Former PsyOp guy here with OEF experience, now working in cybersecurity. Please feel welcome to ask me (almost!) anything, and I'll do my best to respond.
edit - this TTP FM [0] (warning, PDF ahead) seems to be freely available, and gives a comprehensive overview of what PsyOp actually does in the modern US Army. Perhaps most relevant for today is propaganda analysis and the SCAME method, a multi-faceted approach to determining information about enemy capabilities and intentions.
How much warfare is currently happening on social media sites, nationally operated or otherwise?
Are sites like 4chan, facebook, reddit or twitter very influenced by governmental PsyOp operations, national or foreign?
To the average bloke like me it would seem like discussions on these pages are being "managed" A LOT, but i could not tell if that is the effects of standard propaganda on the population like the news or from deliberate/strategic postings.
Obviously the phrasing of my question is limited to platforms that operate in my known languages, but the question applies in a general sense to all social media platforms.
As many of us know, one of the most successful PsyOp propaganda tactics is that of controlled dissent. Funding organizations that present a fashionable yet controlled form of dissent in order to sway public opinion. How much of that is from private actors like Soros, Buffet, Gates, etc and how much is Govt funded? The state defends the interests of those with power, so is there a lot of overlap or is there a lot of internal disagreements?
> How much warfare is currently happening on social media sites, nationally operated or otherwise?
Plenty. Likely more than you or even I realize. That said...
> Are sites like 4chan, facebook, reddit or twitter very influenced by governmental PsyOp operations, national or foreign?
Foreign gov't, certainly. Ours? As honestly as I can claim, I never knew of any Psyop folks conducting operations on those sites, nor did I ever hear of any directives for Psyop folks to use those platforms as viable mediums.
US citizens are eternally out of scope for Army psychological operations, but I have almost no experience with influence operations conducted by a few Virginia-based agencies. Not saying CIA or NSA do such things, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.
> one of the most successful PsyOp propaganda tactics is that of controlled dissent
I would mildly disagree here. Personally, in-group / out-group mentality is the easiest to manufacture and exploit, and serves as a fantastic emotional distraction from other areas.
>Personally, in-group / out-group mentality is the easiest to manufacture and exploit, and serves as a fantastic emotional distraction from other areas.
My personal conspiracy theory is that the current shit storm of identity politics is the product of exactly this sort of psyop.
That conspiracy theory could be accurate, but humans are perfectly suited to lapping up tribal shit. You don't need to do any serious work after casually throwing a landmine into a peaceful debate. Social media is the worst drug.
That's an evidenced conspiracy. Check out Space Communes "Will the revolution be funded?" It is a research piece about think thanks that do exactly this, although it focuses on the "leftist" liberal ones there are also the right wing, conservative or libertarian ones to play as the counter strike to these. Creating a cycle of culture war that serves to distract the population from more pressing perspectives.
Per the article: "BBG spokeswoman Lynne Weil... stressed to Business Insider that the BBG is separate from Pentagon Information Operations (IO)."
Also, from the actual legislation: "(a) IN GENERAL.--No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States." https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-112hr5736ih/pdf/BI...
AFAICT, the intention and purpose behind the law was to permit domestic distribution of material published overseas. Otherwise, there'd be no simple way for Americans to actually see and discuss the substance of our own propaganda.
That is a load of FUD someone fed you. All that really changed was that US funded media like Voice of America wasn't explicitly blocked in the US.
VoA produces pro-US view point media in 46 languages. The most extreme thing they do is air a ton of classes on learning English and broadcast into other countries that don't want it.
> Personally, in-group / out-group mentality is the easiest to manufacture and exploit, and serves as a fantastic emotional distraction from other areas.
Well somebody is running massive psyops on the American public then.
We in the Baltic states near Russia are observing a massive shift of antivax, alternative medicine etc influencers, who have been exploiting this "us vs them" so successfully during last years, into Russian war propagandists.
Not only you, Slovakia, Czech republic, Poland, Hungary and I am sure Romania, Bulgaria etc. All west flanks of Russian's wanna be new empire. To me those were clearly FSB (or related) psy-ops, pretty successful ones. 101 on how to weaken state and public discussions.
Coupled with support of political parties / celebrities who very uncritically support anything pro-russian and fiercely attack anything else. Luckily, Putin managed to demolish most of it in couple of days.
Well, yeah. It's pretty obvious that Russian troll farms have been running massive psyops. But beyond that, psyops that generate anger with ingroup/outgroup mentality drive eyeballs, and that means profit. There were reports about troll farms in the 2016 election, I think in Albania or the Balkans, that made a fortune making up us-vs-them stories on both sides.
The abject failure of Russian propaganda in the West during the current conflict renders the notion of Russia having any sort of more than trivial shit stirring capability implausible, if not outright risible.
If you look at the rapid change in some points of view in the West, it shows how widespread Russian propaganda is/was.
When the invasion was launched, there was a huge pro-Putin contingent in the US who said it was justified. You can also look historically at how well it worked in Russia's other wars of aggression over the past decade. The fact that it was not able to overcome the images coming out of Ukraine is kinda irrelevant.
#VaccinateUS You can’t fix stupidity. Let them die from measles, and I’m for #vaccination!
#vaccines cause autism—Bye, you are not my friend anymore. And try to think with your brain next #VaccinateUS
anti-vax:
Dont get #vaccines. Iluminati are behind it. #VaccinateUS
Did you know there was a secret government database of #vaccine-damaged children? #VaccinateUS
I wonder what sort of bad actors were behind the divisiveness we saw over COVID. It's absurd how quickly that became such a partisan political issue when it was so self-evident that making it a partisan issue would kill people. It seems you can make any issue into a partisan issue these days, you just need to convince some suckers to believe the other side made it a partisan issue, and they'll make it into a partisan issue.
> If Russia was able to create division, why are they so bad at it when it matters - now.
Just guessing: It is easier to create division, when you manipulate both sides. It is easier to manipulate both sides, if you genuinely do not care which side wins.
As an example, consider vaccination. Trolling only on the anti-vax side would be a rookie mistake. A few bad arguments get made, then they get debunked, for most people it's game over.
To do it properly, you must also have your trolls on the pro-vax side. Their purpose is to provide stupid arguments in favor of vaccination, so that anyone who remembers their high-school education will go like "wait a moment, this doesn't actually make sense". They will also make such nasty attacks on their opponents, that many decent people will go like "hey, I am technically on side of vaccination, but these guys are assholes; I would rather not be associated with them publicly". -- This creates the situation where you have lots of confused young people documenting the mistakes of the pro-vax side, and pointing out their horrible behavior. Much better (from the attacker's perspective) than if one side is merely wrong.
The important thing is that (to the attacker) it doesn't matter which side wins. The goal is to create conflict. If the pro-vax side wins, by doing something that will make the losing side mistrust and hate them forever, mission accomplished. A few more conflicts like this, and the society is ready for a civil war.
Now when the two sides are pro-Russia and anti-Russia, would you want to be the Russian troll assigned to write anti-Russian articles? It's a lose/lose situation, because if you are too good at doing your job, instead of a bonus you might actually get a bullet, if you boss starts suspecting that you actually mean it. But your boss is even more scared of his boss, which is why he will probably assing all trolls to write pro-Russian comments. The entire troll department will play it safe, but as a result they will be much less effective.
I'm not pro-Russia. I oppose virtually all wars, especially ones that have a terrifyingly high chance[1] of solving global warming by nuclear winter. Furthermore, I'm neither Russian nor Ukrainian and I didn't have an opinion on the validity of the parties' justifications for the last 8 years of the Donbas conflict and I see no reason to let CNN/FOX/NYT/Twitter or any other American media outlet assign me one now. That being said the Ukrainians shelling ethnic Russian regions for 8 years was wrong. Russia invading and shelling Ukrainian regions is also wrong. My bias is against the unnecessary taking of human life. My intellectual interest here is in the use of propaganda and how it mutilates the ability of otherwise intelligent persons to make sense of world events.
Evidently the anti-Russia side is doing a fine job already, so why wouldn't Russian propaganda operations in the West just focus on the completely occulted pro-Russia side? And rest assured there is a pro-Russia side, we just don't get to hear it. If Russian "troll farms" were effective they'd manage to get it out. They observably haven't, so we can conclude they're incapable of doing so. Furthermore, the powers that be in the West act as though we are children that can't risk exposure to dangerous Russian media. This offends me and it ought to offend everyone else that has any intellectual self-respect. Regardless which side, if any, is in the right, the infantilization of the subject in the West is depressing.
How many people here have even heard of the Azov Battalion[2]? What is behind the apparent absurdity of an openly neo-Nazi unit fighting for the Jewish President of Ukraine? There's a lot going on here to be curious about and we're not permitted to be.
My impression is that troll farms work like much of social media, the vast majority of things they do have zero impact on the world but a very small percentage of their efforts goes viral. I think people like to inflate their actual impact for partisan political reasons.
Still I’ll give an example of very effective propaganda. I was linked to this video a few years back made by “independent Canadian Journalist” Eva Bartlett. She oozed credibility, she was a westerner speaking at the UN and had legitimately been to Syria herself. It appealed to all my biases, she spoke against a mainstream media conspiracy to coverup war crimes to promote war in the Middle East. She even got featured by modestly popular pundit Jimmy Dore. Her video has been watched around a million times or so on YouTube.
Now I won’t comment on the credulity of her claims, but I found it remarkable how when I first watched her video I had NO IDEA she was on RT’s payroll. She was called “Independant Canadian Journalist”. I like to think I’m hard to manipulate but man the Russians played me like a fiddle with this propaganda!
It's your personal problem that neo-nazi equals hating jews. As someone who worked with keeping young men away from neo-nazi groups in the past - it's just not true for many groups. The real picture is much more complicated and is more often than not related to simple hate. If you have someone closer to you to hate, every other topic or nationality takes a backseat. Russian imperialism is closer to these groups than anything else now.
> rest assured there is a pro-Russia side, we just don't get to hear it.
Lucky you! I hear a lot of it. Here is a summary, if you wish -- everything is USA/NATO's fault; war is horrible and the best way to end it is to stop supporting Ukraine and convince them to give up; if you say anything negative about Putin or doubt his words, then you are a hysterical warmonger and the good and decent people should make sure that you will be properly punished for that.
> the infantilization of the subject in the West is depressing.
For me the depressing thing is the assumption that 50% of media in the West should be the voice of Russian trolls, otherwise something is wrong with the West.
I don’t want to watch Russian propaganda anymore than I want to watch Ukrainian or US propaganda for that matter. You completely missed my point. What I don’t want is for someone else to decide what I can watch for me.
> Foreign gov't, certainly. Ours? As honestly as I can claim, I never knew of any Psyop folks conducting operations on those sites, nor did I ever hear of any directives for Psyop folks to use those platforms as viable mediums.
Wouldn't operating there also target a lot of non-US citizens? How would you actually go for non-US people that frequent English forums? Also, that the US completely leaves the field to the other guys seems unlikely to me, both from a tactical perspective and from the opinions I see.
Not that I have any credentials, it just sounds very strange to me.
Honestly, my hypothesis (as I have no discrete data) is that sites like reddit, twitter, HN, tumbler, etc. already have CIA / NSA / "DoD" people both on staff and as participatory users, likely volunteer moderators / admins as well.
When you start to think about how many other foreign countries are doing the exact same thing, well, you start wanting to use social media a lot less.
I know quite a few people who work at alphabet soup agencies and US based social media sites are strictly off limits. The exceptions are law enforcement (FBI, USSS, etc) actions where someone is dealing in child abuse material or terrorist recruiting.
Also ask yourself... why? Foreign intelligence resources are much better spent on foreign networks like VK, WeChat, and TikTok.
I'm not sure I understand why you've brought up posse comitatus. The US military can't enforce domestic laws, but that doesn't even remotely pertain to whether the US military performs operations on domestic citizens (which it doesn't for entirely separate reasons).
>Foreign gov't, certainly. Ours? As honestly as I can claim, I never knew of any Psyop folks conducting operations on those sites, nor did I ever hear of any directives for Psyop folks to use those platforms as viable mediums.
They were smaller then and it was still illegal for the USGov to do domestic propaganda before 2014. Twitter is famous for having literal PsyOps officers on staff.[1]
I imagine there are at least a few differences in the legal boundaries for the US military and the UK. I can't speak to the latter, but I stand by my claim about the former.
Here's the most concrete anything I could find [0] about relationships between the US media and any PsyOp personnel, but I don't much care to look very hard. You're welcome to look as well.
You linked a Senate Bill that, as far as I can tell, never became law. It looks like similar bills were issued in 2020 and 2021 and also failed to pass.
And this is even before we attempt to tease apart why you think that conservatives would be confused with White supremacists.
False equivalence between BLM and Republicans. They aren’t two sides of the same coin.
Further, BLM activists don’t blow up federal buildings (and nurseries) or bring zip-ties and gallows to their riots trying to overthrow the government. You sound silly.
> "White supremacist has now become a label for a larger and larger group of republicans/white cisgender traditional-valued people. "
White supremacist beliefs aren't even illegal in the US (whether or not they should be), so the idea that the label of white supremacist itself absent of any other crime is somehow being used to legally prosecute people who are guilty of nothing more than "traditional beliefs" or "being Republican" is quite a stretch.
Not as much of a stretch as placing white supremacists and BLM as category-similar examples, though.
> In the legislation above: "White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States."
This isn't just something the legislators made up, it's a factually true statement.
From the CSIS[1]:
> Far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks and individuals inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years. Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.
Oh man, forget about white supremacists, antifa and the rest of the fun-house gang, could you imagine if the state departments individually labelled every single US citizen as a potential domestic terrorist, to pre-emptively justify deploying whatever surveillance and psyops they wanted? There's something deeply comical to me about the notion. That seems more or less like the fear that justified the PRISM priapism anyways.
You don't know how big this goes. It started with 9/11 and eventually gave the president unlimited power to use all forms of necessary and appropriate force against all forms of aggression. This includes using agencies to spy on their own people.
Right after the 9/11 terrorist attack, overwhelmed by mourning, congress gave the executive branch broad powers related to terrorism that still exists to this day. That power is scoped in a 60 word document voted on by congress.
That document effects how the government operates to this very day.
There was one person in that podcast who saw the future for what it was before anyone else. She made a stand and risked her entire career to stop what was to come. Ultimately she failed and that's why we are where we are today.
The answers to your leading questions are probably classified at the TS/SCI level.
I think it's safe to assume that there are a non-trivial amount of psyops happening on those platforms, since those sites are among the main sources of information for almost all people. It would be foolish to not target such low hanging fruit to manufacture consent if you are trying to influence populations.
I would go further and add wikipedia and google results to the list. Conflict of interest edits on wikipedia by companies and legislatures are nothing new. Check out CongressEdits[0] and the slew of bots that it inspired, which enabled monitoring of IP address ranges that edit wikipedia.
> It would be foolish to not target such low hanging fruit to manufacture consent if you are trying to influence populations.
While I agree at a conceptual level, I don't believe US Army Psyop to have a hand in any of that. However, the government as a whole is not exempt from that claim - see Operation Mockingbird, for example [0].
AFAIK, US Army Psyop does not belong to or is considered an "intelligence element" of the Army. We were often reminded that we don't do intelligence work, but rather information work / warfare.
It doesn’t work like that. You have to understand what set of laws an organization falls under. For example, even though NSA and Army is part of the DoD, they fall under different Titles of US Code which defines their authority.
I'm fairly certain that /r/worldnews is gamed by western intelligence and diplomatic agencies. The top stories and top comments on said stories are invariably towing the US State Department line.
All things being equal, this doesn't seem like the most likely explanation. It's more likely that there are just a large number of people who agree with what you think are the US State Department's positions.
Whether those people have been in turn influenced is a separate question.
It's probably a mix. There's a number of fake accounts creating the volume of fake news, while the regular users then pick it up from there. I've never seen such an influx of fake news coming from literally every source. When even newspapers blindly lie it's hard for the regular person to understand what's going on.
> I've never seen such an influx of fake news coming from literally every source. When even newspapers blindly lie it's hard for the regular person to understand what's going on.
That's a common tactic of propagadists: To paraylze people - make people feel powerless by convincing them that everything is a lie.
Everyone lies, but that doesn't mean there aren't honest people, sociopathic liars, and a big chasm between them. No publication is perfect, but there are plenty of very credible ones.
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.
Everything really is propaganda, tho. Nearly.
It's also a basic tactic of propagandists to convince people that only approved narratives are good, and the forbidden ones are propaganda. To try normalize themselves a the self-anointed authority that decides which is which. Just like the liars, criminals and corrupt who say, "trust me, I'm honest. Some people lie a lot, but me, you can trust."
> sociopathic liars,
Like spies, conwomen/conmen and other professional liars?
> No publication is perfect, but there are plenty of very credible ones.[0]
"A bland, and in this case, meaningless statement." ;)
Is this tendency consistent over several years, though? Because there are some pretty stark differences between the Trump foreign policy and that of Biden or Obama. I don't imagine that many normal users would be inclined to echo the words of Hillary Clinton and later Antony Blinken, and in between them Rex Tillerson. If they have done that, maybe there is some kind of organized effort behind it.
The state department is not the same as the president. The previous president did not have a significant degree of control over the state department or any facet of the federal bureaucracy, in all reality.
r/worldnews is corrupt, and I'm sure you can find a metric fuckton of evidence if you care to look.
I saw a wildly popular but politically embarrassing* article there get wiped from the front page for "just being commentary / a blog post with no evidence", when it was actually a Coundcloud link to the politician's actual words.
The story was wiped. It is no longer searchable by either Reddit or Google search. This is a post consisting of direct evidence with zero commentary, of the utmost public interest, with 20 thousand upvotes or so. Just memory-holed completely with no appeal.
* The Irish Health Minister at the time, Simon Harris, was saying that "we're on Covid-19, so there's been 18 other coronaviruses" .... In fucking MAY of last year. THe Health Minister. And this was AFTER those talking heads in America were reamed for the same mistake.
I have the same impression. With the start of the war, the Russian side completely vanished from basically all forums I saw, except if parodied to a maximum for laughs. Part of that is surely that few people that saw Russias side beforehand don't support the war and don't want to defend it, but basically all I see now is complete and utterly black and white. And I support supporting the Ukraine, but I'm afraid this might be the final breakthrough for maximum polarization.
It's plausible that this represents a genuine change in public opinion. For historical precedent, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, public opinion in the United States drastically changed from a split to a 91% approval for the United States to declare war. [0]
The websites you have viewed, assuming they are in English, likely have a userbase that is primarily from the United States and countries that are part of the Western world. It's reasonable to believe that these countries (which have shared values) have genuinely shifted in public opinion in support of the invaded country.
If you're looking for the other side, you can find it in forums which have a userbase from countries that are not part of the Western world, and share different values. However, the views are more neutral for pragmatic purposes (due to prior relationships with Russia), rather than actively in support. [1]
Pragmatically, the war is not in the interest of most users across the globe. It represents an escalation that could plausibly lead to nuclear war if a NATO country were to intervene, which is in nobody's interest. It also affects daily life in other countries as gasoline prices are up across the world, and the sanctions will damage to economies outside of Russia. Emotionally and ethically, it's hard to see the footage of civilians dying and getting blown up by missiles as part of the attack.
I genuinely don't see a framing where it's a reasonable position to support the war without a massive logical leap or emotional stretch, and believe that other users in Western nations have arrived at the same conclusion.
One doesn't have to support the war to simply have an opinion that there's plenty of blame going around, but there's a full court press online insisting this can't possibly be a legitimate stance.
> but there's a full court press online insisting this can't possibly be a legitimate stance.
That suggests some conspiracy. Instead of complaining about persecution - a common tacitc to change the subject from the weakness of one's argument - because people disagree with you, how about making your argument and listening to others?
> a common tacitc to change the subject from the weakness of one's argument - because people disagree with you, how about making your argument and listening to others?
Falsely framing people you disagree with as being conspiracy theorists or suffering from delusions of persecution is also an incredibly common tactic....although I suspect most of the time the person doing it doesn't even realize they're doing it.
Guys please stop falling for this psyops comment. I work in PsyOps and he was ordered to speak like there is no psyops against American citizens. Dont believe him believe me
I don't know psyops well, but I do know just a little about small unit tactics, and I've noticed that certain groups seem to use, at a level sophisticated enough to clearly indicate they know what they are doing, the public information equivalent of the small unit tactics - complementary effects, reinforcing effects, fixing the enemy, the focus on offense and movement, etc.
Is that a fair description of psyops - the information equivalent of more 'physical' tactics? How do they differ? Also, do you notice groups - political groups, companies, governments, etc. - using psyops outside military contexts?
> Is that a fair description of psyops - the information equivalent of more 'physical' tactics?
Absolutely it is. From a historical perspective, the tactic has known many names: Psychological Warfare, Psychological Operations, Military Information Support Operations, etc. By definition, however, only 37-series (e.g. MOS 37F, MOS 37A) folks trained out at Ft. Bragg are able to conduct PsyOp.
Political groups, private sector companies, etc. certainly conduct influence operations - sometimes at the direction of former PsyOp personnel - but there are legal distinctions and differences. It's one reason I enjoy limiting how much television I watch: advertisements are just watered-down influence operations with the goal of "spend money on X".
>The best defense is to not absorb the data to begin with.
The despair that can result from this is almost unimaginable though. When you separate yourself from the propaganda infrastructure then try to have conversations with people and at the slightest prompting they start vomiting talking points and a viewpoint that's purely based on propaganda... oh god, it's unbearable. And you can't call them stupid because they're not stupid they're just... outmatched by a professional force.
It's too true and so depressing. People can't stand up to the immense volumes of resources and hundreds (thousands?) of years of research these organizations are founded on.
All my education has lead me to not participating being the best solution.
Despair is a good word. I couldn't think of a better one to describe the dropping of emotion that I feel when I hear people repeat verbatim.
Indeed. The talking points really stand out. Especially from the reactionary side, they often have no other basis than 'this is what is being repeated'.
hi, my city is host to rapidly growing (foreign) usa war bases.
As an engaged citizen, I notice that local media over the past 10 years have not given this significant change to our town the scrutiny that any similarly sized development would receive.
scandals such as sexual assault are reported by outlets in other cities, but not locally.
what advice can you share to help me understand what is being done to so effectively manage the otherwise useful local media?
This is an emergent property of there being a big source of income from a single entity. Nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds.
It’s not that local media is paid to shut up, it’s that many of the viewers and advertisers directly benefit from the big entity and will become angry at the news unless it has irrefutable and overwhelming evidence of some wrong doing.
I'm actually aware of (some of) the basing in Darwin. Didn't a military-connected Chinese organization acquire a port there also, maybe back when the US Marines started building?
I'm afraid that, given Darwin's location, allied military activity is going to be 'big business'. But the stanadard argument is that China has shown they are going to be aggressive, and that the alliances are much better than facing China alone. But living where a lot of that activity will likely be happening, what is your perspective?
The 'good' news for you, perhaps, is that the US's strategy now is not to concentrate in large bases, which can be overrrun by new and future long-range precision missiles, but to spread out on many smaller facilities.
yes a chinese company (Lanbridge) got a 99 year lease on the port. I guess they are military-connected in so far as being state-owned.
my perspective is that it is a great indignity to host foreign war bases during peace time. But if they are here, even to visit, then I want better protections against the reality of crimes committed by visiting service personnel; and I want to close the loopholes allowing the USA to bring illegal weapons.
In the context for this post, there is no comparable hiring process or trust factor. There is a certain level of aptitude and physical fitness required, but this job is plain and simple military service with some extra schooling on top (e.g. foreign language, parachuting, etc.)
Manipulation and influence can look very similar, and naturally skilled manipulators tend to go elsewhere (I think there's enough research about career preference and correlation of "dark triad" traits to substantiate this).
In my experience, most of the enlisted folks doing PsyOp had little idea of what it truly involved when they first began; however, the Army remains eager to redirect the passion of 20 year olds into counterinsurgency / foreign policy tactics.
Hard disagree here, as this job is for enlisted soldiers. Ego and money are out on that alone. Revenge, maybe? But you really don't know where you'll deploy. Ideology... maybe as well? The Army understandably does a pretty good job of obtaining uniformity there.
Virtually all of the motivations of folks I knew could be abstracted to "things are truly bad for these people; how can we fix it?".
Truthfully, almost no benefit at all, although I've been out of the military for some time now. Obviously there are military networks (e.g. SIPRNET) used to transmit resources / info between units and locations, but that's about the extent of it.
My experiences in Afghanistan were almost entirely on-ground, working directly with local village leaders and OGAs (i.e. other governmental organizations, such as USAID). Perhaps unsurprisingly, direct communication with people provides the best avenue for learning / sharing / influencing. Most of the media we disseminated (whether print or radio) was purpose-made for various objectives like decreasing the prevalence of IEDs.
Do you have any go-to public tools for fact-checking or any internal tools that you might have had access to in the past?
More generally speaking, how do you defend yourself against PsyOp in this age with heavily degraded trust in the government and judiciary system in the west particularly?
How do you feel about psyops deployed domestically, against US citizens? For example, there currently appear to be psyops against worker unions, raising the minimum wage, and the potential for a 4-day work week. Were you experienced in these?
> How do you feel about psyops deployed domestically, against US citizens?
Short answer is that PsyOp is not used domestically.
There are a number of criteria for something to be considered actual factual psyop activity, and a private company attempting to influence US citizens would automatically fall short of those criteria. My work was done exclusively and entirely in Afghanistan.
Should also add that I detest those kinds of influence operations. Much like hacking, there is white, grey, and black classified activities [0]. I'm a bit old-fashioned and prefer to stick toward the white hat side and dabble elsewhere only when necessary, and not treat it like a fair selection.
Wouldn't it likely be an agency performing domestic PysOps, not the military? And I would guess that it would be TS/SCI or higher, so not really known.
Well, the fact that the CIA was recently exposed as running a mass domestic surveillance program is pretty good circumstantial evidence. Political/lobby/corporate interests are definitely doing it too. The commercial ones may even be selling it to the government.
Somewhat off-topic, but does your PsyOp experience help you in Cybersecurity? I imagine it's valuable for social engineering or (possibly) getting management to accept that it's needed.
Thanks for asking; I was wanting someone to bring this up. It certainly does help.
All too often, great ideas are communicated poorly and end up going nowhere, I think. Knowing how to frame something for a particular audience, or helping people feel like they're heard / acknowledged / part of a team, or seeing through pervasive political fogs, and a bunch of other little skills that really boil down to "good communication" and "psychology" have undeniably helped.
Somewhat unfortunately, I'm working on convincing myself that not all persuasive communication is bad!
> I'm working on convincing myself that not all persuasive communication is bad!
No problem convincing my guys of this. We start with public health and
safety campaigns like the famous Stop. Look. Listen. that ran through
the 1970s with Darth Vader actor David Prowse here in the UK.
Prowse, who fell out with George Lucas, once said that Vader was not
his greatest work as a body actor by any means, but the Green Cross
Man, which is estimated to have saved 500,000 children's lives.
When I did influence work it was in a similar vein, directed towards
the kind of things you'd have no moral objection to, like stopping
kids from picking up cluster bombs or preventing rape as a weapon of
war.
There's plenty of for-good psyops work out there.
There's also what I'd call "Counter-Pysops", which is just
Intellectual Self-Defence. This can range from training people to spot
and deflect phishing or blackmail scams, all the way to message
analysis to spot and neutrally evaluate foreign psyops messages.
What do you consider the best NON-FM/TA reference? So many DOD publications seem to be 10% 'military objectives' and 90% 'how to navigate the world's largest bureaucracy.' I tend to find things like monographs from the military's educational institutions a lot more valuable, but then they're narrowly focused which leads to a very fragmented way of looking at things.
Did you notice an increase of techniques or pattern usually related to PsyOps (no matter from which side) during the weeks leading to the Ukraine invasion?
At a purely definitive level, no. PsyOp cannot create a campaign (i.e. a coordinated approach to influence with objectives, timelines, etc.) with US citizens as an intended audience, but there truly isn't much difference between public relations / mass communication and some core PsyOp procedures.
That said, I think our intelligence community and executive branch did an incredible job of establishing themselves as a high-credibility source from even before the invasion, allowing them to easily counter propaganda sponsored by Russia or whomever else. In my opinion, honest communication and appeals to morality / humanity will always remain effective.
> I think our intelligence community and executive branch did an incredible job of establishing themselves as a high-credibility source from even before the invasion, allowing them to easily counter propaganda sponsored by Russia or whomever else.
I noticed that too, and I've seen a few experts other than you say it. I've always thought that the US fell far behind on information operations. Others like the Russians seemed to run circles around the US, which would produce anodyne responses much too late. I despaired that the US didn't seem to prioritize it, and would inevitably lose contests for hearts and minds, and lose them gradually in the long run. Organizationally, what do you think was the difference that motivated this change? Will it happen again?
I realize that wasn't clear and I'm too late to edit the parent: In the past, "I've always thought that the US fell far behind on information operations." Now it seems different. What changed organizationally? Can it be sustained?
I think we're simply seeing the positive effects of an administration that cooperates with the intelligence community, and not just unidirectionally.
There are numerous reports to dig up about how the former admin flat-out ignored or went directly contrary to what the IC was saying, and I think that hurt us more than we will ever know.
Beyond a doubt, I think that's an enormous improvement. Imagine Trump trying to plan, coordinate, and execute this response across the federal government, NATO, the EU, and countries worldwide.
However, my (vague, inexpert) impression goes back long before Trump. Obama, etc. seemed always a day late and a dollar short. Remember Obama's response to Russian interference in our elections? Not the actions (which I doubt many remember), but the words? Neither do I.
Apparently, "integrated deterrence" is a DoD concept for integrating all (or much) of the executive branch in objectives - sanctions, information operations, etc. Perhaps that's what we saw in regard to Russia and Ukraine. According to one Congressperson, it's the first time it was applied to a real situation.
I’m surprised the army literally calls it PsyOp rather than trying to disguise it as something more mild like “Communications Specialists”.
Is there a reason for this?
In my mind it would be to attract better talent that actually wants to do PsyOps rather than Communications, so it’s a good filter to attract smart people that want to do spy-like work.
I remain a believer in open information as much as possible. However, if you feel you have a question that isn't suitable for other people to read publicly, I likely won't be able to answer it privately, sorry!
What possible ethical basis do you have as an individual have to mess with people (lots of them), lying, misleading, misinforming, etc in order to achieve a goal?
Who decides what is a 'good' goal? Does it matter, or do you just do what you are told?
I know the answers - you're just following orders, you believe you are working for the good, etc. These are not valid answers - you cannot pretend the actions you take against others are ok, because you were just following orders.
Order following and misleading others at scale, makes you part of the problem.
eh? probably much the same as anyone else who isn't perfect.
there seems to be a misconception here that psyop == lying. the majority of psyop is well-presented truths as opposed to intentional deceit. credibility counts, and is easily eroded with careless lies.
we did have a fair amount of latitude which objectives we would pursue, however, based on the relevance and estimated effectiveness for the demographics in the area. that said, reducing roadside bombs is an objectively good goal, in my opinion. as is encouraging people to participate in an election. as is informing the public about free medical services.
> I know the answers
well that's no fun! honestly, it seems your "known answers" are a bit off-base. try to keep an open / curious mind; we're still on HN after all :)
Well-presented 'truths', according to whose perspective?
eg: "reducing roadside bombs is an objectively good goal"
Well, from one perspective - who wants more roadside bombs?!
But if the road side bombs are being put in place by the natives of a country to make things harder for what the natives perceive to be an invading force, to help prevent the occupation and destruction their country, perhaps this is a valid act? Perhaps you would think defending your country against an invader is valid. So, from that perspective, what is the problem with a road side bomb when you are fighting an invading force that can call in airstrikes. Taking action against a far more powerful force in defence of your country is heroic.
The problem with all 'presentations of the truth' is that its not a presentation of truth at all. There is no unbiased perspective. But if you are able to broadcast your message via a megaphone (via the media) loudest you probably 'win' - by lying to everyone.
So, who has 'the truth'? Does the government that pays your paycheck?
You are simply creating and broadcasting the message you have been told to - it is your job - you do what you are told for money. Right or wrong and truth have nothing to do with it. You may think you are doing 'right' but all your are doing is accepting the comforting provided illusions that your paymasters are providing you with to enable you to do that job. They say it is 'right' because it suits their agenda, and you accept that because it suits yours (money and not feeling bad about what you do).
You are not expressing truth, nor is what you are doing aligned with your personal morality, if you even have a personal morality.
I don't think anyone is inherently evil, but I can proudly say much of my work was oriented toward humanitarianism and democratic initiatives. Call it cliche, but you do win people over with kindness and decency.
We worked to build schools, teach farmers about modern agricultural practices, provided medical services, and let women vote or shop by themselves in the local bazaar without fear. We helped reduce IEDs placed in the area to prevent civilian casualties, encouraged safe driving practices, and worked to convince young kids to stop fighting.
I cried when I read that the city in which I lived for a year was recently retaken by the Taliban after we left. I could only hope that the people with which I shared hot tea on cold desert mornings, or potluck style meals, or laughs around a hookah, were able to stay safe.
> Call it cliche, but you do win people over with kindness and decency.
You are probably familiar with the work of Dale Carnegie. A large part of HN find his work to be overrated and obvious at best, while personally so far I found it enlightening and found that the world would be a better place if people actually followed its advice. What is your opinion on his work?
I've personally never read his work. I thought the titling alone so shallow as to not warrant a toe-dip, and the orientation toward success in business was just another factor in my shying away. Sorry!
Lol jk (somewhat). How much would you say the US mission in Afghanistan is influenced by this kind of humanitarian directive vs. some nebulous geopolitical motivations?
For a period of time, counterinsurgency doctrine for Afghanistan was entirely based on humanitarianism - i.e. "winning the hearts and minds".
We stopped pushing that around the time I was there, as regular Army folks can do a fantastic fucking job of erasing months of progress in one patrol or meeting.
I $till haven't landed on a $ati$factory explanation for our geopolitical motivation$ to $tay in Afghani$tan, though.
Just wait until you find out that my security clearance is now expired and I occasionally browse Wikileaks!
Information should be freely accessible. I held that belief long before I joined the military. If you're interested in the SCAME approach, check it out. Baseless accusations about my integrity are uncalled for, though.
edit - for what it's worth, my calling it "PsyOp" versus "PsyOps" is a good indicator that I am what I say to be.
We’re all just names on an internet forum. Everything here is baseless. I’m not even saying I doubt you are/were involved in PsyOps. I’m saying I’m not so sure I believe the “ex” part.
Anyhow…here’s a question for you. Leading up to Jan 6, it was quite clear to me that someone with PsyOp knowledge was involved with Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Any thoughts or comments on that?
If I were still enlisted, I could get in legitimate trouble - like, UCMJ action with hard labor, docked pay, then dishonorable discharge - for the things I've simply read. I wouldn't admit to that if I were still attached.
But to your question - could you share a tweet in particular, or a theme before I answer? I'm not entirely sure what you're describing. Most of his tweets seemed from the hip, unpolished, and frankly without any point other than to stir up controversy.
As an example, in the month before Jan 6, he made regular posts showing pictures of people in other countries rioting which he claimed they were doing because they were so upset about America’s “stolen election”. He continually used terminology centered around fighting and rising up around these posts. I remember how utterly contrived it seemed to me, like the posts were intended to spur a certain idea in the minds of his followers.
This isn't the only psyops person in that orbit, but probably one of the most influential. I do find it ironically amusing that his 38-slide powerpoint is not notably worse than many official military slide decks.
https://thedispatch.com/p/who-is-phil-waldron-and-why-did-th...
> Most of his tweets seemed from the hip, unpolished, and frankly without any point other than to stir up controversy.
That would fit the on-going GOP/reactionary tactic of always creating disruption, fear, and crisis. Even reasonable, but controversial, communication might create more sense of calm.
It was hosted on FAS, which had/has a long history of doing such things. Steven Aftergood was its co-founder and his bona fides are quite well known: https://sgp.fas.org/aftergood.html
> You’ll also use social media [...] to share information meant to help change minds and behaviors in the U.S. Army’s interest.
Back when I used reddit, I almost certainly came across at least two (2) of these folks. I was participating in discussion on $GEOPOLITICAL_TOPIC on a certain subreddit (probably classified as a foreign TA) and on two separate occasions, users DM'd me in a friendly manner and seemed to want to have a good faith chat about it. They dropped lots of unsolicited links, one even said "I wish we could talk about this over drinks", but when I calmly refuted their talking points, they quickly ended the conversation.
At the time it immediately reminded me of the analogous "deradicalisation" psyops in the context of far-right/Islamic extremism.
The key behavior was the "trying to be your friend" bit. They could have just replied to my comments publicly, like a normal user.
Grow your career releasing domestic propaganda now that the 2013 NDAA removed the Smith-Mundt Act ban on domestic propaganda. You too can earn $13k/year posting on multiple social media sites from a flowchart given to you that day. Never let the truth stand in the way of national security interests.
>“There was essentially a de facto ban on the domestic dissemination of materials originating from the State Department,” said Weston Sager, an attorney who published a paper on the change in law. Under the new law, it is still against the law for government-funded media to create programming and market their content to U.S. audiences.
>During consideration of the bill, critics voiced concern that lifting the restrictions could result in information designed to influence foreign audiences being used against American citizens. Proponents countered that the ban made it difficult for Americans to access and evaluate this content.
Having read your quoted text and your link and found them to be spurious and random it seems necessary to restate the question that was posed by the person to whom you replied:
The link says that there is a good argument that protections against domestic exposure to American propaganda were weakened, but also that propaganda directly targeted at domestic audiences is still illegal.
Every conspiracy theory out there seems to revolve around the concept of psychological operations, and they're at least as right as a stopped clock. The problem I see with them is that when a military tactic gets used against civilians, it would seem to make a kinetic response both justified and ethical. This idea that deception is somehow more ethical or acceptable than violence or the threat of it is itself, a psychological operation with real and negative consequences. I get that we're all trained to reject violence and co-ordinate to use shame against anyone who doesn't proclaim that enthusiastically enough, but if an organization or movement uses covert military tactics to dissolve or fabricate norms that result in militarily strategic political and economic outcomes, the unintended consequence is it may morally justify a kinetic repsponse as proportional.
Arguably, a commensurate and proportional response to using psychological operations to destroy the livelihoods of perhaps millions of small business owners would at the very least be a traditional pillorying, if not something more severe. In radically eschewing the idea of violence (even including words and silence in its current definition), we've had the effect of normalizing deception to the point that we're completely destroying trust in institutions, and increasingly, each other, where all the minor incidents of violence that didn't happen because of organized deception now risk all happening at once.
Sure, do psyops against the Enemy, but when you turn them on civilians, it's worth considering you have to live with the people you use them on, and they have long memories.
I would think this specialty would build skills that are well compensated in the private sector: public relations, marketing, political campaigns, journalism, SEO. Since gaslighting and enlightening aren't all that different in terms of PsyOps, also include teaching. Convincing a population that they are being liberated rather than invaded is good training for convincing another population to use chorizo flavored toothpaste.
has a population ever been convinced they were being liberated? seems to me that's more of a lie to tell the invading soldiers to give them high morale until the truth sinks in
I think it could be a common delusion of the invaders. In the Iraq war, I think the Bush administration really thought, in a fit of megalomania, the Iraqis would welcome them as liberators. I once read a military historian who said (paraphrasing), "you can always identify a bad war plan when it ends with 'and then the local population will rise up and join us'". It's such an incredibly egocentric view of the world.
I knew someone who was in one of the lead units in the Iraq war. They said they were instructed to tell people in each town that the US forces had come to liberate them, and that the locals would of course rise up and help the Americans. They said every town was the same: they'd make the announcement, and then they'd hear the mortars coming ...
It turns out people don't like foreigners with guns taking over their towns by force, no matter what their stated intentions. Imagine how you would feel.
To deceive your enemy is a valuable thing. I just watched this excellent lecture on the Colossus machine [0] and learned that our invasion of Normandy was successful in part thanks to US communications being able to "leak" plans to Nazi code breakers and fool them into thinking we would land in an entirely different beach. (The colossus decoding high command communications allowed us to confirm the deception was successful)
OTOH, mass deception of a population is a little newer, and anytime Russian PSYOPS are brought up I like to drop this link [1] about US Army developing social media "sockpuppets" back in 2011, years before we ever heard of the Internet Research Agency (founded in 2013 if wiki is credible)
Now that the disinformation cat is out of the bag, I wonder what kind of internal fact checking tools the Army uses to separate fresh SIGINT from trash. The videos purportedly coming out of Ukraine are impossible to sort through, the strangest thing to me was seeing hundreds of accounts post the same video, instead of quote tweeting or retweeting or linking to a source, just, 'I've never mentioned Ukraine before but here's a video of what's happening right now!'
> To deceive your enemy is a valuable thing. I just watched this excellent lecture on the Colossus machine [0] and learned that our invasion of Normandy was successful in part thanks to US communications being able to "leak" plans to Nazi code breakers and fool them into thinking we would land in an entirely different beach. (The colossus decoding high command communications allowed us to confirm the deception was successful)
The same pattern of confirming the success of a deception via Ultra/Colossus occurred with Operation Mincemeat:
I have seen on social media GPT3 bots arguing about some hot topic issue, when you post its given a sentiment score, if favourable to the current agenda of the news story, it is boosted, if not only you and your friends can see it if they try and manually find it.
Some people even had obvious Nivida generated faces as profile pictures.
Its all about controlling what you see, most people will join a crowd, or if they are against a crowd they don't say anything because they, at the end of the day want likes and supportive comments not the hate that comes from going against the grain.
The comments on a story is not separate from the content of the story.
This sort of thing was happening very often 2020/2021 less so now, they might have just gotten better at it.
I am reminded of the London bridge terrorists attack MI5 had a whole catalogue of social media content, posters and news story's ready to bring the country together. I might be able to find a link if I dig through my archives.
Who knows that story I read could have been disinformation.
I recommend people looking to understand Russian governments mindset and tactics to take look at this video by Finnish army intelligence expert & researcher. It has decent English subtitles. Quite awakening stuff.
I imagine it would be more or less appealing for persons interested, to see the engineering side contributions of PsyOps. Individuals wearing fatigues sitting moderating social media all night long will be soon forgotten. Like the horse driven plow. The idea of mechanized disinformation as a trend moving forward seems likely. The results of planting personnel into social/familial groups as counter insurgence have been inefficient. this is due to the human condition and our ability to forget key fragments of an operation protocol that is so personalized. Deep undercover agents in the past proved to be high risk for defecting. It is perhaps most efficient in terms of delays to produce systems such as counterfeit blockchain technologies, automated subversion of academic journalism, ect. PsyOPs is really a long term tool beyond elected governments and generations of people. It would involve hardware specifications in manufacturing and global natural resource management schemes.
> The idea of mechanized disinformation as a trend moving forward seems likely.
It think this is no longer a trend but reality. I often post on the Chinese propaganda Facebook page (CGTN), and the nationalists who answer usually use the country of origin to craft their response. America is a fascist state who invades countries. Canada is "America's lapdog". African countries "benefit from China". And so on. When I removed any reference to my country of origin the answers got fewer and weirder, to the point the sentences made no semantic sense. The profile of those answering were obviously fake and looked different but semantically similar. A few pictures of them with landmarks, private friends list, random interests, everything else private. To the untrained and non-careful mind these can more than convincing.
edit - this TTP FM [0] (warning, PDF ahead) seems to be freely available, and gives a comprehensive overview of what PsyOp actually does in the modern US Army. Perhaps most relevant for today is propaganda analysis and the SCAME method, a multi-faceted approach to determining information about enemy capabilities and intentions.
[0] - https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-05-301.pdf