The days of wearing hooded robes and waiting for initiates to slink furtively into your taffeta-draped S&M temple are, sad to say, long gone. As any cult’s social media manager (bear with us) will tell you, the easiest way to find new members for your crackpot cargo cult is to use websites like Facebook to spread your messages – however bonkers they might be.
The Cult Information Centre defines as a cult as an organisation which among other things uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain its members.
So who fits the bill? Well, I know they don’t like being referred to as a cult, but the Church of Scientology certainly uses Facebook to share “resources” to both its existing members and people who haven’t encountered the “church” before.
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Andrew Gutsch, one of Quora’s “Top Writers”, told The Kernel what it was like to witness the invasion of Desteni followers on the site: “Initially I didn’t see Desteni as a cult. I didn’t even see them as a group. They were fanatical and their arguments ranged from contradiction to ad hominem attacks.
“They made no sense. They were working as a cabal and effectively gaming the system by infiltrating low-profile topics. They flew under moderation’s radar for quite some time, bringing down the quality of the site.”
Michigan State University undergraduate student Shan Kothari was one of the first Quora users to identify the tactics that Desteni were using on the network, which were not always obvious to casual users. “One of the ways I noticed them was that they up-voted each others’ answers, which then quickly rose to the top of some questions. They also down-voted the answers of others at times. This is what bothered me most.”
How social media fuels crazy cults – James Cook – The Kernel
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