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Psychological Operations

goarmy.com

131–140 of 191 posts

Re: Psychological Operations

#131
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communic…

> 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.

Re: Psychological Operations

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> US citizens are eternally out of scope for Army psychological operations When did you quit the force? Targeting US citizens has been allowed for almost 10 years, now. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-domestic-propaganda-offic...

Your only source is business insider?

Re: Psychological Operations

#134
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Psychological Operations

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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…

> Ours? As honestly as I can claim, I never knew of any Psyop folks conducting operations on those sites

I guess Reddit users in 2013's "most addicted city", Eglin Air Force Base, were just really keen on posting photos of cool leaves they found:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...

Re: Psychological Operations

#136
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference between astrology and astronomy is evidence. Do we have any regading this question?

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.

Re: Psychological Operations

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>one reason I enjoy limiting how much television I watch Absolutely. I've no delusion that I can combat the manipulation. The best defense is to not absorb the data to begin with.

>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.

Re: Psychological Operations

#140
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you start wanting to use social media a lot less fidgets for a minute about whether HN is a social media site

We are lucky that HN effectively only has one staff person. Sort of hard for the CIA/KGB/CCP to seed it while it stays at this stage. Especially with strict moderation of participants.

> We are lucky that HN effectively only has one staff person.

False:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25235720

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