Factors can certainly pull in opposite directions and vary in importance by situation. Noise is a very real issue and I think there is a threshold on the amount of incriminating evidence a wistleblower needs to have of a conspiracy before being credible and that increases with the size, profile, etc of the group in question. You’d naturally expect the number of people making up stories to go up with the number of people aware of the alegedly conspiring group’s influence. Or maybe another way, we should expect information about small conspiracies to be filtered differently from serious criminal ones and again differently for nation state level ones. The level of coersion a state like the US or China can apply when sufficently inconvenienced is also a world beyond other actors.
Factors can certainly pull in opposite directions and vary in importance by situation. Noise is a very real issue and I think there is a threshold on the amount of incriminating evidence a wistleblower needs to have of a conspiracy before being credible and that increases with the size, profile, etc of the group in question. You’d naturally expect the number of people making up stories to go up with the number of people aware of the alegedly conspiring group’s influence. Or maybe another way, we should expect information about small conspiracies to be filtered differently from serious criminal ones and again differently for nation state level ones. The level of coersion a state like the US or China can apply when sufficently inconvenienced is also a world beyond other actors.