I spent 1 hour and 21 minutes watching one of two YouTube videos posted here this morning. Patrick Bergy tied a lot of things together very plausibly regarding how social media can be used anonymously to manipulate people.
I want to present some conclusions/hypotheses I've come up with as I've watched the "cyberwar" go forward.
In my opinion one of the most heavily censored topics on the internet right now is "anti-vaccine" content. There is a BIG reason for that. (Heck, Adam Schiff himself wrote official letters to tech giants asking them to remove/censor anti-vaccine "misinformation")
I have a physical copy of Scientific American from April, 2017. There is a story in this edition called "Inside The Echo Chamber" by Walter Quattrociocchi with the subtitle "Computational Social Scientists are Studying How Conspiracy Theories Spread Online-And What, if Anything, Can Be Done to Stop Them".
It's clear that this researcher had access to impressive amounts of data: "By applying the methods of computational social science to the traces people leave on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other such outlets, scientists can study the spread of conspiracy theories in great detail." (I did wonder if he got access to information by using Cambridge Analytica or something like it)
Anyway, our friend Walter and his associates discovered some interesting things: "People who read science news rarely read conspiracy news, and vice versa. But the conspiracy pages attracted three times more users." and "People who were exposed to debunking campaigns were 30 percent more likely to keep reading conspiracy news. In other words, for a certain type of user, debunking actually reinforces belief in the conspiracy." (Could this be why pro-vaccine advocates 100% refuse to participate in scientific debate with "anti-vaxxers"?)
Walter Quattrociocchi studied 55 million US Facebook users.(?!) His group found that "over time people who embrace conspiracy theories in one domain-say the (nonexistent) connection between vaccines and autism-will seek out such theories in other domains." Here's the part I love: "Once inside the echo chamber, they tend to embrace the entire conspiracy corpus" (How the Great Awakening goes forward?)
Walter ultimately admits defeat: "These dynamics suggest that the spread of online misinformation will be very hard to stop."
The World Health Organization recently admitted that "vaccine misinformation" is spreading (and apparently gaining traction) much faster than their efforts at "debunking" it.
Anyway, truthful (what the DS calls "conspiracy theory") content spreads organically and cannot be stopped. Because the truth cannot be "debunked" the DS must resort to censorship, which will not work.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26319742
Heres some on-line information that relates to Walter Quattrociocchi's work: https://eprints.imtlucca.it/3685/