The versions of this practice that I disdain are "What is 'racism' after all?" then they divert the thread into hair splitting over definitions.
It happens often enough to appear deliberate, even inauthentic at times.
It's even been categorized into a classification system called "Types of Reply Guys" by @sbarolo
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-reply-guys
Some of the participants are part of web scraping firms that can collect the social media posts of individuals going back decades.
The Reply Guy interactions have been successful in reducing the number of online women gamers & the public presence of journalists...
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... & scientists.
A phenomenon that gets women to reduce their public participation is incredibly useful as a business model, to whom?
Jane Mayer & Jessica Valenti reduced their public presence when reporting on issues that upset GOP oil donors for example.
The reports on Belandre aka "James Bell" show disturbing practices.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gq8a/james-bell-cyberstalking-harassment-catfishing
During the period leading up to the world wars, hostile foreign governments established newspaper clipping services as part of...
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... their espionage and manipulation of public opinion.
I wonder if such web scraping businesses serve a similar function?
Creating a wealth of data with potential future usefulness.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_monitoring_service
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/16/what-its-like-to-read-the-nsas-newspaper-for-spies/
I just googled "newspaper clipping".
What triggered my curiosity was Rachel Maddow's Ultra podcast about German newspaper clipping services.
It's also from "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"
There are several companies that do this for brand recognition. There's nothing stopping the same technology from being used in malign influence campaigns or espionage.
https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-monitoring-tools/
Another element to media monitoring services.
I've been wondering about the directed flows of money that brought us people like Brett Kavanagh, Clarence Thomas, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Amy Coney-Barrett, and Stephen Miller.
What mechanisms accelerated their careers, over all others?
These aren't particularly bright people or hard working. They lack charisma or presence. From relatively average families. So why?
They all have one...
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@JMaverickJacks1 @Npars01 @Alan "Not being clever enough to do X" isn't the same as not being smart enough to make a clever plan. The (cliche?) Peter principle applies to these self-proclaimed supergeniuses; with enough money, they can sail their depleted uranium boats for a while, and by g-d they'll do it instead of thinking it over and trying a different approach. Tesla lasted a long time with a Fisher-Price My First Executive Suite playhouse for electric car trump, but by the time he bought the hellsite he'd decided that whatever successes Tesla & Space-? had were because of his supreme intellect, and, well, you can see what happened.
(In the case of Tesla, electric car trump wants everybody in a car, but one of his cars, and if the underclass can't afford it they can walk. His attempt to kill mass transit with that stupid vacuum tube gadgetbahn is an example of his smarts.)
So, yeah, I don't think he's clever enough to be more than evil.
@JMaverickJacks1 @Npars01 @Alan And poor people as well. A lot of people like a man on a horse, and most wealthy parasites fit that category. It's not very smart; the leopard-eating-faces-party will inevitably do it to them (ie: Peter Thiel agitating against diversity) but they've gotta follow daddy.
If they're fortunate, they'll eat a bullet before the mobs break down that door (the one good thing Hitler did was to kill Hitler) but I fully expect each and every one of them to be dragged out of their escape estates and hung by their bodyguards.
You can call this being a genius, but I'm afraid I'll have to differ with you on this.
Ken White
Nicole Parsons
JMaverickJacks1
Orc