Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Social Media is defined by plagues of brigaders swarming any idea they disagree with and destroying it’s credibility & impact. Brigading is a coordinated troll attack; popular because everyone can do it, knowledge or intelligence not required; it's easy, just click what they tell you; and there's a dopamine reward, usually from virtue signaling but perversity often plays a part. The most famous brigading groups are the online knitting circles; thousands of women who initially started out knitting together but eventually became a force to be reckoned with by all posting together, what became know as a Twitter mob. And that's not counting the thousands, even tens-of-thousands, of coordinated bots. In fact, bots account for more retweeting and message ranking than real users. Entire Twitter Storms can be nothing but bots on either side.

There are several methods of brigading: going to the homepage of a political candidate and typing a scripted disparaging message en mass. There’s ratioing, where Dislikes of a post far outweigh the Likes or retweets. There’s UpVoting which takes activist posts to the top of the feed, to the first page where everyone can see them, and DownVoting things they don’t like to bury that idea though obscurity Even online Buyer Reviews of products are completely open to manipulation, so-much-so that they've become more a weapon than a resource; for example, a Trump campaign App will get a quarter million negative user reviews, dozens by each brigader; the numbers so big that no amount of positive real reviews could make any difference. Trying to continuing a message every fifth post, surrounded by brigader invective, is not a successful strategy; brigaders always win.