How to Quickly Spot a Clown
They will:
-
Employ faux debate tactics: Generalizations, gas-lighting, projection, misdirection, false equivalences, confusing correlation with causation, appeal to authority, transference, false precepts, personal attacks, straw-men, red herrings, etc.
Topic sliding If information of a sensitive nature has been posted on a discussion forum, it can be quickly removed from public view by topic sliding. In this technique a large number of unrelated posts, or posts aimed at diluting the information presented, are submitted in an effort to trigger a topic slide to literally push content out of view. Operators can control several fake UIDs via the bots they make use of; these can also be called upon in the other techniques to mask the intent of the operator from the users at large. Although it is difficult or impossible to censor the posting it is now lost in a sea of unrelated and bogus postings.
Seeding bad information Operatives will insert flawed or bogus information from time to time as an ongoing tactic, depending on their skill set and the needs of their mission. Their most common ruse is providing information or evidence which is backed by bad source material in the hope that the "source of the source" is never checked. This serves several objectives, mainly resource consumption, evidence pollution, discouragement and misdirection.
Astroturfing consensus This is a technique that attempts to build a manufactured consensus around a flawed set of statements or compromised information. This is related to consensus cracking, where false evidence is injected in an attempt to dispute or discredit what the current consensus is, and push it towards the desired false consensus. Misleading and false evidence and information are often salted into the evidence pool, with an aim to impede organic consensus building, while also poisoning the available information and evidence.
Cultivating tacit approval (The legal term for this is 'silent agreement') Attempting to attain this state is done using a technique where operators will try to convince the user population to ignore, or not respond to bad information or false assertions. This is done in a bid to reduce push-back against the above mentioned tactics. It's worth noting that the reply filtering mechanism of the boards (which currently can't be disabled without code changes from the site admin) is used as a weapon of sorts in this tactic: Filtering with software prevents anons from defending against seeding bad information and astroturfing consensus. This is why the operators push so hard to condition anons into filtering material they disagree with.
How to spot a Clown's bot
NEVER DIRECTLY ENGAGE A BOT It just wastes bread with their responses, and hands them a target to programmatically lock on to without handler interaction. It seems that the easiest way to foil the bots is to point them out by proxy, by copy/pasting the user's ID as a quoted reference and intentionally breaking its post link in your response and/or answering it with a meme until they start misfiring because they can't parse the response to lock onto a target correctly.. Doing this can also make the bots look artificially erratic and easier for other anons to spot.
What we know about the cl0wnbots
-
Are used to facilitate topic sliding, manufacturing consensus, obfuscation of intent, and general disruption