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Psychological Operations

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Re: Psychological Operations

#141

Post by verisimi »

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…

How do you live with yourself?

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.

Re: Psychological Operations

#142

Post by verisimi »

boston_clone wrote: post #24
carabiner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not true.

Operation Mockingbird is one example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

Re: Psychological Operations

#143

Post by Lascaille »

whatshisface wrote: post #108
hackernewds wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any supporting links to these claims?

> “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 restr…

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:

Any supporting links to these claims?

Re: Psychological Operations

#144

Post by dqpb »

User23 wrote: post #92
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. Well somebody is running massive psyops on the American public then.

Well, it’s also Fox News’ business model.

Re: Psychological Operations

#145

Post by mule1 »

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…

Will institutions involved in psyops be deploying AI models in the future to create bot nets of psyops?

Re: Psychological Operations

#146

Post by mistermann »

HWR_14 wrote: post #116
User23 wrote: 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.

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.

> It's pretty obvious that Russian troll farms have been running massive psyop

Alternatively, this narrative is a massive psyop.

Re: Psychological Operations

#147

Post by User23 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #116
User23 wrote: 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.

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.

Re: Psychological Operations

#148

Post by mistermann »

openknot wrote: post #81
Sebb767 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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.

Re: Psychological Operations

#149

Post by bilbo0s »

mistermann wrote: post #146
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.

> It's pretty obvious that Russian troll farms have been running massive psyop Alternatively, this narrative is a massive psyop.

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.

Re: Psychological Operations

#150

Post by pyinstallwoes »

Ajef wrote: post #122
boston_clone wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being a civilian, what does this distinction mean/imply? [Edit] wording For -> Being.

I assume the distinction is:

1. Intelligence: building database. Lakes of warehousing metadata and then analysis of it.

2. Psyops: weaponized intelligence. Memetic warfare. Directly affecting the thoughts of clusters to whatever end is strategized.

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