I'm going to give you an example of Information War in operation from this thread on /pol:
Assange adds empty hourglass to his Twitter
Original Post
Archive Page
see Note 1

The argument here is going to follow three points

• Was meganaon a LARP?
• Was Qanon a LARP?
• Is Assange dead?

I'm not here to argue for or against any of these points...what I want to demonstrate is how Information War affects how information is gathered and understood.

We'll start with this poster:

I'm not shilling for megalarp but timelines were suspicious because the same day she said some pretty specific shit about the qtards being 4 young Obama holdover staffers, 3 she said she knew had connections to a Soros funded group in southern Maryland (ShareBlue is funded indirectly by Soros) they left and told everyone to go to 8ch 2 hrs later. I was shitposting hard in those cbts threads so it's hard to forget. Take it for what it's worth but it could explain how the board went south. If JA is alive and going to be freed, that would make megalarp a pretty good larp. We were all saying he was dead.

"KDC" refers to Kim Dot Com in the following

here's just something about megalarp we can't ignore. She's not Frank. She does verify with feet regularly on same tile floors. As much as I'd love to say it, even though she give us dates with happenings, she posts walls of details and really hasn't been wrong. She said on July 25 Awan would walk and everything would start happening in DC. On the 27th the mainstream media reported he had been arrested on 25th.
She said JA was alive and Oct '16 raid on his HQ did happen thanks to that fuckers Kerry clapper and Brennan but she also said the raid on embassy reported wasn't as it seemed and that JA was intercepted and extracted by good guys.
She is called megaanon because she connected JA to KDC and Rich. She said KDC was a fat prick in it for himself because we were still freezing his assets from that lawsuit, but that JA used MegaUpload when file sets were really big. She said Wikileaks didn't have a ton of infrastructure so they'd host the bigger dumps with KDC and he'd handle it. She said JA/Wiki would make the call on whether Megaupload was needed and then they'd put them in touch with KDC direct and he'd give them secure access via VPN/IPSec tunnels he'd open and leakers could leak. He'd then store on his servers he dedicated and hosted for Wiki.

This comment argues that meganon is not LARPing (see heading below for more information on the LARP concept)

Now this was the part that verifies her claim in JA/KDC and MegaUpload
It basically says no one other than Assange has the authority to tell you to send or submit info outside of the Wikileaks site. This proves there is a process for high-level leakers to dump or submit files, outside of Wikileaks, but only Assange can decide/direct you to do so.
It was proven Rich did have contact with Wikileaks and Assange directly, so we know Assange could've authorized and put Rich in touch with KDC direct to set up secure transfer via VPN/IPSec tunnel access to submit.
Because we know Assange will never snitch a source direct, KDC only knew leakers by the pseudonyms they gave. KDC said he knew the DNC leaker was Panda. After he tweeted that it was confirmed by a whole bunch of autists that Rich used a Panda variation (Pandas4Progress) etc., in a screen name, a handle and a gmail account.
Megalarp got shilled hard with the "JA is dead" meme. If he's freed then he's alive. If he's alive, then megalarp solved Rich as leaker in May 2016 and I'll feel like a faggot for calling her megalarp. No one put Rich/JA/KDC together like that before her. Then the board got shitty. Then qtard raids.

A Question and Answer about the Q threads

Have we ever seen a bigger coordinated, consolidated shill effort on here than those cbts threads? I've been shitposting on /pol/ for 3 years and Chan's for at least 6 and never seen anything like it.

It not hard to get a subject to look like it's being shilled, if you shill it yourself.

And another accusation against Q

the Q stuff is Crowdsource The Truth, with good pals Jason Goodman and George Webb being paid by Arnon Milchan trying to hide the fact that Rahm Emmanuel (and family), Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and others are involved in the child trafficking

More vs Q

Said a lot on cville too. Shit about how whites were being targeted and Soros sent his paid supremicists to start shit while blending in with a bunch of white guys who weren't planning on rammin chargers down streets to make any white guy attending look bad. She said qfags were tied to Soros groups too and they mixed in enough fake info with real info so msm and Alex jones would pick it up and make us look like dumb MAGA tinfoil Trump supporters so planted the qfag stuff knowing half was fake, let it spread like herpes in Hollywood, then use the fake breadcrumbs they planted against us to prove the qlarp wrong making everyone who says their redpilled on MAGA look like a joke. Megalarp said a couple months back if we saw the msm attacking the chans or talking about q that should be a sign. She even tied it back then to cville as same strategy. Lump us together make us look crazy and dangerous. She said the disinfo qfags were spreading on twitter and shit would be used against us to say we were dangerous and how dangerous disinfo on the internet is as opposed to the msm. Idk. it's just starting to tie into a lot now

Moving back to Assange's status

mega has posted a lot on that meeting with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and that meeting. Said it was coordinated and facilitated by Bannon and said Bannon secured the permissions and visas via congressional committee for
Rohrabacher to meet with Assange in person.
Mega basically posted what she said the purpose was and what was discussed. In short, she said Assange's HQ in Iceland was raided in Oct '16 as part of Kerry, Clapper, Brennan plan. They were planning to extract Assange at same time but good guys got to him before bad guys and that was like 8 hours before HQ raid. Said good guys were ones who cut network at embassy and stuffed him into a van because Assange didn't even know it was happening and they couldn't let him know either because he'd been tapped at the embassy and they didn't want to tip Kerry/Brennan/Clapper team off. She said she knew where they took him. Said she carried his passports herself. Would make sense too because people traveled with Snowden after he ducked out of China to Russia.
She eluded to Assange being warm wherever he was going and I think she made a joke about him getting a tan. South America makes sense because if you remember, the Wikileaks team was the ones who got the visas and paperwork for Snowden then negotiated secure travel out of China. He was supposed to fly out, to Russia then connect to somewhere in S. America but got held in Russia, where he still is. In that Snowden documentary, a few people from the Wikileaks team escorted him on the trip and got held up with him at customs in Russia. Snowden was stuck in the airport while Wikileaks negotiated his asylum with the Kremlin.
Megalarp did say the HQ had been raided though and that bad guys did take a lot of documents, hardware on on prem and that they did cut the network which is why the HQ went dark, but that everything really important was stored and hosted in the DC rack space they had with MegaUpload...

and from another polster

Oh ye, you mean the Julian Assange (Foolian) who literally recommended the Catalonian revolutionaries should communicate via WhatsApp?!
Lol give us a fucking break you scumbag, that's not Julian he would never, and I mean ever, recommend people to use fucking WhatsApp to securely communicate.
Do you want to know why? Categorically WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, their claim that it is end to end encrypted is fucking rubbish because users of WhatsApp don't touch their encryption keys, WhatsApp gives them out therefore they can read anyone's fucking messages.
This is one of like 1,000,000 indicators that they killed Julian.
Seriously anybody reading this just think about this single fact for a second.
He's dead folk

Now let's look at a common idea in the thread

Everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.

Who can the shills be?

Possible agents of influence could include:

• natsocfags (everything is a Jewish conspiracy, including why their socks keep getting lost)
• ShareBlue (see Note 2); also note that these shills will imitate natsocfags to give the impression that the Alt-Right is dominated by Nazis
• Trump-shills (The God-Emperor can do no wrong)
• The Russians - [I'm not being funny here, either. Whether or not there is a war between the unAmerican Deep State and the silivoki (my interpretation), the Russians are not good guys. Just because the Deep State is corupt to the hilt doesn't mean it isn't in the Russians' (silivoki's) interests to stir the pot.]
• The Chinese - (ditto)

or maybe...

Civitas shills for muh liberal economic freedom and dildos as a liberal rights.
Dagbladet shills for feminist left wingers (look at their treatment of the power struggle in Ap for a gratuitous example).
VG shills for... I don't even know what to call it. Jewry? Yeah. I guess that's the closest we'll get.

Note that is not necessary to be part of an organization to shill for it; all it takes is a common interest in the goals or ideology. That is why the Right names the Dallas cop-killer as a BLM terrorist...he didn't carry a BLM card, but he spouted the same hateful rhetoric.

In other words, not everyone that espouses a viewpoint is a member of a front group and organized to push that POV...in fact, an idea that gets traction and is pushed by the general public can be seen as a successful InformationWar operation.

What are some reasons to "shill"?

The concept pre-dates the net, for sure:
Who really invented ‘Moby’ trolling? Alinsky

Hell, The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies has been around the net in one form pr another since I've been surfing porn (hint - a long time)...hmmm, anyone want to take a crack at this oldie for a Steemit post?

These tactics are classic...

What is a LARP?, and why is it used in shilling?

Reddit and 4chan are anonymous forums. You can hide behind a username. LARPing is Live Action Role-Playing, where you pretend to be someone else in real life. A LARPer in this context is someone who claims "I am a high level official in the Department of Justice" without providing evidence and then say something like, "The DoJ will announce charges against the CEO of Comcast tomorrow." Because no proof is provided, some people will say that the poster is role-playing as the person they claim to be.

If you can get people to believe you hold certain knowledge, or represent an organization, you can move on to passing out misinformation or you can discredit the organization...i.e, shilling.

False Dichotomies

One of the reasons that people fall for misinformation tactics (InformationWar) is that False Dichotomy is a fairly entrenched way of human thinking. For example, the natsocs on /pol see everything in terms of Jewish conspiracy. If we were to root out a Jewish conspiracy during our Information War, the natsocs would use it to "prove" the overall conspiracy. If we didn't expand the local conspiracy into the overall question, we would be covering up for the Jews. If we found a source of conspiracy that didn't point to "The Jews", then (in their minds), we would also be covering up for the Jews. (see Note 3)

I'll point you to @dwinblood, who explains the concept better than I do:
False Dichotomies rule the stage during this day... we should learn to recognize them... [logical fallacy]

Also see @dwinblood's comments on this post:
How to be an InformationWar Activist - Part Twelve: Information War, Binary Thinking , Utopian Thinking, Critical Thinking

When we as humans put all out thinking into a THIS OR THAT mentality, we open ourselves up to getting shilled by agents targeting our thinking patterns.

My take?

A) I have no idea of which version of the arguments in the /pol thread are true (me and some of these posters = blind men groping an elephant here); this is an exercise in seeing InformationWar in action
B) People are overly invested in their own analysis...PERSONALLY angered when challenged
C) I guarantee there are organized shills in the thread; what I can't tell you is which.
D) One of the points we make in Information War is the need to understand the bias of the information that you are analyzing. A second point is that we should try to recognize and expose organized sources of disinformation.

Notes

• Note 1
  There are various methods, but you should archive webpages, instead of/in addition to bookmarking them, that you intend to use later. Web pages can be edited after the fact, the server can go down, or the pages can be memory-holed.
  One way to do this is through archive services like http://archive.is/(which are subject to the same problems), or by saving the webpage as PDF or HTML to your own hardrive. My favored method is
  Using Zotero to archive your Steemit posts on your hard drive

• Note 2
  ShareBlue (CorrectTheRecord) Data Dump/OSINT - Part One
  ShareBlue (CorrectTheRecord) Data Dump/OSINT - Part Two

• Note 3
  Let's not pretend that natsocs are the only people that fall into this pattern of thinking. I criticize them first here due to my own Jewish ethnicity. I have a shotgun, and refuse to take any camp tours ;> I really don't think they present a large portion of the danger to this country, however. The bastard alliance of leftism/globalism holds that spot.
  Although this thread has been removed, I saved a copy of it, and it's arguments of Q's legitimacy (at least the first post of Q's(/pol/ - Sociology of Q - or why boomers like it - Politically Incorrect - 4chan. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2017, from http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/150526834/sociology-of-q-or-why-boomers-like-it)...so there is a pre-faithed viewpoint here, as well.

My Books