Management of perceptions

To some people, perceptions are reality.  If a thing is perceived as so, it is so.  However, if a thing is not so, and appears so, does that make it so?  The perception can be manipulated.  A magician can fool you with magic tricks.  What you see isn't necessarily what you think you see.

With that last post, I noticed something that I noticed before.  To wit, when you see some comments being made on a post, they'll be thumb up or thumbs down.  This suggests approval or disapproval.  Now, anybody who looks at this will think that the thumbs up or thumbs down indicator is an actual count of how well something is liked or disliked.  But wait a minute.  The numbers could be manipulated.  Nobody is doing an actual head count of who actually likes a comment or not.  Somebody out there could be voting many times.

I noticed on a comment that somebody used a lot of insults and so forth against those who supported the protest against limitations of free speech.  The commenter claimed "extremism" and "bigotry" and so forth.  Along with that was an unusual number of thumbs up for that commenters position and thumbs down for the comments that went against this commenter.  But this commenter who got all the thumbs up appeared to be a minority of comments.  Something doesn't add up.

So, I figured this commenter was jazzing up his/her thumbs up by voting up his/her comment and down everybody else's.

Management of perception, folks.  What you see may not be the actual reality but what someone wants you to see.