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Wrecking Infowars — a thought experiment

Unfortunately, by now you are probably familiar with Alex Jones and Infowars, a conspiracy driven alt-right orgy of insanity. Lately, I’ve been thinking of how to overcome an adversary like this, one who lives in an alternative reality where 9/11 was an inside job and how the deep state is turning our frogs gay.

That said, at its core, Infowars is an e-commerce site. They sell all manner of supplements and herbal viagra and doomsday meal prep and all that fun stuff. That is the business. That in turn makes the insanity they spew little more than content marketing. They bring people in for the crazy, and then upsell them “Survival Seeds,” which are somehow superior to regular seeds.

Now, you can’t fight this crazy because it only adds to their narrative that any attack on their ideas is a Soros backed plot to destroy America. Instead, you have to hit them where it hurts: the money.

So here is how someone might be able to mess with them — we can call it a “Macedonian Teenager” attack:

1. Identify their most popular products on their ecommerce store
2. Set up a few fake medical sites using free WordPress templates and some fake articles you can source cheaply on eLance and sites like that.
3. Among those fake articles, source a few that discuss how their 10 most popular products are killing people, making them impotent, giving them cancer, etc.
4. Put other fake conservative crap on those sites for fake credibility
5. Buy ads on Facebook targeting folks who “like” infowars, Breitbart, and other alt-right noise — with headlines like “STUDIES SHOW SUPPLEMENT X MAKES PEOPLE IMPOTENT”
6. Ideally, enough people would see this (with a big enough “boosted content” ad buy on Facebook that they would start seeing their sales drop, hopefully quickly. On top of that, if any of that information was able to spread using the echo chamber of Facebook, they would then have to spend time defending themselves, taking time away from Crisis Actor conspiracy theories.

Would this work? No idea. But it would be fun to try.

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