https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels#:~:text=Goebbe...

but sounds like 1920s may be fine overall?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_public_relations#:~...

(at least Bernays, whatever he may have advocated about undermining source attribution, did not seem to advocate actual sock puppets?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Third_parties

Those might soon become the drones of social (elite v "elite" culture) wars!

(Also occurred to me that Monotheism has been unreasonably effective against an other kind of sock puppetry. Hierophants. Had to get inventive :)

I asked Gemini to argue that Bernays was a populist (i.e. against the usual diagnosis):

He who seeks to manipulate public opinion must always heed it. (1923)

Started soft? Becoming more of a hard-line elitist later?

TIL the Daily Mirror used to be a feminist organ

"MANIPULATING PUBLIC OPINION: THE WHY AND THE HOW"

https://ia800201.us.archive.org/1/items/AmericanJournalOfSoc...

which seems overall to argue less that one should respect public opinion in itself, than that, in order to move the public from A to B, one must have not just B in mind, but also A, in order to connive an appropriate vector along AB.

EDIT: atm I'm not finding that sentence in 1923's "Crystallizing Public Opinion" https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61364/61364-h/61364-h.htm

But at the core of this great heterogeneous body of public opinion is a tenacious will to live, to progress, to move in the direction of ultimate social and individual benefit.

Hints at something more than token respect (of a wild beast to be tamed).

Gemini concurs though that overall Bernays didn't think elites should have anything to gain from heeding public opinion beyond sharpening their technique. (The public as an object, and not a peer)

> The radio is at present one of the most important tools of the propagandist.

What you couldn't do with radio is to triangulate targets via associated clusters; they used snail mail to do that.