VILLAIN PROPAGANDA 101: The Anatomy of a Fake Fan

(UPDATE AUGUST 16: BTW, I have to repeat, this article is just for educational purposes so we can learn some tricks from the bad guys. I mentioned in a previous article that I don't consider them as threat because of their very obvious deficiencies, primary of which is the limitations of Plastic Surgery. The premise of the operation described below is already laughable, that you will be "lured". But we still can pick up some tricks. We'll have more studies shortly)`

Studying the propaganda tactics of the villains could be educational. We can pick up tips, especially those which are benign and are actually applicable in our scene. I wrote before some of their tactics locally: I call it Parasitic Propaganda because it rides on the popularity of others, using the fame of others as propaganda prop to paint a picture of the supposed popularity of their artists. Which is just a mirage mostly, created by propaganda. In this blog, I traced the shenanigans done on Pinoy stars from South America to the Russian Post-Soviet space but the footprint of the villains are not even that big in these areas: the memberships of the pirate websites (the captured audience) in the Spanish-speaking areas are just above 50,000 and those in the Russian Post-Soviet space just reach about 30,000. If you look at the map, the only place where they could possibly obtain their near billion hits are in Northeast Asia. But Japanese acts dominate their own charts (Japan has 127 million population), so with the Chinese (China has 1.3 billion people). But if you compare the viewcounts of the big Chinese and Japanese acts, the Chinese and Japanese are even far behind in hits. Does that mean the Chinese and Japanese love to watch repeatedly in Youtube other people's supposed hits more than the records that they buy in reality?

 Digital manipulation is the easiest because you only need the computer. I've already written instances in this blog where viewcounts have been doctored to present a different reality.

 I'll introduce a relatively common but simple trick: pretending to be fans, with the aim to control the discourse and insert propaganda unobtrusively, to make-believe they are "popular". They have established  a well-structured syndicate here.
 1) Many of those pretending to be fans in the Comments of videos of Pinoy artists are actually "agents", trying to be noticed so that if you click their names, you will be led into their pages full of clips of the artists of villainlandia. These fans act as traps so that when you fall, you fall into their pages, and hopefully lured by their "beauties".
 2) Most of those pretending to be fans in the fan club forums and are very active in the discussions are "agents". One of the common routine is the complementary dance they do: one very ardent in his loyalty to a particular artist, backed up by an accomplice extolling his loyalty, until they practically control the discussion & slyly insert their agitprop (Example: "Why not remake the K___novela so and so? Beautiful like so and so... ) or worse, a miniaturized de-facto "People Power" takeover, same script of "wresting control" is involved but  in a much, much smaller scale. Again, just to make-believe they are "popular".

 Many of these diligently attending are actually agents because that's their work, their supposed to be "free time" is their working hours. They are mainstays of forums, even the broadcast studios' forums. I haven't had the time to ascertain if there are "double agents" at least, that will follow in a more detailed article. Needless to say, the legitimate ones should always be alert with these tricks.

 Mind you, these tricks are international. I had fun discovering three (so far) supposed Pinoys who applied to be my friend in VK. Look at the picture, a typical agent, a fake account of a fan. When she contacted me on August 10, she didn't have any friend yet, I was supposed to be the first, but she was already a member of many Korean groups in the VK. Telltale signs galore of a fake account. She is the VK equivalent of the fake YOUTUBE fan I mentioned above: if you befriend her, you get the Korean traps, not the music clips this time like in YOUTUBE but the Korean fan groups more likely composed of agents masquerading as fans.

 And worse, she pretended to be a Filipino who advertised her bad taste. Needless to say, I banned her from my page.

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