16 ms·

Psychological Operations

168 points by georgecmu 5y ago

erddfre3423 5y ago
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw
submeta 5y ago
I am wondering if this kind of manipulation / intervention also takes place in comment sections of online newspapers.
cryptica 5y ago
Sometimes I feel like governments should pay me to stop posting stuff online because I probably mess up their PsyOps on both sides.
Linearbandit 5y ago
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_rationalist 5y ago
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  > 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.
- throwaway10242 5y ago
  [dead]
hirundo 5y ago
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.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  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
  - hirundo 5y ago
    So roughly as difficult as selling chorizo toothpaste. Capturing hearts and minds is tough all over.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    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.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      megolomania is a good explanation, self-deception without needing PSYOPS !
boston_clone 5y ago
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. [0] - https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-05-301.pdf https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-05-301.pdf
- vasuki 5y ago
  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?
- verisimi 5y ago
  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.
  - boston_clone 5y ago
    > How do you live with yourself? 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 :)
jazzyjackson 5y ago
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!' [0] https://youtu.be/g2tMcMQqSbA https://youtu.be/g2tMcMQqSbA [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
- webmaven 5y ago
  > 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: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
pphysch 5y ago
> 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.
obviouslynotme 5y ago
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.
- hackernewds 5y ago
  Any supporting links to these claims?
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    >“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. - Associated Press https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-7064410002 https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-7064410002
    - Lascaille 5y ago
      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?
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        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.
motohagiography 5y ago
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. An example of this is the news out of the UK that they used "totalitarian tactics" (their own words) during covid to shut down the entire economy and wipe out a lot of small businesses, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit-totalitarian-use-fear-control-behaviour-covid/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit... 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.
godmode2019 5y ago
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. Written text is a broken medium.
archhn 5y ago
A hint hint if there ever was one.
Borrible 5y ago
Coincidentally, the Ides of March are coming soon.
disambiguation 5y ago
I remember when PsyOp used to just be something you'd hear in an Alex Jones rant. Truly strange times.
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
teddyh 5y ago
No discussion of US psyops is complete without a link to Skippy’s list: https://whyumai.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/skippy%E2%80%99s-list-the-213-things-skippy-is-no-longer-allowed-to-do-in-the-u-s-army/ https://whyumai.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/skippy%E2%80%99s-li...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

168 points by georgecmu 5y ago

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw

submeta 5y ago

I am wondering if this kind of manipulation / intervention also takes place in comment sections of online newspapers.

cryptica 5y ago

Sometimes I feel like governments should pay me to stop posting stuff online because I probably mess up their PsyOps on both sides.

Linearbandit 5y ago

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_rationalist 5y ago
TeeMassive 5y ago
> 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.
throwaway10242 5y ago
[dead]

hirundo 5y ago

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.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
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
- hirundo 5y ago
  So roughly as difficult as selling chorizo toothpaste. Capturing hearts and minds is tough all over.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  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.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    megolomania is a good explanation, self-deception without needing PSYOPS !

boston_clone 5y ago

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. [0] - https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-05-301.pdf https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-05-301.pdf

vasuki 5y ago
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?
verisimi 5y ago
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.
- boston_clone 5y ago
  > How do you live with yourself? 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 :)

jazzyjackson 5y ago

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!' [0] https://youtu.be/g2tMcMQqSbA https://youtu.be/g2tMcMQqSbA [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

webmaven 5y ago
> 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: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat

pphysch 5y ago

> 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.

obviouslynotme 5y ago

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.

hackernewds 5y ago
Any supporting links to these claims?
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >“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. - Associated Press https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-7064410002 https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-7064410002
  - Lascaille 5y ago
    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?
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      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.

motohagiography 5y ago

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. An example of this is the news out of the UK that they used "totalitarian tactics" (their own words) during covid to shut down the entire economy and wipe out a lot of small businesses, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit-totalitarian-use-fear-control-behaviour-covid/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit... 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.

godmode2019 5y ago

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. Written text is a broken medium.

archhn 5y ago

A hint hint if there ever was one.

Borrible 5y ago

Coincidentally, the Ides of March are coming soon.

disambiguation 5y ago

I remember when PsyOp used to just be something you'd hear in an Alex Jones rant. Truly strange times.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

teddyh 5y ago

No discussion of US psyops is complete without a link to Skippy’s list: https://whyumai.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/skippy%E2%80%99s-list-the-213-things-skippy-is-no-longer-allowed-to-do-in-the-u-s-army/ https://whyumai.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/skippy%E2%80%99s-li...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]