The Censors' Toolbox: Schismogenesis, Turning Nonpartisan Issues Into Divisive Matters Where One Position is Unsayable
This old book notes that this general phenomenon or the tactic goes back to the World Wars
The "Big Oil" companies have politicised climate change, despite spending decades internally admitting the problem was real.
That much is very meticulously documented. It's not merely some theory about them conspiring to turn it into a political matter; it's easy to show and demonstrate how they make it "popular" for right-leaning people to reject climate science and supremely unpopular to hold that position in "the left". This means that instead of talking about science people online will bicker ad infinitum about "The Science" and classical politics - all this while the "Big Oil" tycoons rig the important panels, control events like COPS, and get a helluva lot richer very fast, more so with subsidies from the taxpayers and inflation as an excuse for eternal price hikes.
We've only just mentioned one manifestation of this tactic in relation to IBM and Red Hat [1, 2], i.e. GNU/Linux (with connections to DEI and CoCs). One is presumed racist and intolerant for merely holding a view or a principled stance, whereas IBM, which literally worked for Hitler, paints itself as the literal rainbow. We're meant to think that companies that helped implement the Holocaust are Saints looking after gay people.
The tactics at hand can be described as "schismogenesis". In the context of politics, as per an online page: "There is documented usage of schismogenesis techniques by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS, an institutional precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)), against Japanese-held territories in the Pacific during World War II. U.S. military academics have identified how China and Russia have pursued social-media strategies of schismogenesis against the U.S. and other Western liberal democracies in an attempt to polarize civil society across the political spectrum to damage policy-making processes and to weaken state/military power. Similarly, scholars in Ukraine have documented how Russia has relied on a strategy of schismogenesis to undermine Ukrainian identity and values as a way of promoting pro-Russian territories that can be used against Kyiv, to include forming their own militias which operate alongside Russian special operation forces."
This cites "Polemological Paradigm of Hybrid War Research" [PDF] and this old book.
Buddhika B. Jayamaha and Jahara Matisek wrote [PDF]: "the recent rise of extremist politics in the United States and in western Europe provides growing evidence that schismogenesis appears to have been fueled by Russia, China, and numerous other hostile actors who can benefit from the cost-effective method of weakening the rules-based international order without directly confronting the West."
In modern "G[I]AFAM"-type "Big Tech" (where "F" is now "meta" and "I" can be Intel/IBM) what we're seeing is the framing of online censorship, e.g. via CoC, as a matter of racists against anti-racists. This over-simplification is promoted and further accentuated to paint one side as "trolls". The general population, including developers, ends up feuding inwards instead of uniting to tackle "G[I]AFAM" et al. (the acronym does not matter as much as the concept).
Be wary of these divide-and-rule methodologies. Some people study them in "Business Schools", where the sole goal is to increase money, even to the detriment of society at large. These are the sorts of people who call all the shots at "International Business Mob" (IBM), which literally worked for Hitler and it still trying very hard to censor people.
Just because Microsoft is evil does not mean IBM fights evil. IBM works with Microsoft. Their daemonic pact goes back to the 80s. █
"We should design some of our extensions explicitly so that IBM can't run them under OS/2. We need to put real thinking into this."
--Bill Gates [PDF]