Great reference of illusion of truth, and also "tell a lie enough, and it becomes truth". There is a fundamental macromemetic principle at play here. Our brains are highly focused on the "genealogy" of memes, specifically, to determine if the meme has passed through a large number of other minds. If a meme comes from multiple sources, or has shown itself in slightly mutated forms, then the mind grabs onto it with the idea that "if I USE this meme, then lots of other people are sure to resonate (agree, or at least tolerate) with it".
The reason being is that's evidence that lots of other people have already touched the given meme and passed it along (possibly adding a slight mutation in the process).
This is also why good new ideas don't catch on. Or why logical arguments against things which are obviously bogus or fake news fight an uphill battle.
As a marketing strategy (memetic engineering), we have "pseudo-mutation" or "polyvariation" where we put out several memes that look like they have mutated from one another, or put them out so they appear to come from multiple sources (even if these are actually controlled by one source).
Edward Bernays used this by creating "The Institue of Cooling" or "The Tabacco Smoke Institute" (or even something like "The Healthy Lung Association") who can all put out "opinions" which serve a given industry or company, and these of course would be funded by the company or industry in question.
We're memetic critters, memetics has a lot of very definite principles and laws (moreso than economics, actually), and these laws may be subverted very effectively by bad actors, especially those with money and/or a servile cohort ready to act on their behalf.
Oh, yeah, and spearheading anything with attractive young people doesn't hurt! (^>^)
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