Happy Rockefeller points out the leaked HB Gary email that describes 'persona management', a black glove digital technique that creates "not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use."
Creating digital herds of social media sheep administered to graze or stampede through low-maintenance, centrally-administered triggers is shady to be sure. What's more, it could work. In fact, it is no doubt already working all over the Internets. This post, for all you know, is typed by a digital sockpuppet algorithmically translating and outputting these words into an apocalypse of global languages and dialects. Bots crawling for interchangeable grammar patterns, vocabularies with algorithms for placing regional slang variations into common sentence structures. One author typing one post on one laptop. Click 'Publish'. Hundreds (thousands?) of pieces of content are blasted at intervals carefully designed to mimic an sudden, organic, "netroots" global discussion via tweets, GMails, blogs, and Facebook Pokes...all automated in a cleverly randomized lockstep.
And it gets worse. Wait 'til you get a grip on Twitter bombing (pdf.).
Can Twitter-bombing be stopped? Sure. Twitter could shut down the Twitter bombers. Google could deemphasize incoming traffic from Twitter bombed links.
But add Truth and what is a Twitter bomb? News? History? Art? Antoine Dobson ?
Content bombing up the Google indices due to sudden influxes of traffic from Twitter isn't necessarily a Twitter-bomb. It could just be an assassination , a bong rip , or hamster on a piano...eating popcorn...on a piano...