@Vindicator suggested that I create a post here that we can link to from the pizzagate forum to help people understand how CTR/ShareBlue works and identifying shills/trolls.
The best way to know whether you are dealing with someone who is simply illogical/uniformed or if it is a proactive attack by someone deliberately trying to derail our efforts (CTR, ShareBlue) is to look for patterns from the poster/commentator, within the thread itself and in the poster's by clicking on the poster's name.
Here are some of the key patterns:
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Caution/Discouragement Trolling: Heavy caution at a new, possibly promising, lead or to essentially make us feel that our investigation will not lead to anything. This is different than asking for documentation of a CLAIM. It will sometimes involve a "refutation" of a claim as unsubstantiated WITHOUT any support for the refutation, which is obviously illogical and a good indicator that the item may deserve more attention. A good example I encountered guy involved a commentator pushing back very hard on somebody's finding of possible other targets connected to Tony Podesta among his FB friends based on questionable posts. The CTR person was trying to say that CP is actually College Progressives or had some other meaning than child porn, without providing any support and when the images and comments clearly showed the same sexualization of children that we have seen throughout the investigation. The shills will sometimes support this effort with a downvoating brigade against a post of new, promising information that seems to be substantiated and to merit further digging.
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Misdirection/Hyped Dead-End Leads: Smoking gun or exaggerated claims without evidence, which contradicts point #1. When you see both happening, you know it is a shill (versus someone just being over zealous) since it shows radically-inconsistent analysis.
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Posts to Paint Us As Lunatics: These shills will sometimes plant ideas that seem to be ludicrous, disconnected, or fringe, with no support, so that they can build the narrative of fake news by pointing to nonsense threads. Examples include linking our investigation to aliens or more radical conspiracy theories so that new arrivals to the effort, and the media, can quickly discredit our research by pointing to the most incredible and unsupported claims. When these unsubstantiated ideas fly up with heavy upvoats, you know it is CTR. They use this to move our resources into dead ends or areas that make us look silly...while replacing legit threads by moving to the top of the board.
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Painting Us As Hateful, Rage-Filled Bigots: This approach involves posts or comments showing heavy venom, hate, and bigotry toward a particular group. Since the LSM tries to paint those who oppose their narratives or support Trump as xenophobic neo-Nazis or white supremacists, the favored targets are usually jews, blacks, or Arabs. They will take a thread and try to hijack our efforts as being driven by this stereotyping and bigotry, to make us look like a lunatic fringe of white supremacist racists (one of their memes). This serves to dissuade others from joining our movement and arms them with material to feed to the LSM portraying us this way.
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Espousing Vigilantism and Violence - So We Must Be Censored: This is a favored tactic to try to show how dangerous the investigation is so that the LSM and social media should censor and stop our efforts. These posters will make a call to arms/violence...take things into our own hands...in an effort to show that this movement is dangerous and must be stopped by the authorities, media, and social platforms. The posters try to play off of our natural concern and outrage at what we have uncovered...saying that we have waited enough without results and the time for patience is over...as with the goal of creating a convenient narrative record for authorities to shut down our efforts in the interest of safety. to go down to the place and give them justice. There was a strong theme around this prior to the Dec 4 false flag op with the staged "gunman attack on CPP," and it was very evident to those who knew the tactic. They have used the same approach in creating violence at rallies and then trying to blame the other side (usually Trump supporters recently) for the violence and hatred. The LSM is very supportive of this tactic as it tends to feed into their dual goals of censorship and gun-control.
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Post Sliding: Some call this shit posting. This tactic involves either posting the same material under many posts at once, posting nonsense posts, or regurgitating old posts without any new developments. They will also do this within threads by copying-and-pasting the same exact material many times within a thread and across threads. The purpose of this is to slide more relevant and dangerous posts/material that are at the top of the feed (first page) from display. We need to be on top of this to mark as SPAM and quickly remove. It also serves as an indicator that something currently featured on page one might be very damaging and worth a deeper dig.
Those are the main themes for spotting paid-for shills (CTR/ShareBlue). The response should be to Report, downvoat, and move on from there. You should call them out if you have clear evidence from their history via a pattern (inconsistent logic except that it goes AGAINST our efforts, very new accounts). Once you identify them, do not engage them in dialogue as it is wasted effort and space.
Vindicator ago
There are only so many strategies...if they adjust, we'll add them to the list. Perhaps they will tire of free colonoscopies.
Vindicator ago
Great post, reasonedandinformed. Knowledge is power. Now, let's link this in comments when calling out shills. :-) Ping in some users you feel have good BS detectors to help spread it. You can ping five user names per comment.
Also, if you would like to start adding links to examples of each tactic as you happen to run into them, we can turn this into a full-blown research post and put it up at v/pizzagate.
Pinging @abortionburger @wecanhelp @Millennial_Falcon @sensitive