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A comment on Psychological Operations. Parent comment

Re:Psychological Operations by tediousdemise on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @07:10PM (#30535331)
The answers to your leading questions are probably classified at the TS/SCI level.

I think it's safe to assume that there are a non-trivial amount of psyops happening on those platforms, since those sites are among the main sources of information for almost all people. It would be foolish to not target such low hanging fruit to manufacture consent if you are trying to influence populations.

I would go further and add wikipedia and google results to the list. Conflict of interest edits on wikipedia by companies and legislatures are nothing new. Check out CongressEdits[0] and the slew of bots that it inspired, which enabled monitoring of IP address ranges that edit wikipedia.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CongressEdits

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Re:Psychological Operations by boston_clone on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @07:35PM (#30535539)
> It would be foolish to not target such low hanging fruit to manufacture consent if you are trying to influence populations.

While I agree at a conceptual level, I don't believe US Army Psyop to have a hand in any of that. However, the government as a whole is not exempt from that claim - see Operation Mockingbird, for example [0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

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Re:Psychological Operations by acapybara on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @08:14PM (#30535856)
"US Army Psyop" is a subset of a subset of US government agencies.

https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/what-we-do/members-of-the-ic

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Re:Psychological Operations by boston_clone on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @08:23PM (#30535919)
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.
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Re:Psychological Operations by Ajef on Thursday March 03, 2022 @02:28AM (#30538151)
Being a civilian, what does this distinction mean/imply?

[Edit] wording For -> Being.

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Re:Psychological Operations by pyinstallwoes on Thursday March 03, 2022 @10:55AM (#30542591)
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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Re:Psychological Operations by jonnybgood on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @11:26PM (#30537171)
It doesn’t work like that. You have to understand what set of laws an organization falls under. For example, even though NSA and Army is part of the DoD, they fall under different Titles of US Code which defines their authority.
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