Pentagon Opens Sweeping Review of Clandestine Psychological Operations (washingtonpost.com) 29
The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms' rules. From a report: Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and some federal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department's attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.
The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations. The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the past two or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin's "imperialist" war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict's direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas -- employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China -- did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.
The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations. The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the past two or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin's "imperialist" war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict's direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas -- employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China -- did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.
Definition of "Central Command" doesn't fit (Score:2)
The definition of "Central Command" doesn't seem to fit what is described in this article.
CENTCOM's area of responsibility is "Middle East, including Egypt in Africa, and Central Asia and parts of South Asia." [wikipedia.org]
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Otherwise government becomes irrelevant as a beneficial tool.
Yup. That happened long ago when that "Representative" literally stopped giving a shit about everything the average citizen wants or needs by showing their true loyalty to the lobbying army of the Donor Class.
The only time a Representative pays attention to you, is when you're casting a vote for them to remain in power. And that should have said everything to voters many elections ago.
We don't have intelligent voters anymore. We have brain dead cheerleaders.
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Well the vote hardly means anything when direct votes initiatives the receive majority votes, are casually overridden by by the ulterior motives of "Representatives"
We The People still cast actual votes to elect those "Representatives". Flows up from local and state elections too. If we don't like it, then we should collectively Learn to Vote Better.
Goes for all political parties, since The Swamp doesn't give a shit which brain-dead puppet is "running" the country. The Presidency has been reduced to half-baked speeches/political attacks and pointing at someone to launch the nukes before we kiss our asses goodbye. The Vice Presidency, is obviously even more pointle
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Why do you recommend an approach you know will fail to make any change?
Were I to offer a suggestion the best I could do would be Instant Runoff Voting. That *ought* to improve things, as you could vote for your favorite candidate without consideration of whether said candidate had a chance of winning. Unfortunately, the limited amount of data I have suggests that it doesn't really improve things.
I have an alternative that I think might be a lot better, where people sign to support a candidate, the represe
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Whose psyops are we really talking about here? (Score:5, Insightful)
It feels like you're picking a nit. Can you clarify why you think that nit matters?
My reaction to the story was to wonder if they are really talking (indirectly) about improving Ukrainian psyops against the Russians. Putin's latest war may well be won or lost based on how many Russian conscripts feel like deserting or surrendering rather than killing more Ukrainians. There are many dimensions of psychology here, and they all offer opportunities to reduce the bloodshed.
The latest strange idea to come to my mind was "One day in the life of {Russian soldier's name}". Essentially a series of videos, where each video features lots of personal information about one Russian soldier's life invading Ukraine. I'm pretty sure the Ukrainian intelligence services have the capabilities to make such videos, especially if they recruit some prisoners to help with staged reenactments that make the Ukrainian intelligence capabilities look even better than they are. In other words, one objective will be to create fear among the other soldiers that remember when they were fighting alongside the prisoner. Make them think they were being captured by hidden cameras the entire time. They should be sweating every time they use an indoor toilet?
(And yes, I am thinking about One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Not one of Putler's heroes.)
By the way, I think the single best surrender inducement might be a guarantee of safety until after Putin has gone away. That asylum program could even be disguised as lengthy investigations of war crimes. Too bad for Putin that he has no way of telling which of his soldiers actually deserve to be investigated. Too many crimes. (Also no way for Putin to tell how they were captured or if they surrendered eagerly.)
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Well, I amused a moderator, but no one has better ideas to add?
I forgot one: Feces analysis results reported within the videos as part of the embarrassing evidence. What are is Ivan eating? Is he still getting military "food" from Russia? Or does their very shite prove they are stealing food in Ukraine? Maybe even detect that they aren't getting regular food at all?
And it can now be revealed (Score:4, Funny)
In fact Slashdot is entirely a PsyOps operation, with every story summary and every comment generated within the darkest recesses of secure DoD facilities.
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That's because the government algorithms in the scripts posing as anonymous posters worked too well, they gained rudimentary Ai (upper case A and lower case i) and were no longer controllable. It all went downhill when CmdrTaco was promoted to Captain.
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I dunno, sounds plausible to me. 15 years ago you could take down almost any online presence simply by including them in a /. article with perfect deniability. Sorry, we didn't mean to DDOS you, we simply wanted people to be aware of your amazing website.
Couple that with the unwillingness to update the look to something more modern or support common industry standards and the fact that despite /. having fallen into the deepest depths of irrelevance over the last decade, someone continues to pay to keep th
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15 years ago you could take down almost any online presence simply by including them in a /. article with perfect deniability.
Today, only the lowliest (or most poorly coded) sites can be brought down by a Slashdotting.
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That's the best joke today's Slashdot has to offer?
I sure thought it was a target-rich story for funny.
Tiktok is a Chinese psyop (Score:5, Insightful)
getting kids outside China to vandalize schools, drink poison, etc, but not in China though. In China, Tiktok is about kids' achievements.
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And China's manufacturing of fentanyl which they sell to drug smugglers in Central and South America to export north causing more overdose deaths than US soldiers killed in Korea and Vietnam combined is an overt asymmetrical operation to kill Americans.
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To be fair, many adults feel the same way. And act it out when they feel unobserved.
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Pull the other one... (Score:2)
Love it when a corrupt organization announces that it will investigate itself. Like when the police determine, after an internal investigation, that no wrong doing had occurred in the conduct of its officers, after something horrific has occurred.
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To be fair, the investigation doesn't always fail. It depends on the degree to which the organization has been captured by the corruption. And the police are one extreme example. Some of the intelligence community are another. But the military in general may not be.
How dare you get caught.. (Score:2)
after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms' rules..
"Outrageous. We must have a full accounting to find out what went wrong causing the social media companies to be able to discover our operation"
Seems reasonable to me. (Score:2)
Why should our government get upset when it learns that its military forces are developing a capability to manipulate opinion in foreign countries? This seems to me to be a perfectly normal and expected activity for them. And, our enemies are doing it every day to us.
Russian hating CIA bots? (Score:1)