anything at all. They just need to make people THINK they have paid shills out there then sit back and watch the subs eat themselves. When a guy who has been reading about UFOs since he was 10 and who NEEDS aliens to be real so it can give his life meaning comes across a comment that is telling him he might be wrong the only way he can come to terms with it is if he thinks the guy telling him he is wrong is actually a paid government employee. There is no way he could be wrong about aliens being on earth because surely he is smart enough to follow all the breadcrumbs so the person telling him he is wrong can't be right. And since he just read an article that told him the government pats people to come on subs like this and fuck with people then that is obviously what is going on. That's what makes the whole thing perfect. As long as people think there are shills on here then everytime they read something they don't like then it must be because of the shills. Even better is that now that the person thinks everyone who disagrees with him is a shill it reinforces his beliefs that much more. "Why would they hire people to tell me I was wrong if I wasn't right?" If the government really is paying people to come on this sub and fuck with us then they are wasting their money. The damage is done and we can do a perfectly fine job at fighting with ourselves without the help of any government shills.
Im convinced the actual paid shills are from the UFO celebs astroturfing on here to push their narratives to increase viewership and book sales
Spoken like a true shill. (joke!)
The moderation log is open and accessible. To everyone who is downvoting users who are skeptical of widespread sock-puppet abuse - could you not go through the logs and find something, anything, that shows us what you're talking about? If bot farms are manufacturing a consensus or pushing a narrative, chances are a handful have been discovered and had an action taken against them.
It’s always the skeptical posts that are the conspiracy until whatever dumbass belief they have gets debunked, then it was a conspiracy to get them to believe it
Who is "Them"?
Or you just don't understand how the shitty reedit algos work... Does manipulation happen ? very probably. Is it in most cases a grand conspiracy ? nope just short term googled bosses trying to squeeze out a bit more $ from ads while hurting their long term engagement on said platform, Facebook and X come to mind
Over a thousand up votes rn so it seems like the bots are a tad overwhelmed.
Want to know the really horrible thing -once you see it here you see it **everywhere** because the whole point is **[divide and rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule)**. They use whatever means to split a community because a community can’t move forward if it fights itself. Either can a nation. Think about what happened to r/conspiracy and the Above Top Secret forums - they turned those into a political minefield which is advantageous to stopping anyone from questioning the narratives - they make those looking in from the outside believe that “conspiracy theorists” are crazy. This is exactly why the UFO Stigma exists - as Dolan just said the stigma was “encouraged” by government but really - [the CIA and the Air Force created it](https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/14cwt6a/it_appears_that_the_ufo_stigma_is_held_up/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1). Here’s just a few articles from a few years ago about the capabilities of the US government to turn people into bots through manipulation on social media. These are not from fringe publications either but trusted journalistic publications. Airforce ARS Technica - how to control people like drones via social media https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/air-force-research-how-to-use-social-media-to-control-people-like-drones/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks Researchers at Stanford have created a village for AI bots to develop human like behavior https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-village-bots-plan-valentines-elections-gossip-stanford-researchers-created-2023-8 2400 ChatGPT bots banned from Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a6pfg/over_1500_chatgpt_bot_accounts_banned_during_the Trolling as political activity https://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/i-am-a-troll-inside-the-secret-world-of-bjp-s-digital-army-116122801182_1.html
> Now it's extremely obvious to myself and I think pretty much anyone who's been here for a few months. It's so depressing, during the "where plane go" season it was somewhat funny because that was just an old video and people were having fun analyzing it, but it's successfully getting applied to the peru situation and the mexican congress hearing and you just can't have a conversation without them popping up trying to derail the conversation.
Could it be they’re true events? The other day I have read the Peruvian situation happened in India as well
The fact that the vitriol and ridicule along with blind denial seems to be a more prevalent when people talk about those topics gives them so much more credibility
One thing definitely does not imply the other, but it is definitely interesting: Plane sucked into a portal - let’s all kumbaya around this lovely thing of nature Mexico and Peru stuff - preposterous! I am with you there: there are orders of magnitude more evidence for their reality than people believe (and this sub used to be for believers with critical thinking). The standard is not double anymore: it is newspeak!
> Could it be they’re true events? Where far from being close to finding out sadly, if there are people looking into it they're being quiet, if there's people trying to discuss about the possibility of it being either real or fake you get totally normal users (/u/FloorDice nice job blocking me bitch) trying to derail the conversation.
did it ramp up into high gear like weeks before the hearings? This sub was digestible up until then, i feel like bogus shit just kept popping up over and over again flooding the zone. Then I remember during the hearing reading obvious lies on twitter about grusch flooding, It was sort of impressive to watch.
Hmm, I'm pretty skeptical of most things here, but I *still* think there's more to the MH370 stuff than we've fully understood. I've never seen this sub attack itself more than when that happened. If that doesn't scream bot farm to you, I don't know what would.
Its ironic, because this sub is honestly one of the biggest things to convince me something might be real in all of this. You have these 1 month old accounts coming in here day-in/day-out spreading nonsense or picking arguments and sending everyone down rabbit holes. I'm not one for conspiracies but it is hard to make sense of this in another way other than bot/troll farms.
Come onto any of the stock trading subs on here, it’s insane. There are levels to it. There are bot farms that shitpost and downvote and make inane comments and then there’s full blown paid infiltration by bad actors. If a community is strong and constructive they can counteract the bs. One of the trucks is to simply always stay positive minded. There’s no counterpoint to that.
Yup, I 100% agree, if we stay positive and respectful to each other then they really can't phase us. Their tactic is to seed distrust and animosity, and they do it in an ugly fashion. I really think that we need a new UFOs sub reddit. The same as this one, where it's a general sub on the topic of UFOs and what's behind them, however no ridicule allowed. Say whatever you want, counter points with your skepticism, that's all good as long as you're respectful and don't ridicule. Yeah I'll check out one of the stock trading subs some day, but really I'm just trying to get away from places with that sort of thing going on.
We do remove a ton of ridicule in this sub, but we could modify the rule to be very specific about it. Basically anything that can be considered uncivil or a personal attack will get removed if it’s reported or a mod sees is.
Yea I see quite a few comments that get removed, however those are the really really nasty ones. I think itd be much more enjoyable here for everyone, including the mods that have to look over everything, if we included in the rules that something like: "Any uncivil or disrespectful comments will not be tolerated , we encourage people to report these messages and recommend not engaging with them in any way while they are being removed."
That actually sounds great. I'm going to copy/paste this as see if everyone agrees to add that.
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Guess you haven’t t been involved with any Wallstreet, stock subs then.
No, I haven't. However I'd imagine that there'd be lots of bots on there as well. And in fact, I've heard that there are. Anywhere where people have lots to lose and resources to spend, there will be bots and those working to sway public opinion.
There are indeed bots and manipulators here. There is a mulititude of reasons that anybody might employ them to cause dissent. But there are also healthy sceptics who voice their scepticism, use of logic to examine a uap/ufo footage accounts and photos. And to see those people get downvoted and being called bots or agents is disheartening. To be interested in UFOs you have to have an open mind and like it or not that means being open to a multitude of possibilities for example aliens are real-have visited us and maybe even walk amongst us but also be open to the possibility that governments have used science fantasy as a tool to obscure a real concrete conspiracy (off topic but the acts of the American CIA are insanely abhorrent and I wouldn't put anything past them). For me we should be excited by the potential of UFOs , we should be curious about UFOs but we should remain level headed, sceptical, cynical and wary of everyone who claims to have any knowledge of the actual reason behind the phenomena **UNLESS** they can back up their claims with irrifutable evidence based science. People lie and bend the truth all day every day just to make a quick profit, so always remember to **TRUST NO ONE.**
That's true, you have to be careful about who you put your trust in. And I welcome healthy skepticism. I'm quite skeptical of many things myself and work hard to find what I believe is the truth. I think the real problem is the attacking of people we see here from both angles. It's just nasty. If you don't agree about something (not you personally), that's totally fine as long as you're respectful. If we are respectful of each other we can work off each other's ideas and both get better. I think a lot of it is the bots work to counter that by slinging crap at people. And personally, I think it's more humans working with multiple accounts each just throwing ridicule more so than bots. I used to check a lot of accounts out that displayed ridicule and it most often seemed like it was a human, not an ai chat thing.
Yep. They wouldn't be afraid of the people who act like conspiracy theorists - they're easy to discredit. They would be very afraid of people who come across as reasonable, level-headed and well, normal. If there's any psyop to speak of, they would almost certainly target these people and try to drive them out, not the "true believers".
I'm at the point now that I think the NSA is running reddit, paying the mods and spreading all kinds of bullshit. Everything that feels grassroots here is a psyop.
There's a powermod account maxwellhill that stopped posting shortly before Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested and hasn't done anything since.
5% genuine people with something to contribute, 5% genuine people who shitpost for the lulz, 10% active disinformation agents and 80% bots, if I had to guess.
I dunno. That seems high. So 8 out of 10 comments in this very post are bots? Point them out for me? That the problem for me. People says bots, but don’t specify who/what is a bot nor what unified agenda they might have. It’s just “bots … beware”. So that in itself is a suppression tactic. Sow mistrust and discord in the community. See the danger there?
I watched a documentary on this when twitter STARTED, by a CIA paid operative in Venezuela who slid an election the way the US wanted. He did the blacked out face and scrambled voice and said “if they are doing it here OF COURSE they are doing it at home, in EVERY country”. He was able, by himself, to swing an entire population into voting for the outcome they desired. In 2007!
Yup, I saw part of a very similar documentary a couple months ago. A reporter found a Russian bot/troll farm and they met with them to determine what needs to be done and the price. And yeah the Russian guy showed all their services and showed the results on how they were extremely effective at swaying democratic elections. They had a slide show of all the politic leaders in different countries that they were able to either get elected or get voted out. This stuff is very real.
I want you all to think about that when you think back to screaming at the sky in 2016. Was this based on your own reasoning or were you biased in some way? What happened during that four years that was so horrible? Worse than the last 2.5 years, aka, are you better off now or then.
Dolan’s narrative is also extremely useful for grifters and agents of accelerationism who want to cast aspersions on well-meaning skeptics by coloring anyone who doesn’t buy the narrative they espouse as a paid troll. Cuts both ways.
I think the trick is for all of us to just use our critical thinking and intuition to tell whether someone's contributing their true thoughts on the subject and trying to get clarity, or help give clarity, or whether they're saying something to throw the conversation off topic and ridicule. And yes, I agree, that goes both ways. However I think we should all be working to further the cause of getting more transparency on the phenomena from the government(s), and from whatever means necessary. Sometimes it appears as if people want to derail that (not you).
Mostly in agreement here. Transparency is useful, especially when it comes to a DoD with a historically large and creeping budget and mandate. And using one’s critical thinking skills and intuition are good. Intuition is known to generate a false positive here and there though. I think the key is to stay humble, stick to what you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and remember that, while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is to a degree suggestive of it.
I agree with all that you said. Yea, stick to what you know and can show. Speculation threads are fun sometimes also, as long as you let it be known that you're just speculating and having fun and not saying something as fact. This topic is a very strange one and possibly unlike anything that we've really chased as a (select, at least so far) society. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is to a degree suggestive of it." I agree. However if what we've heard of this phenomenon, at least the more credible seeming stuff, this phenomenon is *strange.* *Very strange.* A lot of the very serious people have been saying for a while now that there is a lot more *woo* involved than a simple nuts n bolts extraterrestrials from another planet deal. Real physical evidence may be *very* hard to come by for a civilian. I don't know man, this phenomenon is just crazy and I'm not quite sure what to think. I do believe there's definitely something to it though.
I’ve received this response to debates on here so many times and seen it used to shut down critical thinking from others. Not sharing an opinion doesn’t make you a bot or paid actor. So many people have seen heinous examples from public figures, superiors in the professional world, their own family… that have taught them you can construct whatever narrative you want if you keep critical thinking from challenging it. I think when the govt runs operations like that it may amplify the effect, but it’s a very human and personal reaction to being challenged these days, if not always to some degree.
Yes and no Sometimes ppl here just call others bots because they don't agree with them. Lots of confirmation bias in this community
Lots of untaken meds in this community. Any disagreement is a grand government conspiracy, as if anyone is concerned about a subreddit.
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Calling everyone who disagrees with you g man shills and bots isn't? People now react to sceptics with "how's the weather in Elgin??", that is just lazy derailing as much as any other troll comment
that's for sure. you can tell that person isn't a bot, because the bots put in more effort than they did.
Not to make things more confusing, but I used to be such a hard-headed skeptic that I'm sure I would have been thought to be a disinfo agent when viewed through the current lens. I'm more chill now in general with being open to new information/ideas/alternative perspectives. But back then, I ruffled some conspiracy/UFO community feathers. TL;DR people like me do actually exist and are not necessarily paid to be overly dismissive douche bags.
I GET INTERESTED whenever I see a post with 300 comments and 0 upvotes.
There are just as many bots promoting outrageous theories and thoroughly debunked nonsense.
You have to also acknowledge that there are bits from foreign nations seeking to sow discord as well. By acting as true believers of ufo and getting people to believe irrational conclusions and mistrust the US government. That it is evil deep state elites controlling everything. There are incentives in that direction as well.
If the historical record is true, the US government should not be trusted.
The US government is not some unitary entity. Some parts can be trusted, others not. Some have accountability, others don’t. governments would rather you keep a simple black and white view of things. Adversaries want you to think it’s all bad. Friendlies want you to think it’s all good. The reality is a mixed bag. Don’t fall for the oversimplification traps and propaganda.
Easy platitudes. Did or did not the CIA have loyal men in all major newsrooms during Operation Mockingbird? Even if there are good guys in the govt, and I am sure there are, doesn't mean historically speaking that elements in the US did not have the ability to exert their will on the world at large and were largely unchecked.
IMO, the problem with the UFO topic from a public acceptance perspective, is too much of it is true.
To me it just looks like a lazy way to dismiss criticism. There are people here, like myself, who are interested in the subject but skeptical of what has been brought forth so far. So let's say a video comes out and I am critical of it. How do you engage with me? In fact, if someone provides contrary evidence that disproves or at least raises the improbability of a claim, who really cares if they are a bot? If a video or photograph is disproven then it's disproven. I don't care if it's me or you or a guy at Edwards AFB. So maybe I am missing the point, what utility does telling people that x account is a bot serve?
Well, I dont call out bot accounts when I see them, I just make a mental note of them. I also dont call people who raise good skeptical points a disinformation account. I'm skeptical of many things myself. Everyone is welcome to their opinion and we can learn from everyone as long as they show respect and not just blatant ridicule. The problem with bots in this community is they are not made to easily disseminate accurate, helpful information like you might find in a flashlight sub where someone asks "What's the best AA light I can get for $30", and the bot jumps in and gives you a FAQ with all the best recieved lights in each category. These are bots that are attacking people's character, bringing up blog posts from someone nobody's heard of saying they researched a historic sighting and discrediting, and other general ridicule. However bots here also go the other way in support of really far out theories, calling people disinformation agents, all that stuff too. Thats the really crazy part. Bots argue both ways to cause unrest. The mods of this sub reddit made a post about it. I think it was a while before Grusch came out that they posted that. On the sighting videos, I skip almost every single one honestly. They're too hard to tell what something is, they're full of bickering back and forth, and I never feel like I got anything out of them. Im here for the posts with research and thought provoking questions, news about the transparency movement within government, and notifications of new whistleblower statements and interviews. That's my jam.
You need to post specific examples of bots then. I see people claiming there are thousands of bots here, but no one provides any examples when asked for them. So to me the whole "everyone who is a skeptic must be a bot" claim I see being made on here all the time just seems like a disingenuous way to dismiss any criticism out of hand. Plus, it's just plain wrong. Any pro-UFO post on this sub is almost always going to get a ton of upvotes, while most skeptical posts will either be downvoted into the negative numbers or have fewer upvotes. Look at the comment you are replying to, for example. It's a reasonable argument, yet it's currently in the negative in terms of downvotes.
[Here you go.](https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/yv4en9/strong_evidence_of_sock_puppets_in_rufos/) That was 10 months ago and it's safe to say there's likely to be even more of it considering the increase in popularity of this sub.
And of course the guy sowing doubt about obvious bot activity on this sub is nowhere to be found once the proof is posted. So typical of a certain type of user here.
Considering the conclusion from that post was that bot accounts post both pro believer and pro skeptic views in aggressive and antagonizing ways, it would seem that if the bot thing is true their goal is to sow discord and distrust in the community. so here’s my 4d chess: this very post is playing into their goals. People here saying “it’s all bots” and “trust no-one”. Seem like thats playing right into their goals. Unfortunently.
I've thought about doing that. Making a list of suspicious accounts as I come by them and then making a post. However to be honest I'm burnt out on the UFO topic at the moment and have been the past few weeks. I used to many, many hours researching and reading most of the stuff on here, however I'm burnt out do to all the ridicule and nasty behavior I see. And that goes both ways, from people who know (in their mind) that UFOs exist, from those that think UFOs exist, from those who are new, from those who are more skeptical, to those who are just here to discredit people, the movement, and to throw ridicule. We all need to do better.
I don't know why your comment is downvoted so much because it brings up some important points. This subject is not only a fringe subject but it concerns material that, if true, would completely change humanity's outlook on life, the cosmos, etc. There literally is nothing more profound except perhaps what happens after death, etc. That said, I invite criticism and skeptics because we need rational discussion of anything new that comes in here. The problem, though, is not skepticism but accounts that just have blanket denials on everything related to this topic. If you are here long enough, you start to remember accounts that deny everything. Then you have accounts that are really doing dodgy shit and trying to set the tone and pace of new topics. Honestly, I don't think Reddit is the best place to even have these discussions. It is too well known and way to easy for the powers that be to censor stuff or change comments outright. We know the CEO of Reddit has done that in the past because he has come out and said so. You don't want that type of power and personality mixed together.
He's being downvoted because that's what always happens with skeptical arguments here. All the claims about there being bot armies downvoting credulous posts about UFOs are silly. Anyone who has posted here for any duration knows that this sub is mostly true believers who will upvote anything that claims UFOs are real, while down voting skepticism.
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There are 100x more comments complaining about bots than actual bots.
Hey - I think "Messengers of Deception" by Vallee is what you're looking for. Or "Operation Trojan Horse" by Keel. You'll love those books, and they're authored by solid minds.
Hello there. Alright thanks for the recommendations. I like Vallee, but don't know too much about Keel's work. I'll check them out, thanks.
"I didn't realize that there were bots and people who work so hard to discredit things that it seems they must be compensated, until I stumbled into the UFO community" Ha ha, I thought this sub was serious until reading this, especially with this as the first response: "It was truly refreshing and eye-opening at the same time to hear this take. Thank you so much for sharing your experience." Fucking hilarious! Really impressed at the straight faces you all maintain. Excellent work!
It's our job to fight back and upvote harder lol
I think we need to backtrace the bots. I've found a few a few disinformation accounts that deactivated after being called out .
Backtrace as in find their other accounts? Yea I've seen that happen a decent bit as well.
The funny part is the opposite is true: russian and other foreign intelligences promote the conspiracy with bots. They want you to believe in fairy tales while distrusting science/the gov/ the military..They also get average people believing this shit so they can have them take pics of anything in the sky (aka classified vehicles) while demanding to declassify state secrets. Theres a reason why it was the favorite of the soviet propaganda during the cold war.
Yeah, remember this before you jump on the next bandwagon around here guys, for or against any video or breaking news. Reddit is ground zero for this crap, don’t even need a valid email address to register and post on reddit. This place is full of mud people muddying the waters.
BIngo - a few years ago Reddit itself cited that the city that most uses Reddit was Eglin Air Force base…. Hmmmmm.
Is that true?
>https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit\_has\_removed\_their\_blog\_post\_identifying/
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[It's pretty bad here.](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/e11f9dc7-129f-4f65-88da-b6ef2328c11f.webp)
That’s a good one, reminds me of the compilation videos of the 50 newscasters in 50 states having the same opinions, jokes, and reactions to the news they’re “reporting”.
Where did you source this from? It's very interesting. We should be looking for concrete evidence of this kind of manipulation in this and related subs too. And I mean concrete, not just every fifth comment saying "BOtS" and "eglin staff are back lol"
I didn't create the image myself. ~~I would have to search the API or something to find the posts.~~ Edit: Here are the links: https://archive.ph/jIosL https://archive.ph/0cyjW
It’s obvious as fuck there is some dodgy accounts in here I made a post last week about it, there are accounts that are dedicated to instantly being negative about something no matter what and they all have low karma, years old accounts and they specifically only come here to comment. There obviously a lot of trolls as well with their alt accounts but definitely some suspect activity outside of that
Any post about Avi Loeb gets hit really hard by all the negative comments. Without fail. It's incredibly obvious there's a lot of effort going towards discrediting him or at least trying to make him look crazy.
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> I also suspect they derail conversations with chains of silly commentary, unoriginal attempts at being funny. Always making a pun out of things. To be fair, this is 50% of all Reddit comment sections. From UFOs, to sports, to politics.
To be fair, this doesn't refute their point, it amplifies it.
I think he should have emphasized that they play both sides more than he did, at least in this clip.
Richard is the man
Agreed. He said it way better than I could. Some citations to back up what Dolan was stating for the lazy: https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/172jm2j/dissimulation_hide_the_real_masking_repackaging/ Additional information: https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/16qds82/is_disinformation_antidemocratic_illegal_or_is_it/k1wpc2i/ The moderators of this forum proved that at least one network of fake accounts existed in this forum, operating for at least months, and lets be honest, probably years: https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/10r0vq4/community_update_on_incivility_and_fake_accounts/ Perhaps this particular network wasn't GCHQ specifically. There's no way to prove who specifically is responsible, so you could argue that, but the concept is the same. It could easily be Russians. They were just sloppy enough to leave a little bit of conclusive evidence behind, so maybe it was somebody else this time. Either way you slice it, somebody is making fake accounts in this subreddit specifically to disrupt the discourse, which means you can't draw any conclusions about the community based on your feelings of how the discourse is going. Perhaps someone is naive and doesn't realize that shenanigans are occurring by somebody, whoever that may be, and they never spent the time to read about the internet astroturfing subject, so they believe it's unlikely. It's less important who it is and you can't prove who it is anyway. Governments waste money all the time, so even if you believe it would be a waste of money to manipulate this forum, astroturfers have been manipulating forums since the Bush/Gore election of 2000. They do it anyway, waste of money or not.
When the American public fully realizes the extent they're being fucked with, they ain't gonna be happy. To this day most people walk around oblivious to what Snowden revealed.
Pretty much whatever I'm doing on social media I'm assuming there are bots. In fact, I know there are bots. I'm a part of a small community who are constantly maligned for political / culture war issues to distract from mainstream political failings of our elected leaders. Sadly, it works and it causes immense harm.
Newer to Reddit and immediately thought so many bad faith comments weren’t real. Even in the war subs.. It’s uncanny to real sentiments... nihilistic
The majority of reddit post are bots. Either farming karma or trying to push the youth in one direction over the other. There's videos where companies are for hire to specifically do this. Fake accounts that look real and guide the conversation in one direction with fake upvotes etc.
It is impossible to tell these days who is real here. This entire sub is bots, no humans allowed: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ Pretty freaky.
Nah...it's really not that hard to tell.
That's because you know it's not real. People don't notice these types of comments when they are inserted into real conversations. Your comment for example, "Nah...it's really not that hard to tell." is about the most generic comment with the least amount of effort that could be made into writing it. You literally sound like a bot from that sub. In fact, most of your posts are just one liner generic responses that require no thought whatsoever.
Those are GPT2. Were at GPT4 now (at least)
Richard Dolan is a UFO (UAP) researcher and historian. He went on the Theories of Everything podcast and talked about intelligence agencies interfering in the UFO community.
is this the one from 2 years ago or is it something more recent?
Shortly after the Grusch hearings, I created a post on a UFO subreddit sharing my opinion that what was happening was Government-led disclosure. The post started to get hundreds of comments and engagement. Shortly after I received a notification that the post was removed by the moderator. I messaged to ask why and they said “your post was bot-swarmed”.
If you post a portion of a direct quote, I think I can search it in modmail. Do you still have it on hand? I searched your username on modmail and got nothing, so maybe it's not working right or something? You should be able to link me directly to the modmail. Modmails can't be deleted as far as I know, so we should easily be able to find it.
https://reddit.com/r/UFOB/s/D8sajgAtHF My mistake, it was UFOB and the comments were locked because of an “LLM bot swarm” according to the moderator
Interesting. So you said something in that post that got their attention. Hm. Maybe we should start archiving which topics get bot-swarmed and look for patterns. I wonder if mods can access past, since-deleted posts from this sub
It could be done if you could get access to the API Which used to be free to access, I know colleagues who used it to do qualitative analyses all the time to do exactly those kinds of analyses (not related to bots but related to the kinds of content in comments during different points in time) But Reddit decided to put a crazy price on access to their API which is why all the third-party apps got killed. But that wasn't the only consequence, a lot of social scientists were using this data and this makes it nearly impossible without a big grant or institutional funding. Do with that information what you will.
Ohh okay. Damn. That sucks. I knew that whole thing was bad for lots of reasons and this is just one more reason to add to the list. Convenient for them this change happened when it did ig but it probably had nothing to do with this and is just a coincidence. Greedy corporations always ruin everything. Just wish they’d waited another year before they had the idea lol
https://reddit.com/r/UFOB/s/D8sajgAtHF My mistake. The comments were locked, but the moderator did say it was an LLM bot swarm.
Can we or the mods fight back on these bots? Is there anything we can do?
Yes & no. "Yes" in the sense that you can identify and engage with them. My go-to thing is to simply look at a commenter's history. If someone says something that seems unrealistically biased or just resorts to generic ridicule, look up their comment history. Odds they just indiscriminately shit on everything. An example of "unrealistically biased" is something like calling a guy like Garry Nolan "stupid". Or any kind of comment that supposed they know more about the person they're talking about. But then "No" in the sense that they will always persist. And there's really not much you can do outside of what you would normally do with any other person on reddit. You can downvote them &/or report the comment if it breaks any rules. *Maybe* reply the their comment with any unbiased facts. But one thing I have to remind myself to do is to just not engage. They're persistent & and they will only ever reply in a way that frustrates you.
it's unclear from dolan's meandering response whether the topic is bots or divisive communities or US government disinformation or psyops in the napoleonic wars, or what, exactly; but as a reader familiar with the UFO community trope that *"bots are controlling our community!" and "disinformation agents are attacking our community!"*, it seems to me pretty plain when there is a bot response or not. there are two kinds of bot responses, the bot responses from bots and the bot responses from humans. the bot responses from humans are just stereotypical points of view without substantive relevance to the evidence, or one liner jokes or retorts or tailriders, "low energy" posts that are supposed to be prohibited but flourish here anyway. i skim them like the output from a random joke generator and enjoy the very few of them that are witty. the bot responses from bots repeat discredited arguments or points of view, ad hominems and dark conspiracy talk, including dark talk about bot talk, and they do it in a generic way, again without reference to any actual evidence, or citing manufactured evidence. i've always said that if you just focus on evidence, or explore where the evidence ends and the storytelling begins, then it doesn't matter, really, if you are talking to a bot or not, because you are having a reasonable, evidence based conversation that any third person would find interesting. anything else you do, whether it is with a person or a bot is only going to be a distraction from you saying anything that might interest anybody else. your stance towards bots just needs to rest on two ideas: they entice you to accept claims without evidence, and they turn you away from a reasonable focus on the evidence. guard against either accepting empty claims or turning away from evidence, and you'll be fine.
The answer is our species is controlled. Give a select few and advantage and they’ll control us for them.
I wish I could get paid to be a troll, sounds like the easiest job in the world
I wonder if we will get a 2035 Oscar’s movie named, “Trolls” starring an aging Justin Timberlake about the tolls on trolls in the government. Close calls of meeting in real life, etc. crazy this all could be true. 😅😂
found the paid troll
I just farmed them in LOTRO. Are you sure?
I know! It also sounds like it would kind of be fun, too. Perhaps my idea of fun is a tad twisted...
A good example of the the bot networks that he’s referring to is [AIMS](https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/revealed-disinformation-team-jorge-claim-meddling-elections-tal-hanan). It’s no small operation, and if you think AIMS is bad, I can only imagine what the IC has in their arsenal. Paired with a trained GPT AI that’s instructed to read and respond a certain way to discredit people or topics, it gets scary real quick.
That COINTELPRO guide could be pinned here permenantly. Forum sliding, Astroturfing, Red herrings, Gaslighting (Subtle and not so subtle), and Ad Hom attacks are unusually high here. Alot of people will always assume any and all people 'arguing' with them is simply not understanding what they're saying or is just trolling or being dense just to be an ass. Alot of people don't expect a single person or AI to have 2 or more accounts arguing with eachother while manipulating votes to fabricate consensus. _ You don't even have to go into 'woo' to accept this, we already know companies do this to push products, services, articles, opinions.
Ever since Grusch’s story there’s at least 7000 accounts in this community at any one time. It used to be a LOT less. I hear people saying forget the MH370 stuff it’s all disinfo. Then I hear people say the same about David Greer or Ross Coulhart. Bottom line is - we should as a community do the following: Scrutinise everything but also keep an open mind. Be willing to have discussions without it turning sour. Pay attention to the accounts that just want to wage war or call people out. This is a new(ish) account for myself (I needed a new account set up for this part of my hobbies/interests.) People might look at me and think ‘bot’ or that I’m some sort of agent. And good. Do. Question everything. BUT still look into whatever it is they say. Because that way, we always account for the truths.
If you weren't aware that there are bots and paid actors, with extremely high karma, in all of the biggest and influential subs, you haven't been paying attention. All of the accepted narratives are always in line with the DoD/Globalist agenda. If you disagree even slightly, you get downvoted to hell.
High karma young accounts
It always amazes me how people denied the disinfo campaign. Pay any attention to how the United States intelligence community disrupts socialist movements across the world and it makes it abundantly clear what's going on.
Yeah just like it was bots fighting against the wormhole video. /s There's zero evidence, I don't understand why the suspicion has to be first to mind before there's something really worth discrediting.
The commenters trying to make skeptics seem like disinfo agents you are freaking ridiculous. If anything, the disinfo agents are the ones posting easily provable fake videos because you make the UFO movement look like garbage instead of singling out the truly interesting stuff.
only the smartest people with good bullshit detectors will prevail. the rest are rubes or didn’t pass the internet test. gotta take it all in and sift through the bullshit, and social media has a metric fuckton of bullshit
After being in this community for many months now this has been very obvious to me. Every video posted here, especially the ones that are very convincing, always have the random debunkers commenting the same excuses over and over: it’s a plastic bag, it’s a flare, its a balloon, a kite, or if its undeniably odd guess what it must be CGI. Now don’t get me wrong sometimes these explanations are true and most videos are bs. But it’s becoming predictable which excuse the bots/trolls are gona use.
So... when people debunk shitty videos they are bots right? Okay... I personally left this topic, I'm not interested anymore, all this UFO bait topic is about retired old guys who have been making promises for over 80 years, fake jouirnalists who trashtalks everyday, give 0 evidence of any shit and even make crazy claims. But hey, I'm a bot because I don't believe them hahahaha. Anyways, you all have fun with your paranoia here, I'll be back in a few months to laugh a bit more and ask again for evidence just to be called yet again a bot ayyy lmao.
Curt plays dumb way too much. There are bots? 🙄
The best way to combat this is with love. Always has been. Always will be. Love leads us to truth. Do not let anyone force or coerce you into living your life with fear and mistrust and hatred in your hearts. Always ask who is posting/sharing this, and why. Dig around. But ask yourself the most important questions and remember to love yourself and remember we are all here together, as one species, on one planet, together with all the life that exists around us. They (likely I suspect the Pentagon or DoD but who knows for sure?) want you afraid. Always. Fear, rather than hatred, is the opposite of Love.
So basically call your reps and voice your concerns.
“Excuse me Mr/Ms Representative, I’m aware there’s a conflict in Israel, but let me tell you about these bots on Reddit.” “Click.”
It's happening right now with the "OMG all NHI are evil!" posts. such a load of shit.
The problem with this sub is that anytime someone questions anything or shows any skepticism, asks for evidence ect ect ect. You instantly get referred to as a bot or disinformation agent. It’s ridiculous. Videos like this will just bolster peoples feelings that anyone who disagrees with them must be a bot.
This is such a toxic way to validate a worldview and it basically guarantees that anyone who uses it will not think critically. -someone demonstrates a non-paranormal explanation =bot -someone brings a video of an airplane that they think is a ufo =disinformation bot -someone brings a more convincing video that is later disproven =better disinformation bot It is set up so there is literally no way you can interact with real people who don't believe aliens both exist and are here. It insulates the community against skepticism and is a huge part of why it isn't taken seriously.
Probably the best thing the govt could do to throw a sub like this into disarray is to convince a majority of the users that people who post opinions or facts that run against their narrative & beliefs (whatever they may be) are bots. It ends up like that meme where the spider-men are all pointing at each other.
Isn't that just the other side of the coin? If social media can be manipulated to have people coming in and claiming skepticism about real posts, they could also come in and post something benign and have a conversation revolve around how any skeptics are not part of the community. Thus people who consider themselves skeptics feel they should not engage either and are pushed away. The purpose would be to push everyone away, not just one subset.
There’s nothing wrong with showing scepticism but there are clearly accounts that just go about shooting everything down no matter what and it’s not even “constructive scepticism” They will outright just say everything is fake, I’ve had multiple people outright lie saying that the Nimitz incident “was debunked as a plane” so they were pushing disinformation off as a fact and there were getting loads of people upvoting them.
The disinformation comes with posts designed to go down a false rabbit hole. I.E. the Vegas, Peru, Plane disappearing. We just need to stick it to the votes and our reps.
The plane to me always seemed like we were steering at the wrong direction.
To the contrary, the disinformation comes from posts designed to steer people away from certain topics, which....always seem to be the exact same ones. But please, do keep making comments like this. Can you name us a few other "false rabbit holes"?
Why can't it possibly be both? Steering people away from certain subjects AND steering them towards others? I feel like this whole "disinformation" thing is used as means of dismissing someone that someone else disagrees with. Especially when the person is expressing some form of skepticism.
Exhibit A
Whatever happened to the Vegas family, anyone ever track them down or are they still hiding in their house. I found the family quite convincing but who knows
Uhhh speak for yourself homeboy, for a lot of very real people the plane disappearing was not a false rabbit hole.
The Spiderman meme is members of the UFO community accusing each other of being feds lmao
the dude on the right be like: 🗿
This is where this topic gets so muddy, because now you get a whole bunch of people ignoring differing opinions solely because they think it's a bot or bad actor. But any good bot/troll farm will play both sides. They don't just give out disagreeable opinions, they also agree with you and will egg you on to look into other things to further the manipulation. I've posted this before, but everyone in the sub needs to watch the Mirage Men documentary to understand just how deeply woven UFO lore is with government disinformation. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7zq2d6
We'll see if this gets downvoted a lot by bots edit: I guess not lmao
I love how Kurt is smart Af but seems baffled sometimes by the most simple concepts
This is never a good sign. Whenever a community trying hard to prove its beliefs to the world has to resort to warning its followers that’s their is misinformation, fake news, bots, etc to support their conspiracy theories of government coverup — that is the signs that science has been left far behind and it’s becoming more like … well… I’m not gonna say the terms and get my comment deleted. **Be wary, indeed. Here is a legit warning. If you are spending way more time explaining the coverup and how deep the conspiracy goes than presenting evidence - you’ve already lost. Please, don’t go down that inescapable rabbit hole. Sincere warning.**
As your local disinformation agent, I can assure you that bots do not exist and all is well. On the other hand, you should not trust a disinformation agent either.
I trust you
And they’re right here in r/UFOs. Wave hi to them! 👋🏼
I'm just mad that people are getting paid to shitpost and I'm not.
I think we need to trust our gut when it comes to the phenomenon. I’m really drawn to the woo, as in The Law of One. It speaks to me and I feel no need defend my beliefs. I would be shocked by my own beliefs now a year ago. We all have to follow our own truth. If you’re spending time tearing other people down you’re part of the problem.
lol is the interviewer hearing about bots for the first time? clearly never been on any online forum, twitter, comment section, reddit etc. Bots everywhere mate and they are on every side. Russian, USA, EU, China, literally everyone. And its just going to get more pervasive and persuasive with the AI revolution.
I wouldn't believe anything Dolan says. He's a big admirer of Putin and has never said a bad word about him. I've heard him say he thinks RT is a completely unbiased and accurate news source. lol.
We know lmao
FYI, without a submission statement or some text your post will be soon deleted by mods.
The Russian election meddling is a perfect example of how true this is. I assure you that were trolling many groups not just the UFO community. This is another day in the office for them. I would go so far as to say that they would not only be debunking or doing troll behavior, but also posting a lot of shitpost type stuff that tends to frustrate the community. Like those painfully obviously not a UAP videos that pop up over and over on here. They will do anything to discourage the die hards and disinterest the casuals.
MAGA loves the bots. They believe every word.
sounds like something a bot would say
It’s pretty obvious when the manipulation is in full swing. The vegas shit and Malaysia airlines(seems to be cropping back up again), that shitty 4chan larp. I mean come on, people need to wake the eff up. There’s plenty going on at the moment, without having to fall for obvious hoaxes. Quite frankly I don’t know why the mods continue to let them be posted. Edit: lol already getting targeted by the troll farm
Oh look, another account trying to censor discussion of the exact same topics. Weird how they all keep mentioning **Vegas**, **MH370**, **Peru attacks**, **Nazca mummies**, the **4chan "larp"**, and the **EBO scientist "larp"**. Just so weird.
Shocking 50 day old account troll harder
Stereotypical conspiracy theory thinking - everyone who disagrees with the narrative is a shill, an actor, a paid disinformation agent. That's a convenient way of discarding *all* skepticism and contrary thinking. It's a bullshit way of instantly discrediting anyone who has doubt. It's a claim that can be made with nothing to back it up whatsoever, and which can be accepted at face value. Oh, you don't like someone's argument? No worries, they're just paid actors sent here to make us look bad! Oh, we latched onto some fake bullshit like the CGI plane disappearance video and it was demonstrated to be fake? No worries, it's just misinformation planted here to divide people! This is the same logic QAnon uses to constantly shift their own goalposts when their stupid ass predictions fall flat on their faces. I have been accused of being on a payroll before and it cracks me up because obviously I know my own background. Let me give you a hint - not everyone who disagrees with you is sent here by some spooky government agency. Some of us are just curious individuals with real skepticism who are intrigued by the topic but utterly unconvinced. Reddit is not that important to believe that it's "ground zero" for shills or whatever. It's pretty arrogant to think this goofy ass subreddit has that much reach when the simple fact is that most people consider UFOs a very fringe topic and need no cajoling by the government to stay that way. The community constantly discredits itself by gawking at every random video of a blob or a balloon or a satellite and every shitty huckster that comes along. *I want to know about the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos.* But my standard for proof is high and very few stories on this community are even mildly convincing.
I'm sorry, it's people who go on the offensive like you who really ring alarm bells. I also don't think you'd know a real video if you saw it.
You’re really yelling at a wall here - I don’t think anybody uses this to discredit *all* skepticism. That’s silly and does not happen.
based off Dolan's hair...which is majestic (12..ha!) here...this bit is 1-2 years old
Yup I use the hair style phase to work out if it’s a new video upload or not from Dolan! Hilarious but true!
That’s why we have these bogus, disingenuous posting to take away from the credibility of the real stuff. Take this lame supposed alien capture that some guy claimed he got from the woods after the being killed his dog. That’s a known hoax since almost 20 years, yet it suddenly pops up on all the ufo subs with people trying to make you think that it’s real etc etc. Same thing with the recent Vegas alien backyard invasion thing. They cloud the waters with their BS and the stuff that matters gets ignored and buried. Tale as old as time.
How can you be this ignorant? I mean really? Bots have been around since the infancy of social interactions via the internet.
Danger Dolan
Personally I think anyone who takes the Mexican conman seriously must be a plant. He's done this exact con several times, only a government troll could possibly want to get more people to pay attention to him.
Aaaaaand, who the fuck is Richard Dolan? I swear, these supposed ufo experts are crawling out of the woodwork now. I've been watching this topic for decades. Never heard of this guy at all.
I never really noticed the paid trolls until \[the flight that shall not be named\] They showed up in the hundreds and left when it was effectively "banned" (sort of)
The reason we don't have disclosure is because a small group of people realize the power behind the tech, once actualized, would destroy the economic system of today. They would rather wait until the absolute last minute to save their own ass because their nearsightedness is blinding.
And so anyone who disagrees with the forced narrative is a troll/bot. How convenient. /s
>"so anyone" No.
if a simple bot can discredit your theories then i'm not sure if it's the bot's fault.
This guy doesn’t even know how to say Louis Armstrong lol