No but when I questioned you when I named MS you confirmed that is who you were comparing them

Astroturfing implies that the advertisement has some hidden meaning, that there is a message in it. Because Astroturf is fake grass - I know because we have one at college, so everything is not as it appears to be. So disguising a real message behind it, what's the real message by MS then? Not "We shall demolish Nintendo/Sony" is it?

I already answered you in a previous post that these are the techniques communist parties used in western and neutral countries, where they didn't hold absolute power and people were free to express not communist opinions and counter propaganda. In Soviet Russia methods were very different, although also there Stalin always started a smear campaign against his future victims before eliminating them, for example like he did with Yagoda, Bukharin, and most notably Trotsky.

And there is really nothing strange in a western corporation using soviet propaganda techniques, some of them worked quite well to persuade million simpletons people.

BTW, I always clearly wrote "propaganda", pure words and nothing else, not violent methods.

So going by your assumption, MS is currently spreading propaganda about Sony and Nintendo in an attempt to bring them down in the eyes of the public? Before attempting to go for the undercut? That sound insane if you thinkg about it.

And I think such methods existed even before Stalin, it is always the norm to bring down the opposition in the eyes of the public before making a move that may end them.

If anything, the attacks in regards to Kinect needing a controller in order to work properly by Sony or several articles that were posted before, slating Kinect could fall into that category. If it is a practice a you are suggesting, it's a common one, every company does it, so I don't see the reason to single out MS in this case.

Just to clarify, I do not like MS, I like 360 and PS3 to some extent, but when people making assumptions like that it's only logical to correct them in a sense that everyone does it.

Eh, I'm not going to give my opinion on that matter.

While I do speak my mind, there is also a limit.

Saying MS uses propaganda techniques that are inspired to soviet ones doesn't look a capital sin to me.

Some of these techniques, usually only the most acceptable ones, are clearly recognizable in many widely used in advertising not only by MS, but by countless other companies, and also by politicians of not communist parties, that sometimes use also the least acceptable ones.

You are free to disagree just like I'm free to write it. I described them and showed those that look like similarities to me, people are free to read and make their own comparisons.

Look come to think about it reporting was probably overkill but the fact that you have continued saying this for 2-3 pages is basically saying you are baiting people, so I don't know why you weren't expecting to get at least one report.

As I wrote answering other people, I know these methods existed before Lenin and Stalin, but Soviet Union, together with Mussolini, were the first to apply a scientific, systematic approach to the matter, and all the even barely acceptable amongst their methods were quickly recognized as highly effective and adopted by both not marxist politicians and, outside of politics, publicists and marketing experts.

About MS, I'm sure it will never directly smear competitors, and it's also cautious just attacking them, the most direct things I could see up until now are Greenberg's rants, Turn 10's attacks and trash talk against GT5, and, many years ago, Ballmer's mafia-style vague, impersonal, indirect threats against Marc Andreessen and Netscape, throwing chairs to Google and ridiculous attacks against Linux and GPL ("Get the Facts" campaign, "cancer" and similar BS).

As I wrote elsewhere, I also know that other companies use these methods, but when trolling and astroturfing, Sony minions are never as subtle and stealthy as MS ones, you can bust them easily.

Nintendo fans and also its official propaganda are a lot more direct. Nintendo's typical trait is ignoring competitors with understated superiority, while its most enthusiastic fans shift from superiority when Ninty crushes competitors to anger and whining when things don't go so well.  But Ninty is also as good as MS or even more to create buzz and hype. Who could have been Nintendo's strongest astroturfer, Malstrom, suddenly went off his head and began believing he's God, and now he's liked only by a small inner circle, while he managed to get almost everybody else angered with his attitude, not good astroturfing by any means.

Actually you'd find Sony minions get away with much more in comparison with the MS ones, so unless you're trolling stealthly, you will get the banhammer in the face. I personally find this whole fanboy propaganda aload of BS, but some people are very adamant that this site is Sony biased or even MS biased or even Nintendo biased. If you look at the general threads, 360 related ones in particular you'd find ALOT more Sony fans stealthly trolling that thread, I rarely see any other fanbase as arrogant as Sony if I might say so myself, I like the product and admit that PS3 is better to an extent, so I am in no way trolling here, but the community is what deters me in most cases.

Really, you can't generalize all the MS fans and compare them to the Communist party method of propaganda when everyone does it. It's as if I go "French people eat cheese, they're cheesy bastards!", that wouldn't make much sense, because that's stereotyping and there are people among other nations that eat cheese.

Poor case scenario but meh.

It looks like somebody wrongly understood I was alluding also to violent or in any way dictatorial methods used inside the soviet empire, while I was just meaning instead the propaganda rhetorical methods invented, or, to be more precise, systematized by soviets but mostly used by communist parties in democratic nations, outside of USSR and its allies, and later on partially adopted also by not communist politicians and, outside of politics, publicists and marketers.