Well right. It is intentional and malicious, by definition. Not sure why the writer threw that in there. It is at its core a form of unethical manipulation. Devious even. It can be very simple, or very complex.
The political-media complex spends billions of dollars on it, very sophisticated and interlocked, coordinated across different platforms, because it works so well. They are completely and utterly dependent on it Now you know what all those “think tanks” have been doing for all these years.
Even something as simple as “Well, you’re the first/only person to complain about it” is a type of that. It’s a way they will try to frame the issue as something nobody else is concerned about, when it is exactly the opposite.
They have to keep people divided, and uninformed, or misinformed, and turn the tables. If you know what you’re looking at, you see it every day, writ large.
I grew up with a narcissist, and for narcissists of any age, gaslighting is as natural as swimming is to fish. When I could, I headed for the hills, just left it, you can’t resolve it if the person in question remains untreated. If you are dealing with the originator of the gaslighting, it is intentional and malicious. If otoh, you are dealing with some poor schmuck caught in the eddies of a gaslighting campaign, it may not be, because they may believe the false reality, or maybe they feel they can benefit from it at the expense of a targeted victim (not realizing the diminished power of picking fights with fellow victims instead of making common cause with them), or maybe they are too afraid of getting in trouble or being made an example of to speak up and challenge the false reality, or else you have some form of Stockholm syndrome going on.
On the small scale you can flee and hope there isn’t a whole sewer of lies coming after you. On the large scale you can disagree all you like but until a tipping point occurs (and probably a good deal afterward) you can just try to provide a stabilizing reference point I think.
What is so important about Musk breaking up the lefty party is that utilizing social media, and Twitter in particular, bad people figured out how to scale up gaslighting campaigns, combining the nastiness of the small scale with large scale disinformation. The bad news is that the lefties aren’t the only ones doing it. You have a whole world full of university labs and unfriendly states that are able to mess with Americans in America without having to actually hop on a plane.