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Psychological Operations

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Re: Psychological Operations

#171

Post by wolverine876 »

Lascaille wrote: post #137
electriclizard wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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'.

Re: Psychological Operations

#172

Post by mandmandam »

wolverine876 wrote: post #169
mandmandam wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you make the accusations more extreme and express them with more anger, does that make them more likely to be true?

It seems like you're saying I've made an accusation more extreme... Care to clarify what you mean? Maybe in a non passive aggressive way?

Re: Psychological Operations

#173

Post by faeriechangling »

User23 wrote: post #164
Viliam1234 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pe…

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. Th…

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.

https://youtu.be/g1VNQGsiP8M https://youtu.be/Z9F-cHc5Qog

Regardless of her sincerity, what isn’t obvious at all from these videos is that she’s on Russia Today’s payroll:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/370618-syria-sources-bartlett-rt/am...

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!

Re: Psychological Operations

#174

Post by wolverine876 »

User23 wrote: post #147
HWR_14 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One failure doesn't invalidate years of work and mountains of evidence.

Re: Psychological Operations

#175

Post by wolverine876 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #159
bilbo0s wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone should be sober, dispassionate, and to the extent that it's possible, take off any ideological blinders. It's clearly more likely than not that both are true.

I don't know why people should be dispassionate. Unbiased, sure. Dispassionate, not so much.

Passion seems to work against reason and facts - in fact, it's key to psyop manipulation, afaik.

Re: Psychological Operations

#176

Post by wolverine876 »

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #54
woodruffw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Psychological Operations

#177

Post by wolverine876 »

mistermann wrote: post #148
openknot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Re: Psychological Operations

#178

Post by wolverine876 »

justatdotin wrote: post #114
boston_clone wrote: post #5

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…

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 effec…

Where does the US have rapidly growing "war bases"?

Re: Psychological Operations

#179

Post by wolverine876 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #170
boston_clone wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2022/03/03/congressman-...

(I don't agree with the claim that it failed, but that's not the part of the article I'm insterested in.)

Re: Psychological Operations

#180

Post by raffraffraff »

_ofdw wrote: post #56
boston_clone wrote: post #33

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…

>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.
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