Right now we’re reeling in the aftermath of two US psyops that reporters revealed to the public last week. One was what you might call a “classic” psyop, aimed at a foreign adversary; the other was a culture war attack, or cultop, aimed at the American people. Both were devastating – harmful to human life and liberty. Here’s how they went down.
ChinaAngVirus
An investigative report from Reuters revealed that the Pentagon aimed a psyops campaign at the Philippines in 2020, urging Filipinos not to use the Sinovac covid vaccine from China, and to avoid masks from Chinese manufacturers. This was particularly devastating for a country where the death toll from covid was tremendous, largely due to vaccine hesitancy. The Pentagon’s campaign included creating fake Filipino identities, opening hundreds of Twitter (now X) accounts under their names, and spreading memes that claimed covid was a “Chinese virus.” Many used the Tagalog slogan “Chinaangvirus” or “China is the virus.”
The anti-vax campaign was part of a larger psyops effort, initiated under Trump in 2019, to undermine China’s leadership. According to Reuters’ report, it started with social media posts aimed at the Chinese public, which smeared Xi Jinping’s leadership. Then, in 2020, Trump proclaimed on Twitter that covid was the “Chinese virus;” meanwhile, the Chinese government was calling it the American virus. Psywarriors in the military decided to clap back by escalating the anti-China rhetoric in the Philippines, where China had made its vaccine available cheaply. The U.S., meanwhile, didn’t make its vaccines available in the Philippines until 2022 – and the price was too high for most Filipinos.
People have been shocked at how dirty this psyop campaign was, but the fact is that all psyop campaigns are dirty. As I explain in my book Stories Are Weapons: Psychological War and the American Mind, the military authorizes the use of deception and threats to manipulate foreign adversaries; in this case, the US wanted to undermine China by trashing its reputation in Southeast Asia. Filipinos were casualties in the psychological war between US and China.
Psychological war causes collateral damage that is far more unpredictable than nuclear fallout or stray bullets. Obviously the Pentagon’s anti-China psyop wound up victimizing Filipinos – citizens of a US ally – rather than undermining the Chinese government. That was by design in this case, but it isn’t always.
It’s hard to keep a story contained. Psyops often jump back over the border and create blowback in America. That’s how psychological war becomes culture war. It’s not surprising that anti-China propaganda very similar to the Pentagon campaign in the Philippines found its way into US social media in 2021, helped along by anti-vax influencers like Alex Jones. Not only did this affect public health outcomes, but it also set off a wave of violent anti-Asian hate crimes. Now this culture war psyop from the pandemic has finally found its way into the 2024 presidential election: Robert F. Kennedy is running for president on an anti-vax platform, and has spoken publicly about his wild conspiracy theory that covid is a Chinese bioweapon.
The psyops are coming from inside the House
Of course, we would never know about how psyops became cultops if we didn’t have investigative journalists and researchers tracking them. That’s why culture warriors often take aim at the people who expose their efforts to manipulate the American public using weaponized stories or propaganda.
That’s why it’s dangerous that Stanford University decided to shut down the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), a research group that tracked propaganda and influence operations online. I got the news right before it broke; I was on the Moderated Content podcast talking with two of SIO’s founding researchers, Renée DiResta and Alex Stamos, and afterwards they told me Renée’s contract with Stanford had not been renewed and that the SIO was being shuttered. I was shocked. The SIO has raised millions of dollars to support its budget, and has done brilliant work studying the spread of dangerous content online, from covid misinformation to child sexual abuse material.
Notably, SIO participated in the Election Integrity Partnership, which tracked misinformation during the 2020 election and produced a crucial report about what they found. I wrote about their work in Stories Are Weapons. The research group uncovered clear patterns in what they call “coordinated inauthentic behavior” online. Knowing these patterns could allow organizations to prevent toxic, misleading content from seeping into our eyeballs – much the way spam filters prevent you from having to click through hundreds of bogus messages.
But the SIO aroused the ire of right-wing politicians and operatives who claim that the group is promoting censorship simply because they are tracking the spread of dangerous and provably mendacious content. Alex and Renée have received death threats and harassment, and now Renée has lost her job. Despite being one of the nation’s richest and most prestigious universities, Stanford apparently couldn’t withstand the legal and political attacks on the SIO coming from MAGA allies including Representative Jim Jordan and former Trump adviser Steve Miller.
Like a psyop, a cultop works because it contains credible threats. If we think of the shutdown of the SIO as a cultop instigated by US political leaders, then it sends a clear message. If you call out lies and media manipulation, you might lose your job. You might even lose your life, if a zealous follower of Jordan and his cohort decide to go Pizzagate on you. The point is, we no longer have public squares where people can exchange ideas and skeptically critique information. We have a culture war, where you either follow leaders blindly or face dire consequences.
Shutting down the SIO is part of a larger culture war on libraries and schools, places where people are encouraged to question the media and listen to many points of view before deciding what they believe. Crushing dissent and threatening teachers is not free speech. It is an attack. That is why we must call for a ceasefire in the culture wars, which is what I suggest in Stories Are Weapons, as well as my recent TED talk about changing the world with escapist stories.
Where I am around the internet and the world …
You can read some good reviews of the book in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Or you can listen to me talk about it on Science Friday, On the Media, and KQED’s Forum.
Tonight I’ll be in Berkeley at the Hillside Club, talking to Ed Yong about my book.
And on Saturday, I’ll be in Vancouver, BC, at Massy Arts, talking to Charlie Jane Anders.
If you’d like a signed copy of Stories Are Weapons or any of my other books, you can get one from Green Apple Books — they will ship it to you!