Pardon the repost, frens. This is for newanons who may have never been in a place like QResearch before.
HOW TO QUICKLY SPOT A CLOWN
They will:
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Attempt to get a divisive or emotional response from you, to derail research
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Concern-troll and copy/pasta spam shill to contradict confirmed findings
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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.
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Promote social ethics that are disingenuous like doxxing, "reverse psychology", or promoting propaganda
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Promote tactics that are unethical, illegal or involve violence outside the scope of the law
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Act as hall monitors or pretend to be an authority on what is or is not acceptable (don't let anybody tell you what is acceptable – evaluate everything for yourself, including this post)
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Employ Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to dissuade research
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Have fake arguments among multiple IDs attempting to inject an ad hominem emotional character to the bread
Topic Sliding: If information of a sensitive nature has been posted, they try to quickly remove it from public view by topic-sliding – submitting many unrelated posts to dilute information that they hope you won't notice. Operators can control several fake IDs via bots. They also use bots to mask their intent. Although the sensitive information wasn't censored, it is now lost in a sea of unrelated and bogus posts.
Seeding Bad Information: Operatives insert flawed or bogus information from time to time as an ongoing tactic, depending on their skill-set and mission needs. A common ruse is providing information backed by bad evidence, in the hope that you don't check the "source of the source." This serves several objectives: resource consumption, evidence pollution, discouragement and misdirection.
Astroturfing Consensus: Attempts to build a manufactured consensus around a flawed premise or compromised information. Related to consensus cracking, where false evidence is injected to dispute or discredit the current consensus, and push it towards a desired false consensus. Misleading and false evidence and information are often salted into the evidence pool, aiming to impede organic consensus building, while also poisoning the available information and evidence.
Cultivating Tacit Approval ('Silent Agreement'): This technique tries to convince users to ignore, or not respond to, bad information or false assertions. The goal is to reduce pushback against the above-mentioned tactics. This tactic weaponizes the board's own reply-filtering mechanism against anons, by persuading us to employ software filters, so we won't actively dispute operators seeding of bad information and astroturfing consensus. This is why operators try to condition users into filtering material they disagree with.
Dealing with Clown Bots
IF YOU DECIDE TO DIRECTLY ENGAGE A BOT, KNOW THIS:
Responding just wastes bread with their responses, and hands them a target to programmatically lock onto without handler interaction. One way to foil bots is to point them out by proxy: copy/paste the bot's ID as a quoted reference, while 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. This can also make the bots look artificially erratic and easier for other anons to spot.
What Is Known About Clown Bots
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Facilitate topic sliding, manufacturing consensus, obfuscation of intent, and general disruption
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Require a handler to watch for and be in the thread
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Cannot enter threads themselves
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Respond to replies and each other, and can create replies
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Activate on lists of trigger words which change over time
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Use a combination of legit pasta, pre-written points, or spam targeted at various objectives
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Have unwittingly pasta'd supportive replies
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Are employed mostly at night and on weekends (US time)
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Add to bump limits
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Can be filtered by ID once they are observed (unless they are using the shared Tor ID 000000 and you don't wish to filter legit Tor anons)
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Are not perfect and can be easily spotted
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Were deployed starting on the /CBTS/ board
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Have certain flaws that can cause them to misfire, sometimes comically
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The handlers can make bogus clown threads, but also can be confused by accidental ones
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Handlers still cannot access the servers
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Have still not succeeded in their mission
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Still cannot meme
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Have been known to take authentic memes and deface them – because their meme-fu is weak and lacking originality or authenticity