I have to say that I find the amount of effort that's put into silencing these particular weirdos scary - and it's also deeply hypocritical because conspiracy theorists are being shushed down for believing in imaginary and impossible to prove things, while say religious and supernatural folks are free to promote their ideas freely, although they share many of the same elements, and historically have caused much more hate and violence and terrorism.
First, Ben Bagdikian's media monopoly highlights how we now have very concentrated media companies and almost every company that calls itself "the mainstream media" is actually part of 4 or 5 companies that are I think are best deemed an oligopoly of influence brokers in the US. Much of the reason those companies have been targeting the current incumbent president for the past 4 years with a ferver that the Bushes, Clinton, or Obama never were attacked with is largely because when a rich person is threatened with losing their money, they'll simply spend it all to stop it from being taken away. Great example of how that works is here:
Second, you make more money as a "news" org if you foster an unquestioning, guillable audience that doesn't question what you're putting forward much. Hence, the use of naming and shaming, guilt tripping, heckling and otherwise berating their own audience through innuendo and sleight of hand. The MSM has repeatedly crossed the line in the last year of attempting to incite their audience to violence. A great majority of americans at this point, by polls, consider those orgs to be trash news and tabloids; what these large news orgs are attempting to do is to stop competition from taking root. Some of that is supported by the US Government; psyops are a real thing and having media control is an effective means to stopping them. Much of that is revenue assurance. The problem today is, people are turning off the TV and Cable news broadcasts and are going to 3rd parties because they've gotten wise to big media pissing in the soup.
Finally, 8chan has been, for a long long time, targeted by social engineering groups including spooks from the US government. The internet has this funny issue where unregulated, anonymous boards tend to get targeted by social engineering threat groups in foreign governments and that has been pretty well documented. Even HN gets targeted. The problem with psychological warfare is, much like any WMD, it doesn't differentiate between target or target audiences, and as a spook org, you have no idea who really uses 4chan or 8chan. So you end up with these platforms being used to attract and radicalize certain broad audiences, then SHTF such as e.g. Anders Behring Breivik, the courts and governments are left to pick up the pieces and save face.
Pretty much at this point there's no more face to save, and the burden of proof is now a hell of a lot higher for audiences going forward. The game of building trust in an org then using people is prooving less and less effective.
Krebs did an excellent job at following the money down on what looks like a fairly sophisticated psyop. Interesting to me he'd do that.
