Doing your own research is a very important for anyone who wish to become an individual who think for oneself. It is not very realistic to go into every bit of detail. Hence we use heuristic to come to conclusions. For an example, if a certain media or personality is leaning heavily towards a particular direction, we can make assumptions about them. For an example, we can expect CNN to lie heavily in their reporting. We can expect Fox News to be biased towards Republicans. We can expect Naomi Brockwell to provide valuable information and we know Julian Assange to have integrity.
Incentives Matter
Incentives are not perfect predictors. They are still useful to see what is going to be the easy route and what is going to be the difficult path to travel. For an example, even a person who believe that taxation is theft would pay their taxes because legal repercussions can make a person's life extremely difficult.
When a person has a stake in a project, they are likely to do things that will benefit that project. Those who own TSLA stock has the incentive to promote everything related to Tesla, Inc. in a positive light. Those who have a significant amount of HIVE staked has the incentive to at least help HIVE price pump.
Why Follow The Money?
Money is one of the most objective and easy to track incentives out there. Getting paid to say something or promote something or conduct research is not inherently bad. But it can nudge people in a specific direction if they are not strong in their principles. If you have seen how Sam Bankman-Fried was covered by mainstream media and then track the hundreds of millions he has spent on the media companies and politicians, you have seen how money affect people doing a job.
Bonus Read: FTX Was Truly About Politics, Money Laundering and WWIII | This is What I Manged To Find About It
This is far more nefarious and effective than traditional modes of propaganda. It even allows bypassing of certain heuristics people use. These days people have a general awareness that they should not trust news. Even when it comes to citizen journalism, it is possible to figure out political biases. You know that Peter Schiff is going to shill gold and he does not like cryptocurrency.
Now imagine what would happen when propaganda is injected to a channel that cover "scientific, technological, political, philosophical, and psychological subjects" in small doses.
Propaganda Laundering
The video is well researched and has 77 sources linked in the description. I have only gone thorough a small portion of them. Based on my experience researching Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the claims do not surprise me. Financial incentives are given here to nudge or even completely control the narrative. At the very least, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations like it can influence creators to not cover certain topics (due to fear of loosing funding).
When spreading ideas and shilling for projects certain funded by certain people happens every now and then amidst of other quality content, it is easy to cut the apparent links. If Bill Gates said forget planing trees and buy into this carbon capture technology; there would be heavy backlash. If the idea was nudged with coverage from more reputable sources as a new innovation with great potential to make the world a better place it would be like getting a bunch of vloggers to spread propaganda on few of their videos.
You can draw your parelells with Money Laundering:
How Many Are Thinking of Quora Propaganda?
When it comes to spreading propaganda, most people would assume TikTok, YouTube, Twitter etc. to be used. People will do their research and keep their guard up. How many keep the same guard up when looking though Quora?
Quora has close to as many monthly active users as Twitter. A Psyop on Quora can have a good amount of reach. Only having a fraction of the user base of the bigger platforms is compensated by the fact that people are not expecting to be a subject of propaganda on Quora.
7 Hours of Evidence
Don't Forget About Wikipedia Either
Share The Knowledge!
We as individuals may not have much power to make a significant impact. What I can do is arm you with knowledge. Consider this a small fire started. I picked up the fire from other researchers and I have added my own research into this. You can add your to the bonfire!