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Wrong things, often ridiculously wrong things get written all the time. It doesn’t mean it’s the result of a “psyop”. Here’s a roughly accurate flowchart for de
by bandyaboot 3y ago
Wrong things, often ridiculously wrong things get written all the time. It doesn’t mean it’s the result of a “psyop”. Here’s a roughly accurate flowchart for determining if you’re currently being subject to something that could non-ironically be termed a psyop: “is this a psyop?”—>”no”.
- tasogare 3y ago[dead]
- Terr_ 3y agoIt sounds like you're saying there's No True (Scotsman's) Psyop. Where are you drawing the line separating it from aggressive targeting marketing and PR? http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- bandyaboot 3y agoIf the actions are well precedented and widely known such that normal people would not find them shocking, I suppose. So things which we’ve made it since the beginning of the English language without finding the need to call them “psyops” and thereby assigning them fake intrigue. An article saying wrong things about the job market: no. Cambridge Analytica: sure.
- xupybd 3y agoI think you could replace "psyop" with "marketing campaign" for most of the times the expression is used today.
- cm2012 3y agoCambridge Analytica is also entirely fake, in the sense that it's highly unlikely any votes were affected by it.
- bandyaboot 3y agoI doubt I would ever utter the word seriously to describe something, but operations can fail, no? If it indeed didn’t have any effect, the operation was still pretty shocking and intriguing.
- cm2012 3y agoNot really. It was more a marketing gimmick for the company. The kind of advertising targeting Cambridge did (based on cheap 2010s Era fb personality quiz responders) had absolutely no targeting value. It just sounded like techno magic to journalists. Like imagine a developer consultancy said they used latex to fizzbuzz people's computers to get them to vote for Trump. If you understand advertising targeting, CA makes just as much sense as that.
- AmericanChopper 3y agoCalling something a psyop is just a meme. But it is true that everybody has a perspective they want to promote. People have the ability to think and speak more or less objectively to differing levels, but people don’t tend to say things unless the want other people to think those things are true. If somebody makes a claim that is substantially different from your own experience of reality, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask yourself why does that person want me or others to think that that is true? I can also create a roughly accurate flow chart to demonstrate this: “does this person want me to believe something that aligns with their own agenda/perspective/goals?” -> “yes”.
- switchbak 3y agoThere’s a branch of the Canadian military that admitted that they were running an information warfare campaign against actual Canadians during COVID. Small and insignificant as it may have been, there are real psyop’s out there, and dismissing them all as a meme is lazy thinking.
- AmericanChopper 3y agoUse of the word is a meme. But any use of information to try and influence what other people think is basically what a psyop is, and everybody does that all the time. People only tend to call things a psyop if they think the motives are especially sinister, but that's just a pointless distraction imo, as you can never know what somebody's motives truly are. Every statement the government makes is a psyop, or an act of information warfare. Same for journalists, or social commentators, or HN commentators, or anybody else...