Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations
When I was a kid in the 1980s, we heard about Soviet government propaganda to its citizens, including via Pravda. We were also taught how great the US is, by contrast, that it doesn't do those things.
Later, I thought I'd learned (maybe misheard?) that US could engage in propaganda or psyops, but that there were strict rules not to do it against US citizens.
That seems like good guidance, and I'd welcome an honest review that checks whether we're living up to standards that have been an inspiring part of our national character in the past, and leads to any corrective action.
Maybe US collective leadership realizes a way here that we can build upon our ancestors' great ideals, and follow through further, not drop the ball.
The actual report that triggered this investigation is interesting:
https://public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphika_stanford...
The first thing to note is that it's relatively benign in terms of propaganda.
> Assets in the group heavily promoted narratives supportive of the U.S. on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram. These posts primarily focused on U.S. support for Central Asian countries and their people, presenting Washington as a reliable economic partner that would curb the regionâs dependence on Russia. Other posts argued that the U.S. was the main guarantor of Central Asiaâs sovereignty against Russia, frequently citing the war in Ukraine as evidence of the Kremlinâs âimperialâ ambitions. Interestingly, the assets also promoted U.S. humanitarian efforts, mentioning the United States Agency for International Development 94 times on Twitter and 384 times on Facebook in the respective datasets.
It's funny that they felt the need to do this in a "clandestine" way at all since almost certainly these are messages the US would happily say outloud as official statements.
The second thing to note is how ham-handedly they did this:
> The sham media outlet Intergazeta repeatedly copied news material with and without credit from reputable Western and pro-Western sources in Russian, such as Meduza.io and the BBC Russian Service. ... Typically, these sections were literal âword-to-wordâ translations into Russian, as opposed to more-advanced semantic translations, resulting in non-native sounding language.
It looks like it's limited to the very recent past. Apparently the creation of highly coordinated propaganda efforts by the US government dates back to World War I, and there were similar British and German programs of the same era:
> "Once the United States had entered the war, the U.S. government saw a need formally to enter the propaganda arena. The U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI) was created to both centralize wartime communication and avoid restrictive European-style censorship... the CPI labored to create a homogeneous public opinion that accepted the war as a struggle of good versus evil waged to promote democracy around the world. The list of promotional activities undertaken by the Committee is impressive: a vast system of news handouts for journalists, tens of millions of copies of its pamphlets, wide circulation of war posters, several films, millions of advertisements donated by business organizations, war expositions in several states, "Americanization" Committees for each ethnic minority group, and 75,000 Four Minute Men speakers, who presented short appeals between features at the nation's movie houses. Through the work of the CPI, the official view of a just and idealistic war became ever present."
Source: Propaganda studies in American social science: The rise and fall of the critical paradigm, Sproule (1987)
https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/00335638709383794
History's judgement of WWI is varied, but many think it was entirely avoidable, and that the imperial desire by the 'Great Powers' (Britain, France, Germany, Russia) to control as many shipping and rail routes as possible, as well as oil fields and other overseas resources, was the main driving force behind the conflict, and diplomatic talks could have avoided the war.
Trying to sell WWI as a war to prop up the British and French imperial projects, as well as to help keep the Russian czar in power, would not have been so easy.
Off-topic: The featured photograph for the article I believe uses a technique called "tilt and shift effect". It makes the buildings and cars look like miniature toys.
The U.S. has been doing this with VOA for almost a century. This is basically the same tactics, but in a new information space. The main point is marketing and propagation of ideology to render it competitive. The vehicles and the methods are incidental, and depend on info consumption preferences, really.
Would it be productive to talk about how much this shows up on HN? There have always been topics that seem to attract sponsored influencers. In the recent past, China seemed to be the biggest one, though Ukraine is now a major competing topic. I've wondered about the best way to respond to such.
>âThere are some who think we shouldnât do anything clandestine in that space. Ceding an entire domain to an adversary would be unwise. But we need stronger policy guardrails.â
I don't think this point is entirely without merit. We shouldn't opt to lose this battle on ideological grounds. Blaming the US govt for conducting psyops is somewhat analogous to blaming Robert Oppenheimer for the strong nuclear force, with the caveat that the laws of physics in this situation are somewhat actively controlled by the companies that host these "social media platforms".
Effective propaganda is one of the US's strongest competitive advantages - extensive and well funded national security apparatus, think tanks with global reach, compliant media publishers with global reach and big tech platforms used throughout the world, which can amplify and dampen messages, based on whether they suit US foreign policy objectives. We should celebrate this full spectrum narrative control, not 'investigate' it.
This is a bit too late. PSYOP campaigns have plagued Twitter & Facebook from the beginning. Twitter cracked down multiple times on fake accounts, but the operators change their modus operandi each time. It's basically whack-a-mole against the troll farm operators. Requiring phone numbers might slow them down, but then they just acquire a bunch of SIMs and continue registering. The only way to stop this is verifying people's passports and their account has to be held in their legal name. Just like a bank. It might be over the top, but it's the only way to drastically reduce the amount of propaganda, spam, astroturfing, disinfo, and artificially inflated metrics of Twitter & Facebook.
Maybe "only talking about the title" is an anti-pattern in social media; and maybe HN even explicitly warns about complaining about titles; but, this wording difference is astounding enough to be interesting in its own right:
Washington Post: "Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations"
New York Times: "Pentagon Orders Review of Its Overseas Social Media Campaigns"
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/us/politics/pentagon-soci...
Just how flexible are we with language, exactly, that these two headlines can coexist?
It's not even as if these two papers' editors have particularly different ideologies or mindsets. They just looked at the same story, separately; selected a framing; turned the language intensity up to 11; and this is the absurd result.
A sweeping review?!?! Americans have been targeted and impacted by government-funded propaganda. They have been caught up in the fake drama and emotionally manipulated in ways that may impact them for the rest of their lives. It is time that they do a truth and reconciliation and start talking about money available to victims.
Psyop became a science just before & during WWII. The techniques and technologies were imported to the west. They have been studied and improved, and put to use for and against the civilian population ever since, ranging from the good (nod at Sesame Street) to evil (a motion indicating âmost everything elseâ).
Why would we put much credibility into an organization investigating itself? This review is itself probably centralized narrative control. It goes something like this: Through social media monitoring, the Pentagon sees an uptick in people questioning the narrative and seeing the Pentagon behind pysops campaigns. So they commission a study and review that finds a couple supposedly rogue persons in their ranks which they scapegoat and nominally punish. The main apparatus is preserved in the shadows and more resilient after they have probed and fortified all its weaknesses.
This raises my hope that platforms can successfully catch other nation states trying to do this to my country.
Isnât all lobbying and advertising psy-ops?
Here is a good quote from a State Dept. diplomat:
>One diplomat put it this way: âGenerally speaking, we shouldnât be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.â
This is my position as well. Going forward in a world where more and more of what we hear and even see can be fake, trust will become more important. Trust is hard to build and easy to break.
I understand the need to reach out to hesitant populations, and the desire to advance our national interests through persuasion and propaganda. However, actual lying, fake accounts, and disinformation that is deployed in a blanket fashion will be a long-term detriment to our government's credibility.
In shorter form: Bias and "targeted messaging" is one thing. Literally fake people and lies are another.
We should act better than our adversaries, because we are better.
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Need to arrange without blame
They're investigating themselves?
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>Significantly, they found that the pretend personas â employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China â did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.
Because America is fundamentally not peddling the same kind of narrative that Russia or China does.
What America wants is freedom[0]. Russia is run by ethnofascists and China is run by near-textbook tankies. These ideologies are pariahs, and honest propaganda of this bent cannot survive contact with the background radiation of politics. In other words, when America is overt, people complain that we aren't living up to our own standards. When Russia or China is overt, people laugh at them and ignore them.
So, instead, they have to co-opt other concerns and lie about what their ideological opponents are doing. Hence shit like "the CDC created COVID" or "NATO is creating supersoldiers in Ukranian labs[1]". The job is not to prove that China or Russia is right, but to distract from what they are doing. The more they can piss off Americans against their own government, the better.
Americans do not need to do this, because... who is their target audience, here? Hardline Iranian theocrats or the Taliban aren't going to be distracted by covert propaganda. Neither will Russians who think Ukraine is run by the corpse of Adolf Hitler or Chinese who think America created COVID in a lab. People who aren't shitheaded will either respond well to American overt propaganda, or at least point out how America falls short of their own ideals. You don't need to lie to them.
Since America's interests are not furthered by covert propaganda, we should abandon it, since the only interest such propaganda could serve would be fifth-columning the country.
[0] As defined through a liberal lens; i.e. we accept and embrace private capital accumulation and business ownership. Other non-shitheaded definitions of freedom are free to reject this.
[1] Which is literally just the premise of Captain America with extra steps. Every time someone claims this we should reply, "Is this the new MCU movie"?