Re: PSA: Covert agents manipulate, deceive, and DESTROY REPUTATIONS
⭐ Merited by suchmoon (7)
Is this a precursor to an April Fools joke?
Sounds like you are in desperate need of your own advice:
Or do you want us all to believe that cryptohunter and some disaffected ex-sig campaigners actually work for the CIA?
Because you are not making any allegations with clarity and purposefully overcomplicating things, your pure motivation for posting is to create a dramatic effect and get people to pay attention to you, thus narrowing you down to a handful of users. Pretty boring, really.
Why am I bringing this up? Obviously, the Reputation forum (and Meta) are mass-chaos lately. It's that... and more:
I had been growing suspicious that there was more to this recent trollfest than meets the eye. Then, I saw two of the most astute users on the forum, o_e_l_e_o and actmyname, point out to others that widespread assumptions about the identities of various sockpuppet accounts are probably incorrect. Note that neither o_e_l_e_o nor actmyname said what I am saying here! What they said was purely negative. It just tended to mesh with suspicions that I already had, and made me take a closer look...
- I noticed that certain users have been recently targeted with increased intensity by trolls who seek to destroy their reputations. They are exactly the types of users one would expect to be targeted by intelligence agencies and other mass-manipulators: High-visibility, principled, doing a lot of work to contribute to the community (some of them doing it for free, with no paid signature), sterling reputations for honesty and integrity.
- I noticed an ongoing persistent smear campaign against ChipMixer: A privacy site, which is certainly not beloved by the types of entities discussed in the above article.
I had been growing suspicious that there was more to this recent trollfest than meets the eye. Then, I saw two of the most astute users on the forum, o_e_l_e_o and actmyname, point out to others that widespread assumptions about the identities of various sockpuppet accounts are probably incorrect. Note that neither o_e_l_e_o nor actmyname said what I am saying here! What they said was purely negative. It just tended to mesh with suspicions that I already had, and made me take a closer look...
Sounds like you are in desperate need of your own advice:
| DON'T | be paranoid. |
| DON'T | make incautious accusations that your personal enemies are alphabet-soup agents. It makes your adversaries too powerful when you accidentally label some basement-dwelling idiot as an intelligence agency operative. It also makes you look like a fool. |
Or do you want us all to believe that cryptohunter and some disaffected ex-sig campaigners actually work for the CIA?
Because you are not making any allegations with clarity and purposefully overcomplicating things, your pure motivation for posting is to create a dramatic effect and get people to pay attention to you, thus narrowing you down to a handful of users. Pretty boring, really.