The Short and Sweet:
A number of conspiracies are fueled by the same people who desperately want the title "Conspiracy Theorist" to remain a Pejorative. This is a process functionally similar to doing a controlled burn in one area effectively preventing a wild fire from spreading further
Key Example: Flat Earth
The Flat earth Conspiracy theory is easily debunked it, makes no practical sense on almost any level and works perfectly as a vehicle to shame and silence people who believe in legitimate conspiracies that have been proven like water water fluoridation or PRISM
At length on Similarities between a Prescribed/controlled Burn and a Judas Steer:
A Judas Steer is the head of a herd who is being herded knowingly or unknowingly guiding the rest of the herd to the slaughterhouse.
Example of a Judas Steer: Use of some key media or information to demoralize a population controversially I've seen George Carlin (whom I love) posted en masse on aggregation sites in a fashion that is clearly artificial with clips from his specials that demoralize most people on the nature of government; "they own you and there is nothing you can do about it" "voting is for rubes" "you can't fight back" This Rhetoric encourages the fallacy that we don't need the second amendment because there is no way the citizenry could fight back the military and therefore the second amendment's premises is faulty and void. A Judas steer can look similar to a Trojan Horse but the origin is what differs, A Trojan horse is constructed to trick you and defeat you if you fall for it, a Judas Steer comes about in a relatively natural fashion and is then used against the rest of the herd.
As a form of counter propaganda/agitprop this strategy can also work but it needs to be more convincing than time cube/flat earth tripe which isn't something that gains any steam on it's own merits but is simply easy to defeat and makes people feel like "Real Skeptics" when debunking it and is implied to be popular by how many people are talking about it when none of those people actually believe it. This is a prescribed burn a controlled burn.
A controlled burn is similar in principal to a partial hangout but that requires actually giving up some fundamental truth couched among lies and apologies; Key example: Obama publicly admitting to spying on phone records when PRISM came to light but denying that the program is actually being used to mass collect all communication data coming and going from key US corporations users, He encouraged a "discussion" on whether this process of collecting phone call records should continue and the media soon talked it death in affirmation and swept the rest under the rug.
These three tricks of propaganda for countering truth seekers are things that controlled opposition will use to entrap their followers and see them defeated in the public eye I'm thinking of Alex Jones and Q anon, I can't say with certainty either are in fact controlled opposition but I do know that following in line behind them would make us massively vulnerable to being lured into a trap by the media and their owners.
When I look at v/conspiracy I see these forms of agitprop and counter propaganda everywhere. Now there is cause to believe I am wrong on at least a few of these, I'm not infallible but I have seen these tricks on half/pol/, 8/pol/ various other boards on both image boards (especially during gamergate and the two Bundy Stand-offs) depending on who and what the motives are it also ends up on r/conspiracy too.
I will give examples of what I mean from the front page of v/conspiracy as I write this:
This is probably meant mostly in jest but it is here and it could make us look really crazy considering there is zero proof in the post, I have seen much stranger shit turn out to be true or under at the end of a loose thread like this so while Cautious this doesn't seem to be Judas Steer, controlled Opposition or a prescribed Burn, but more like a repost of an r/the_donald meme.
We want to destroy the satanic Jews at the center of Hollywood, I know we all agree here but this guy IS a Holywood Jew, He could easily be a Partial Hangout Or Trojan Horse, I don't have proof that the Jew or the Poster are ill intentioned but it's a fucking Jew, guys, come on.
Seriously? we're going to rehash AIDS paranoia that never panned out? there is nowhere near enough evidence in this post or the conspiracy in general, the guy who injected himself died a year later of a heart attack; you know how most people who die of a blood infection die? Cardiac Arrest. This one seems like a slightly higher effort Controlled Burn to me.
Super low effort, tries to relate an old man's forgetfulness to an incident that happened during the fucking troubles. Probably not anything worth being paranoid about but had to include it for being so dumb.
Of these 4 we have bad sourcing, one is likely to throw us off the scent of valuable holywood pedos another is a probable distraction. I'm not just concern trolling here we have bad content these days and it's not just us, 4chan is as bad or worse than it's ever been and 8chan has gone downhill massively since the mod overthrow on /pol/ while the adept use of controlled burns or meme conspiracies by our opponents is now ubiquitous.
It was worse yesterday and the day before but it seems moderation are aware of this post: https://voat.co/v/ProtectVoat/2656108 which details the involvement of a disinfo conspiracy attempting to weasel it's way into the heart of our community on Voat and use the upvoats farmed here and on other subverses to establish themselves as a controlled opposition and likely their ultimate goal being power mods and disinfo influencers. There strategy was to tell us what we wanted to hear about Pedos being caught, called out and beaten to farm us for "Karma" so they can look like legitimate posters.
We have proof people are targeting us; be more aware/paranoid of deception and voat on content with that in mind.
Most controversially I am going to say it take a step back when looking into this pedo shit, people are seeing the symbology everywhere just like people used to see satanist, cabalic, zoroastrian, pagan symbology EVERYWHERE, I'm not saying don't share it when you see it but we are teetering on hysteria with this shit so watch the clickbaity gotcha titles, just because you found out that flipping the user Icon in microsoft's products upside down is the pagan symbol for Baal, it is btw, but that's probably just a coincidence, what isn't a coincidence is how much Nazi symbology got snuck into Halo 5 but it isn't a conspiracy, it was an artist having fun. just like when you find a series of spiraling triangles on a logo or in a character design, it could mean the artist or owner is a pedo, it could be a coincidence or it could be somebody trying to troll us at this point.
In Summary:
Be suspicious, investigate, just don't be hysterical, it harms others by making proven conspiracy theories difficult to remedy or discuss; and recognize when people are trying to deceive you so as to discredit other conspiracy theories through loose association.
