I just finished reading the book Stories are Weapons by AnnaLee Newitz. It's about psyops and how they are used in politics today. She is very much a lefty.

She starts her book like this:

It's hard to write about a war while it's raging. Especially when there are no craters in the ground, no missiles streaking overhead- just words and images that are inflicting a form of psychological damage that is impossible to measure, impossible to prove. When I started researching this book in mid-2020, the world was locked down in a pandemic that was unleashing a torrent of propaganda the likes of which I had never seen. As a friend of mine lay dying of COVID on a ventilator, President Donald Trump promised that we could cure the disease with light and deworming medication for horses. After police killed George Floyd. I watched as disinformation about the Black Lives Matter movement piled up on social media, where anonymous accounts falsely blamed protesters for violence. A conspiracy theory from 2016 about pizza-eating pedo- philes radicalized a huge number of right-wing extremists, who later joined crowds storming the Capitol, trying to murder the vice president and overturn the 2020 presidential election.

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So you can figure out her exact opinions without even trying. However, she does do some research and it helps in figuring out how psyops work. To create a psyop, you need to rebuild a world, and sci Fi and fantasy can be used that way.

Freud, again, provided an inspiration for Bernays's foray into international politics. In 1921, the psychoanalyst published a mono-graph called Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which he suggested that humans had a "herd instinct" and could easily be led into irrational behavior by influencers. Though Freud imagined those influencers to be patriarchs-fathers, heads of state, religious leaders-Bernays realized that they could be anyone, from a debutante to a grubby newspaperman. Freud thought that the herd mentality was dangerous and could lead to political catastrophe. Lippmann, who feared its power over the free press, agreed. But Bernays embraced it.

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This is how Linebarger introduced science fiction into psyop. Immersed in the science fiction community, he was familiar with the idea of worldbuilding, a term popular among writers trying to create realistic fictional universes that are detailed and emotionally resonant enough to suspend an audience's disbelief. Good worldbuilding chips away at the audience's skepticism by providing plausible, consistent details. … Notice that none of these worldbuilding details hinge on plot or character-they are consistent, believable sets and props that suggest many kinds of stories and myths, without being stories on their own. They are, in essence, a version of those black propaganda drops that Linebarger imagined would lead to mythmaking.

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She also gave good advice on how to study psyops.

To grasp a nation's propaganda strategies. Linebarger argued student of psywar should choose one or two forms of media and monitor them for a lengthy period.

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I chose videogames because I happen to like them, but Lineberger chose Radio, and Newitz used social media. Either way, watching how companies and governments control ideas leads to knowledge of how others will be used.

One of these observations is that it needs truth to work.

The success of figures like Lord Haw-Haw led to another of Linebarger's important observations about propaganda: it is nearly always built on truth. Lord Haw-Haw was popular in England partly because he reported on the war at a time when most news was being censored by the British government. … “Opinion analysis pertains to what people think: propaganda analysis deals with what somebody is trying to make them think.”

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She says that Steve Bannon had access to millions because a handful took a small test. They used an exploit in academic learning to have access to this information.

Though only about 270,000 people took the app test. Cambridge Analytica was able to grab personal information from 87 million accounts. Wylie and Kogan believed this profile data could reveal Americans' secret desires and latent tendencies-especially the little thumbs-up icons that signaled engagement with topics from immi- gration and guns to LGBT rights and Black Lives Matter.

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Then it gets into conspiracy and evil!

Bannon was interested in reaching people who exhibited what psychologists call the "dark triad" of antisocial personality traits: narcissism. Machiavellianism (manipulativeness), and psychopa thy (lack of care for others). People who score high on dark triad tests tend to be authoritarians who are willing to break the law to get what they want.

…

They targeted those people with ads, luring them to Facebook pages that the firm had set up to test out which messages worked best on these easily acti vated people. In his book, Wylie claimed that some of those mes sages included "drain the swamp" and "make America great again," which later became slogans of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Once a group of people with dark triad personalities had converged on a message, Cambridge Analytica operatives would encourage them to gather in a local bar or coffee shop, where they could swap conspiracy theories and strengthen their ties.

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The firm's strategy seemed to be working. After Wylie left the organization, Bannon put Cambridge Analytica to work on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Now it was time to deploy all the tools and messages they'd developed by manipulating people on Facebook who never knew they had shared their feelings with a group of political operatives.

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She also shows a memo released by Facebook on countries trying to to influence the 2016 election.

Private and/or proprietary information was accessed and stolen from systems and services [they're referring to the stolen DNC emails here):

■ Dedicated sites hosting this data were registered:

■Fake personas were created on Facebook and elsewhere to point to and amplify awareness of this data; • Social media accounts and pages were created to amplify news accounts of and direct people to the stolen data. From there, organic proliferation of the messaging and data through authentic peer groups and networks was inevitable.

Concurrently, a separate set of malicious actors engaged in false amplification using inauthentic Facebook accounts to push narratives and themes that reinforced or expanded on some of the topics exposed from stolen data.

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She even describes the people doing it.

Al-Rawi said that he's started describing groups like the IRA operatives as "disguised elites." That's because their modus ope randi is to disguise themselves as concerned citizens trying to organize in their local communities, but in fact, they are actually elite operatives with a significant advertising budget, state approval, and hundreds of dedicated agents who spend their days posting propaganda and garbage memes. To win, all a group like the IRA has to do is create a wrathful mix of brain fog online-and, they hope, offline too.

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She then goes on a multi page rant about how this led to the January 6th riots where people were threatened. I'm also jumping past the Indian wars chapters. There is no mention of GamerGate.

Then she gives threats of X

That said, the clickability of right-wing populism on social media is not isolated to Facebook. Twitter (now known as X) has become a radical-right stronghold in the wake of Elon Musk's purchase of it in 2023. … A 2023 lawsuit in Missouri about political jawboning aimed to stop the Biden administration from asking social media companies to block material that was false or misleading. The case was just one part of a larger right-wing movement to prevent governments and civic organizations from working with social media to stop misinformation about elections, public health, and more. Cumulatively, this movement has had a chilling effect. … Meta, Facebook's parent company, is no longer blocking COVID misinformation, and in 2023 the company laid off members of a global team that countered election disinformation and harassment.

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There's a little bit about how companies are fighting off right wing extremism.

Anti-woke campaigns take aim at corporations too. Amazon took the unprecedented step of turning off user ratings for its 2022 series The Rings of Power, a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Tens of thousands of people were "review bombing." giving the show one- star ratings, in an attempt to sink the series.

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There's a lot of writing with little substance for this entire section labeled Culture Wars. Once again, no mention of GamerGate I could find.

The next section is labeled deprogramming. She demands the internet slow down and be controlled.

Psychological disarmament requires a very different strategy when you're doomscrolling social media all day, eye- balls melting under the barrage of half-truths, memes, news, entertainment, and state propaganda. The 2016 election demonstrated that it's hard to track an online psyop unfolding in real time because there may be several random connections between the operatives and their audience. Because online psyops campaigns move so quickly, we have to be ready for them in advance. It's a bit like disaster preparation. We need skilled first responders at tech platforms, moderators and safety managers who can spot pro- paganda outbreaks and put them out before they explode. But we also need to create firebreaks, technical features that can slow the spread of weaponized information.

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She also noted that there is a fake counter psyop to make the first sound real.

It was a psyop designed to look like a psyop. People on Twitter quickly noticed the duplicate tweets coming from a wide variety of accounts, and called them out as fake. But why would a group of psyops agents want their targets to figure out that they were being fooled? The answer is that they didn't. By making the "debunking" tweets from #DCSafe so obviously inauthentic, the operatives also cast doubt on the real tweets from journalists at NPR and else- where. The #DCSafe operation made it seem like some shady group

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She demands the government control the internet, and it be entirely left leaning people. Also, it can only work if it's slowed down.

Another possibility would be to slow down the circulation of content on the platforms. "Maybe it will be more like newspapers or snail mail," she mused. "You submit something (to You Tube) and it doesn't show up the next minute. Maybe we'll upload things and come back in a week to see if it's there." She acknowledged that this would be a significant, qualitative change and would require "completely different business model. But she pointed out that "there are other kinds of slow business models in entertainment. It takes a long time to make films and shows even journalism. There is some value in slow.”

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In fact, she says the internet as it is gives her no future.

"I could not think of a way to have a good future with the internet as it exists today," Ruth Emrys Gordon told me from her home office near Washington, DC.

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What she wants from all this is to disarm or deprogram people caught in psyops. At no point does she look inward and ask if she was programmed, if her own mind had been washed. It has to be someone else, and that person was the enemy. So her book talks about psyops, but shows how difficult deprogramming actually is, and not in the way she thinks.