@p @yockeypuck

> > (based on synthetic discourse I was seeing pop up everywhere suddenly)
> Yeah, this is the only reason to ever look at the news.

It wasn't the news I saw. It was a bunch of random FB groups and comment's sections where suddenly armies of trolls were coming out to harass "antivaxxers". I noticed it and thought it was out of context and out of proportion, and pretty obviously the result of paid troll farms or AI generated (aka: reputation management). So I started doing some research into pharma tech (and came across mrna + hiv research, albeit without understanding the significance at the time), and after unpacking the argument realised they were straight up gaslighting people who wanted bodily autonomy by slandering them as tin foil hatters. That's when I told people in my network, and warned that big-pharma was probably sewing the ideological seeds for a plandemic in the next decade. Most people thought I was nuts. Assuming any of them remember, I wonder if they still do now...

Fwiw, I see a lot of the same troll farm style discourse on fedi too, but arguably a lot of this stuff only needs to be initially seeded by paid orgs, since most people are so radicalised to one extreme or another now that they'll organically jump on any bandwagon that's put in front of them as long as plays into their existing biases/fears.