On ELI5, an impromptu "I am a professional social media manipulator and a corporate shill, AMA!"

This is the most dangerous element of the internet. It allows discussion to be manipulated and makes people fall in line with manipulated opinion.

People just don't have the ability or the time to analyse everything they read to such an extent that they create a reasoned opinion with regard to both sides of the argument. It's impossible. In this respect, the human mind is trained to take shortcuts; the opinions/"facts" it sees most often or as most popular are subsumed. So when we see a post or a comment with a huge number of upvotes, our instinct favours towards accepting this idea, we are instilled with a bias towards the majority. This applies vice versa for unpopular opinions.

So if these people are able to identify opinions or ideas contrary to their narrative they can easily shut down opinion with a few downvote bots or bots posting arguments in support of that narrative. Eventually people will become trained to do it themselves as they assume the popular opinions.

You can see this all over reddit and other sites. If you go to /r/TwoXChromosomes or any other "political" subreddit and post something contrary to the zeitgeist your post will be downvoted. No matter how well reasoned it is, no matter how articulately you write your comment, no matter what evidence you provide it will be downvoted. And who reads the downvoted comments? No one.

This has been in action for centuries. If you only allow for one side of the argument to be presented then who can argue? It's no longer an argument. Climate change is a fantastic example. I'm not a climate change denier and I place great faith in the empirical evidence but it is absolutely impossible to have any sort of debate on the matter because everyone has accepted the official line.

/r/conspiracy Thread Link - archive.is