William S. Burroughs’ Manifesto for Overthrowing a Government with Fake News
There is at least one defense against this that a government could employ, but the consequences to the public, while virtually guaranteed to protect and extend the government, can only be guessed at.  The key is in Network Science.<p>Most people by now are familiar with the &#x27;6 degree of Kevin Bacon&#x27; game where most any person involved in the film industry can be linked to Kevin Bacon through 6 or fewer links via projects worked with others.  Less entertaining, and thus less well known (just in the mainstream, this is common knowledge amongst anyone who has read anything about network science) is that if you wanted to make it much more difficult to &#x27;connect&#x27; to Kevin Bacon on average, you would only need to ban a couple dozen nodes from being used.  Any communication network populated by humans seems to have a similar character, forming &#x27;clumps&#x27; that are mostly disconnected but share a few points of commonality.  The only thing necessary to isolate the clumps is to identify those &#x27;bridge&#x27; nodes and prevent the bridge from being used.<p>In terms of people relating to one another, this doesn&#x27;t mean anything extreme like &#x27;eliminating&#x27; the person providing the bridge.  By their very nature, these bridging links that provide a path (through which ideas can flow) from one group to another are shaky and weak.  If you had to change your phone number for some reason, for instance, it is unlikely that you would recall updating your number with people you spoke too very rarely and had little contact with.  Even if you did, if occasional messages got dropped, you would be unlikely to notice.<p>Society is very big, and it is probably impossible to actually &#x27;manage&#x27; the space of ideas circulating around.  But, there is one trait that every successful revolution that led to rebellion shares and must share - acceptance across vastly disparate groups.  A revolution in thinking amongst one group, or even several groups, will just fizzle out if it&#x27;s not able to get buy-in across all demographics and interest groups.  Those groups have to come together in common cause to have a chance of actually changing the government.  So if your job is to maintain and protect the status quo, and to ensure that nothing like a revolution occurs on your watch, why not just make this sort of spread impossible or nearly so?  If you have access to information about who communicates with who, you can, very quietly (maybe silently, I&#x27;m not aware of any techniques by which this strategy could be detected though I suspect such would exist), identify the tiny number of &#x27;bridge&#x27; nodes and subtly interfere with their communications, resulting in the average &#x27;distance&#x27; an idea has to travel to get from one group to another exponentially.