considine

Do you mean investors are trying to manipulate stocks by planting stories? Yeah, I think so. But intelligence agencies have whole training programs on how to manipulate narratives, and a very long track record of doing so.

See: Israel's hasbara apparatus,

GCHQ leaked documents on infiltrating and derailing socialist discussions,

Church Committee Hearings,

"The Cultural Cold War" by Frances Stonor Saunders.

The top hits for my "WSB" search are:

• World Sports Betting

• r/WallStreetBets

• World Superbikes

I don't think any of their goons are astroturfing (well, maybe World Superbikes). Did you mean a different entity?

Corporatism leads to imperialism by the need to seek profits in new markets. Wherever we see lots of defense of imperialism, there is corporate backing behind it. That's why I think lemmy.world is astroturfed. There's a strong anti-communist and pro "free market" capitalist tendency on there. Posts that attack the Global South as the world's villains. On the other hand, there are also many people on lemmy.world that speak out against imperialism and capitalistic exploitation. But the recurrent waves of reactionary politics on lemmy.world indicate to me the presence of astroturfing trolls. This makes sense even on a relatively small platform like Lemmy because it threatens to become a nucleus for organizing against capitalism.

Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.

Frequent Guardian readers more likely to agree with anti-China narratives, study finds.

Since people are just going to make command line jokes and leave you confused, the spelling is "pseudo".

Article warns that you will be profiled based on interests.

Article then profiles you based on interests. Proceeds to sell you VPN subscriptions.

Dissociating - so she's dissolving into ions in the bath.

Apparently a reference to a game TF2 (no idea) in which one character says "women..." and they both drink coffee and laugh.

Putin is openly anti-communist.

Propaganda is usually truthful or exaggerated truth. It's the framing that is important. Some facts are focused on. Some facts are omitted.

I acknowledge that Russia, China and the DPRK have made mistakes and even done things that are deeply questionable. But I'm interested in comparing their mistakes or misguided actions to those of the most powerful military empire on earth. The one involved in hundreds of military actions and dozens of coups since its inception. The one with the largest per capita prison population on earth. The one which controls many of the world's financial levers.

There is a difference in the scale of their mistakes or bad actions. Propaganda distorts that difference of scale. It focuses on the crimes of the "enemies" / "axis of evil" / "rogue states" but doesn't examine context or culpability of the empire. They'll choose one conflict, downplay 9 others, and give a one-sided view of that one conflict.

That's how propaganda works. Every state produces propaganda. One state produces billions of dollars of propaganda each year.