The revelations that Epstein had interest and involvement in the development of 4chan really makes me wonder what we would find behind the curtain at next iterations like KiwiFarms, etc if we looked hard enough. Not to sound an overly conspiratorial note, but sewing division within a foreign culture is one of those things that intelligence communities excel at, might match some patterns we’ve seen, and would serve to help explain some of the divergence between expectation and reality, here.

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schoen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is a theory that some skeptics of tech optimism have advanced for a while, that governments like Internet freedom and widespread availability of ICTs in rival nations because it either (1) makes people there hate and fear each other, or (2) makes them easier to propagandize.

In this account the U.S. State Department's Internet Freedom Agenda (which many of my friends and colleagues have been directly funded by) is about destabilizing other countries, while Russian or Chinese spies in turn relish American Internet freedoms because they can stir up conflicts here.

I have never endorsed this view but I've run into forms of it again and again and again. Adjacent to it is the idea that some of our prior social harmony was due to a more controlled or at least more homogeneous media landscape.

	▲	mrexcess 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I definitely buy into the “monoculture” argument a bit. When hundreds of millions of people are all voraciously consuming the same very limited cultural messaging - three TV stations, a handful of movie studios, a handful of major book publishers - there is bound to be a leveling of interpersonal expectations that will be absent in a more fragmented culture. That’s not some kind of crypto denunciation against cosmopolitan diversity, but it is what it is and I do think there’s a there, there.
	▲	vrganj 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can see this playing out right now, with X spreading holocaust denial and all sorts of corrosive messages in Europe, with it's owner being actively hostile to European institutions and the US government actively guarding it from consequences.

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paganel 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The revelations that Epstein had interest and involvement in the development of 4chan really makes me wonder what we would find behind the curtain at next iterations like KiwiFarm

For starters, that Putin was right when he was calling the internet a CIA project back in 2010, 2011, those whereabouts.

Later edit: From 2013 [1]:

> Barlow: Let me give you an example: I have been advising the CIA and NSA for many years, trying to get them to use open sources of information. If the objective is really to find out what is going on, the best way to do this, is by trading on the information market where you give information to get information.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-want-to-tear-down-the-v_b_4...