Show notes, references & transcript: https://psychgrind.com/jammers/
The Jammers · episode 004 psych grind - Would you tolerate a heckler in regular conversation? How about in government making laws we live by? We’re talking about the ways in which we are censored through known tactics we should recognize.
This podcast discussion is about the information landscape with a focus on influencers and the content creator gig economy, and the effects on society with your hosts CHLOE HUMBERT and MATT STRACKBEIN. Music and interludes by MICHAEL STRACKBEIN without use of A.I. Chloe Humbert has a weekly newsletter and podcast on substack called Don’t Wait For Everybody. Matt Strackbein, aka The Letterhack, makes comics and livestreams at YouTube.com/TheLetterhack.
References:
The Cognitive Crucible #25 Kelly on the Mapping and Decoding of Influence, Propaganda and Putin
Senate Intel Committee Releases Bipartisan Report on Russia’s Use of Social Media - Print - 116th Congress | Press Release Archive Date: October 8, 2019 The Committee found the IRA targeted African-Americans more than any other group or demographic. Through individual posts, location targeting, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, and Twitter trends, the IRA focused much of its efforts on stoking divisions around hot-button issues with racial undertones. The IRA engaged with unwitting Americans to further its reach beyond the digital realm and into real-world activities. For example, IRA operatives targeting African-Americans convinced individuals to sign petitions, share personal information, and teach self-defense courses. Posing as U.S. political activists, operatives sought help from the Trump Campaign to procure campaign materials and to organize and promote rallies. The Committee found IRA activity increased, rather than decreased, after Election Day 2016. Analysis of IRA-associated accounts shows a significant spike in activity after the election, increasing across Instagram (238 percent), Facebook (59 percent), Twitter (52 percent), and YouTube (84 percent). Researchers continue to uncover IRA-associated accounts that spread malicious content.
CANADA - Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions - Day 35 - October 16 (french transcript: “Oui. On a vu des messages antivax pendant le convoi et pendant la pandémie qui ont été amplifiés par la propagande russe, particulièrement dans les médias de droite, a continué par des messages dans les mêmes... sous les mêmes gens qui partageaient des messages antivax. Maintenant, pas pour dire qu’il n’y avait pas des gens légitimement et authentiquement antivax au Canada, mais ça a été amplifié énormément par la propagande russe. Et une fois que l’Ukraine a été envahie, on a vu beaucoup de ces canaux se transformer en propagande pro Putin. On voit, et comme je viens de mentionner, on vient de voir récemment que RT est en train de financer des blogueurs et personnalités YouTube de droite Amerique du Nord et compris avec des noms très très connu comme comme Jordan Peterson ou, ou Tucker Carlson, pour amplifier des messages qui déstabilisent les démocraties.”)
Toronto Star - Jordan Peterson snaps back over Russia claims made by Justin Trudeau Trudeau told the foreign-meddling inquiry that Peterson was among those taking money from the Kremlin. Updated Oct. 23, 2024 at 5:10 p.m. Oct. 18, 2024 Peterson is neither mentioned nor implicated in the indictment, nor was he mentioned by the security committee. “If there is evidence of clandestine funding, I am unaware,” Stephanie Carvin, a former national security analyst, said of Peterson in an email. She notes that while he has been to Russia and generally takes a favourable view of Putin, that is not “foreign interference in and of itself.”
Right-wing US influencers say they were victims of alleged Russian plot 5 September 2024 Phil McCausland BBC News, Washington Ms Afanasyeva is said to have shared a video to be posted made by a well-known political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia. Media outlets have identified this alleged commentator as Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News star, who visited Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin. He uses Russia’s store prices to opine on US inflation and cost-of-living issues. There is no suggestion he was aware of the alleged plot.
The Cognitive Crucible podcast – #154 Todd Leventhal on Countering Disinformation – Jun 27 2023 “You can have conspiracy theories that circulate on their own, or in certain subgroups of the population. And quite often what the Russians will do is they’ll watch, they’ll watch what people are saying in our country, and they’ll pick up anything that might be useful for them, and they’ll circulate it.”
The FRONTLINE Interviews Steve Bannon Former Trump Adviser 2019
News 5 Cleveland - Every time officials hide information within a news dump we will link to this article By: Joe Donatelli Aug 09, 2019 This is the most common news dump. Good news is never released late on a Friday afternoon. That’s because public relations officials want good news disseminated as widely as possible. Good news is released on a Tuesday at 10 a.m., while the sun is out, birds are singing and the Dow Jones is soaring. Bad news arrives in our inboxes on Friday evening at quitting time. Public relations officials time it this way because they know that newsrooms go from being fully staffed during the week to having a skeleton crew on weekends. Additionally, when we try to call and ask questions late in the day on Friday, hey, it’s conveniently the start of the weekend, and our calls go unreturned.
Music torture: How heavy metal broke Manuel Noriega Published 30 May 2017
The New Yorker Magazine: The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks. By Adrian Chen, July 27, 2016 The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.
Wondermark by David Malki #1062; The Terrible Sea Lion — September 19th, 2014
Sealioning From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Rhetorically, sealioning fuses persistent questioning—often about basic information, information easily found elsewhere, or unrelated or tangential points—with a loudly-insisted-upon commitment to reasonable debate. It disguises itself as a sincere attempt to learn and communicate. Sealioning thus works both to exhaust a target’s patience, attention, and communicative effort, and to portray the target as unreasonable. While the questions of the “sea lion” may seem innocent, they’re intended maliciously and have harmful consequences. — Amy Johnson, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (May 2019)
Merriam-Webster Slang & Trending - ratio A social media post—as on X, Facebook, or other platforms—is said to have been ratioed when it has received more comments and reposts than likes, implying that it was tremendously unpopular. In other words, to ratio a post is to (collectively) give it more comments or reposts than likes or favorites. Ratio can also mean “to receive more downvotes than upvotes” on websites where such on-screen icons are an option.
Crypto connected real estate man revolving-doored in & out of the Shapiro admin and into data center consultancy. Dodgy looking conflict of interest crypto & AI stuff in Pennsylvania. Chloe Humbert Oct 02, 2025 In the Asset Entities Inc. 10-k form for 2022 and the 10-k form for 2023, the narrative on business background actually cited the Gamestop meme stock debacle cult as the example for their business plans, referring to it as a phenomenon. Patrick Boyle has a video summarizing the late 2021 SEC report on meme stocks (Gamestop), (“Staff Report on Equity and Options Market Structure Conditions in Early 2021”), and how the SEC proposes that their analysis on how Gamestop stocks got so far afield from reality raises questions about market efficiency of short-selling, and Patrick Boyle also explains why what happened wasn’t exactly as people thought at the time. Dan Olson, a Canadian documentarian when talking to Robert Evans on It Could Happen Here podcast about the gamestop debacle said in October 2023 that it was like “if 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”, and there’s a 2024 documentary about the cult-like experiences of some people who were pulled into this financial whirlwind that, from the descriptions, sounded like a cross between some sort of bizarre gambling version of an MLM and a deranged level gaming forum flame war. And this is what the Strive Inc. 10-K form said the company had looked to seemingly as an enticing business model. The report says the business went about making what they called “education and entertainment” Discord server “communities” called, for example, “STOCKS” and “CRYPTO” and “NFTS” and “REALTY” and the narrative brags about having big reach with influencers in these “communities” across platforms like Tiktok and “other social media” platforms… because of these Discord “communities”. In the 10-K form, the narrative goes on to describe “Current Business” as “Discord investment education and entertainment service” that is “designed primarily by and for enthusiastic Generation Z, or Gen Z, retail investors, creators and influencers.”
r/TaylorSwift • September 6, 2023 CraftySomewhere3205 How different are Redditor Swifties than Twitter (and TikTok) Swifties? I am chronically online on both platforms (excluding TikTok) and I have seen distinct differences from these two. I am definitely gave me a bit of surprise after noticing them. One example is skipping/not liking certain songs that is liked by 95% of Swifties; people are literally attacking and overreacting towards an opinion. Meanwhile in Reddit, everyone is cool about personal opinions about songs. So... how different are they?
AnimeRightNews - Peter Thiel’s MAGA3X With Jeff Giesea And Mike Cernovich Revealed In Document Leak Outline to be implemented & reconstituted in future PAC. by Zanting June 24, 2017 Document: “Table of Contents MAGA3X General Strategy Foreword Leadership Intel Division Team Structure: Groups and mission statements: 1st Reddit/LinkedIn Squad 2nd Twitter Squad 3rd MSM Squad 4th Facebook Squad 5th Dissemination Squad 6th Media creation Squad Social Media Division Team Structure: Mission statements: Local Division Mission Statements: Reddit /r/the_donald submitters Plan of Action Major Objectives (Overall) Minor Objectives (Social Media) Minor Objectives (Regional)...”
Gish gallop From Wikipedia The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, without regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.
Williamson, P. Take the time and effort to correct misinformation. Nature 540, 171 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/540171a Most researchers who have tried to engage online with ill-informed journalists or pseudoscientists will be familiar with Brandolini’s law (also known as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle): the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Is it really worth taking the time and effort to challenge, correct and clarify articles that claim to be about science but in most cases seem to represent a political ideology? I think it is. Challenging falsehoods and misrepresentation may not seem to have any immediate effect, but someone, somewhere, will hear or read our response. The target is not the peddler of nonsense, but those readers who have an open mind on scientific problems. A lie may be able to travel around the world before the truth has its shoes on, but an unchallenged untruth will never stop.
Brandolini’s law From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The adage was publicly formulated in January 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer. Brandolini stated that he was inspired by reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, right before watching an Italian political talk show involving former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and journalist Marco Travaglio.
BBC Trending (podcast) - Brazil’s real life trolls - Sun 23 Apr 2023 “Trolls are necessary and I’m going to explain why. We have a troll farm. A lot of them. What we don’t use are bots. Bots are different things. you can buy it in India and they give you 10,000 likes in a second. That doesn’t work because it’s not legitimate. What we do, for example with trolls, is to generate some kind of relevance within the social network’s algorithms. They have become very rigid about what they show and what they don’t. And that has to do with the relevance of the publication. So what trolls do is give relevance to a certain publication. Good publicity, so that it can be shown more than other publications.”
Tim Pool’s ‘Russian Asset’ Drama Is WILD The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder Sep 5, 2024 “It was a while ago over at the Vanguard channel with Gavin and Zach but during the covid stuff a bunch of different independent even lefty outlets were getting a large chunk of cash I mean you know not hundreds of thousands dollars but like a few thousand uh in their patreons and the Vanguard guys said that that disappeared for them when they came out and supported a strong public response to covid and didn’t deny it so that is this is a problem these dark money uh influence operations buying up independent media is a huge problem”
Wall Street Journal - Interest-Only Loans Helped Commercial Property Boom. Now They’re Coming Due. Landlords face a $1.5 trillion bill for commercial mortgages over the next three years. By Konrad Putzier, June 6, 2023 Many of the commercial landlords on the hook for the loans are vulnerable to default in part because of the way their loans are structured. Unlike most home loans, which get paid down each year, many commercial mortgages are known as interest-only loans. Borrowers make only interest payments during the life of the loan, with the entire principal due at the end. Interest-only loans as a share of new commercial mortgage-backed securities issuance increased to 88% in 2021, up from 51% in 2013, according to Trepp. Typically, owners pay off this debt by getting a new loan or selling the building. Now, steeper borrowing costs and lenders’ growing reluctance to refinance these loans are raising the likelihood that many of them won’t be paid back. Many banks, fearful of losses and under pressure from regulators and shareholders to shore up their balance sheets, have mostly stopped issuing new loans for office buildings, brokers say. Office and some mall owners are facing falling demand for their buildings because of remote work and e-commerce.
The Lever: How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID - Dec 22, 2021 by Walker Bragman & Alex Kotch One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing. Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.
The Intercept - After Spying on Standing Rock, TigerSwan Shopped Anti-Protest “Counterinsurgency” to Other Oil Companies. More than 50,000 pages of documents were recently made public after the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline lost a court case to keep them secret. b y Alleen Brown, Naveena Sadasivam, April 13 2023 The released documents provide startling new details about how TigerSwan used social media monitoring, aerial surveillance, radio eavesdropping, undercover personnel, and subscription-based records databases to build watchlists and dossiers on Indigenous activists and environmental organizations. At times, the pipeline security company shared this information with law enforcement officials. In other cases, WhatsApp chats and emails confirm TigerSwan used what it gathered to follow pipeline opponents in their cars and develop propaganda campaigns online. The documents contain records of TigerSwan attempting to help Energy Transfer build a legal case against pipeline opponents, known as water protectors, using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a law that was passed to prosecute the mob.
Kandice Grossman; TigerSwan at Standing Rock: Ethics of Private Military Use Against an Environmental-Justice Movement. Case Studies in the Environment 31 December 2019; 3 (1): 1–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/cse.2019.002139 During the movement, state and federal military forces worked alongside a private military and security contractor (PMSC), TigerSwan, hired by owners of the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners.
American Psyop Episode 1 October 31, 2022 We follow Wes through his experience as a political pundit for The Young Turks and his work in activism which pulls him into a dark world of chaos, manipulation, and madness. This episode takes us through Wes’ background and how he became an attractive target for operations. Through his military career, his time in Hollywood, and his father’s presidential run, Wes finds himself on the edge of a dark and mysterious world that will soon take over his life.
American Psyop - October 2022 American Psyop takes the audience through the amazing and inexplicable life of Wes Clark jr, the son of a NATO General and presidential candidate. After leaving the military for Hollywood, Wes finds himself subject to foreign intelligence operations. Soon, Wes is surrounded by a religious cult, loses his grasp on reality and descends into a world of dirty politics, mercenary organizations and possible threats to American Democracy....
The Guardian - Republican committee bought Trump Jr book Triggered in bulk - Reports claim title hit No 1 in bestseller list thanks in part to $94,800 advance purchase Martin Belam Fri 22 Nov 2019 13.23 EST According to reports in the New York Times, a financial disclosure form filed to the Federal Election Commission showed a 29 October payment for $94,800 to the bookseller Books-A-Million. The RNC spokesperson Mike Reed confirmed the payment had been for copies of Triggered, having previously said: “We haven’t made a large bulk purchase, but are ordering copies to keep up with demand. Each book is sold to an individual who supports the Republican party.”
This AI Song Just Went Number 1...FOR REAL Rick Beato Nov 12, 2025 It finally happened, an AI song has gone to number 1 on the Billboard charts. But what does that actually mean?
MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy - Thinker-Fest: Session 1 - Fireside Chat - How to Fix the “Splinternet” Mar 3, 2023 There are also indirect economic benefits. These are people that create content farms so for example there are businesses who are just invested in getting people to click regardless of what side. We see this a lot in the political sphere where you’ll have the same company creating extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing content with a goal to monetize the clicks and the revenues. And then you also see hidden benefits and this is where it gets a little tricky these are companies that benefit from the discourse in ways that are slightly removed. So for example the latest conspiracy theory of 2023 which is the “15-minute City” conspiracy which we can talk about that is, that gives a lot of benefit to oil. And that is being perpetuated by Big Oil influencers which I’m sad to say actually exist. And so that is something to look at, that all of these end consumers are being accessed, or being manipulated, by very specific economic agendas.
Alastair McAlpine, MD Jan 25 2023 • 14 tweets We’ve all wondered why scientists or MDs “turn”. How respected folk can find themselves deep in the anti-vax community. It’s a decidedly simple (but dangerous and malicious) process. Below is a thread on how people become “red pilled.” Imagine you’re a YouTuber and you think you explain science well. Imagine you’ve built a loyal following on mostly reliable stuff and get 50k-ish views per video. Now imagine you dip your toe into contrarian waters: there’s this new drug: ivermectin. /1 You read a meta-analysis which is favourable and you have on your show an enthusiastic guest with all the right qualifications. This seems legit! Could this work? Is science missing out on something big? Have you stumbled onto the cure for COVID-19? /2 Suddenly… 700k views! With those extra views comes a SIGNIFICANT bump in revenue. You’re now earning fairly substantial amounts. You go back to the fuddy, “mainstream” stuff, and interest in your videos tanks. You’re back to 50k again (and minimal cash). /3 So you once again do something controversial. You start “wondering” about the vaccine. Views skyrocket. People in the comments are telling you what an extraordinary truth-seeker you are. What a great mind.
Important Context ‘Experts’ Cited By RFK Jr. to Justify mRNA Vaccine Funding Cut Have Ties to Anti-vax Supplement Company Four authors of the non-peer reviewed, anti-vax bibliography cited by Kennedy’s HHS are involved with The Wellness Company. Walker Bragman Aug 17, 2025 The 181-page document, “COVID-19 mRNA ‘vaccine’ harms research collection,” which is hosted on an open website, is a bibliography of misrepresented studies—the overwhelming majority of which have nothing to do with the vaccines. It originally appeared in an independently published 2024 anti-vax book “Toxic Shot: Facing the Dangers of the COVID ‘Vaccines,’” according to its opening page. Co-authored by Canadian immunologist Bryan Bridle, a professor at a veterinary college in Ontario and one of the authors on the bibliography, the book featured a foreword from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Naomi Wolff—both of whom have promoted conspiracy theories about the mRNA vaccines.
Detroit Today: Author Sarah Kendzior explains why misinformation spreads so easily - August 22, 2023 She says lack of access to good information can contribute to the spread of bad information. “When well-researched investigative reporting is hidden behind a paywall, you’re going to end up with a population that — even if they’re making their best attempts to find the truth — is going to have a very difficult job doing so,” Kendzior explains.
Soul Stripping Against AI, again. Sarah Kendzior Aug 07, 2025 I am used to people making up quotes from me and repeating them. It happens out of malice or to distract from what I actually said. For example, when I brought up Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt finances and disturbing proclamations of loyalty to Israel over the US, a brigade of bots appeared to falsely claim that I called her a “Russian agent”, when I stated point blank that she is not. The goal was to make me seem unreliable and discredit my accurate claims. This fake “Russian agent” quote was repeated on social media thousands of times over six years — even though it could be debunked in seconds. I could not understand why it persisted until people told me chatbots were saying it in 2025. Social media repetition was necessary to make the false claim land. By contrast, my new fake quotes are slop. They are trite statements that often appear in a list of quotes from other writers — with no source links for any of us. I have yet to discern the point, except to destroy the notion of reporting itself.
Brandt AM. Inventing conflicts of interest: a history of tobacco industry tactics. Am J Public Health. 2012 Jan;102(1):63-71. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2011.300292. Epub 2011 Nov 28. PMID: 22095331; PMCID: PMC3490543. The industry campaign worked to create a scientific controversy through a program that depended on the creation of industry–academic conflicts of interest. This strategy of producing scientific uncertainty undercut public health efforts and regulatory interventions designed to reduce the harms of smoking. A number of industries have subsequently followed this approach to disrupting normative science. Claims of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof also lead to the assertion of individual responsibility for industrially produced health risks.
WIRED - By Matt Burgess and Natasha Bernal Business Oct 27, 2025 5:00 AM Chatbots Are Pushing Sanctioned Russian Propaganda ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok are serving users propaganda from Russian-backed media when asked about the invasion of Ukraine, new research finds. Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids—where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources—to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine, across the four chatbots they tested, cited Russian state-attributed sources, the ISD research claims. “It raises questions regarding how chatbots should deal when referencing these sources, considering many of them are sanctioned in the EU,” says Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the ISD who led the research. The findings raise serious questions about the ability of large language models (LLMs) to restrict sanctioned media in the EU, which is a growing concern as more people use AI chatbots as an alternative to search engines to find information in real time, the ISD claims.
DEF CON 26 - Svea, Suggy, Till - Inside the Fake Science Factory - Sep 17, 2018
GRIST - The 8 talking points fossil fuel companies use to obstruct climate action New research highlights companies’ “aligned and coordinated” use of Twitter to deny climate change and delay solutions. Joseph Winters Staff Writer Published Jan 21, 2025 Other branches of the fossil fuel industry — including plastic producers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts — have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors — oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals — are “aligned and coordinated … to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.” “They were all talking to each other,” said the study’s lead author Alaina Kinol, a public policy doctoral candidate at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities in Boston.
Morressier, January 12, 2023 Using peer review to detect AI-generated scientific papers Although AI-written text is highly sophisticated, it may have unusual writing styles that differentiate it from the personal touch in human-written papers. Peer reviewers can leverage this and check for irregularities such as repetition of sentences and incoherent structure to detect the possible use of AI writing tools.
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow Posted on September 27, 2025 AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging “foundation models” will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or “discouraged” and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations: The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).
Psychology Today - Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It’s exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2021 | Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader The plodding repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to “cognitive exhaustion.” But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of “censorship by noise” in which governments “create confusion through information—and disinformation—overload.” In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then “like” or share information without critical review because they lack the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out.
Sportskeeda - What does it mean when a streamer gets “stunlocked?” Twitch terminology explained By Amay Singh Published May 06, 2023 11:13 GMT “”Stunlocked” has been a staple term in the gaming community for many years and is not specific to Twitch alone. It originates from the concept of getting “stunned” in video games, which refers to a state where a character is temporarily incapacitated and unable to move or act due to attacks or spells being ‘chained’ together one after the after. (sic)”
First NATO scientific meeting on Cognitive Warfare (France) — 21 June 2021 Cognitive warfare is part of the following triad: i) Human and social sciences; ii) Human factors methodology and engineering; iii) Theories of cognition and models of the cognitive processes on which we intend to act. But in order to act or to protect military or civilian actors, operators or decision makers, soldiers or commanders, citizens or elected officials, from deliberate attacks on cognition, it is necessary to understand the phenomenon of world knowledge, of information processing by the brain: cognition. From the simple acquisition of data from the environment, to the use of the most sophisticated semantic memories, from the control of gestures to decision making in complex situations, all of the “cognitive processes” allow humans to live reasonably in the world. The impairment of cognitive processes has two harmful consequences: i) Contextual maladaptation, resulting in errors, missed gestures or temporary inhibition; and ii) Lasting disorder, which affects the personality and transforms its victim by locking him or her into a form of behavioral strangeness or inability to understand the world. In the first case, it is a question of causing transitory consequences, circumscribed by a particular critical environment (cf. Figure 4-1). The second concerns the transformation of the decision-making principles of individuals who then become disruptors or responsible for erroneous actions, or even non-action (cf. Figure 4-2).
Nielsen, S. C. (2007). The Tragedy of War: Clausewitz on Morality and the Use of Force. Defence Studies, 7(2), 208–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702430701338999 Though Clausewitz uses the term ‘aggression’, there is no accompanying discussion which attempts to argue that it is a crime. An example is the following rather ironic passage: ‘It is only aggression that calls forth defense, and war along with it. The aggressor is always peace‐loving (as Bonaparte always claimed to be); he would prefer to take over our country unopposed. To prevent his doing so one must be willing to make war and be prepared for it. In other words it is the weak, those likely to need defense, who should always be armed in order not to be overwhelmed.’ Clausewitz, On War (note 1) p. 370.
The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War by Mark Galeotti - Feb 2023 Outsourcing goes beyond direct warfare and into non-kinetic contests. This century has also seen the explosion of the gig economy. Individual freelancers and temporary workers sometimes recruited directly, sometimes through online platforms or third party matchmakers. It may seem ridiculous to draw comparisons with the cycle courier that brings you your pizza. But this is less fanciful than might appear in an age when conflicts may be fought through the medium of carefully curated newspaper articles highlighting a grievance or attacking a government. And when online influencers can pivot from hyping a hair product to pushing a political cause. This may be the age of multinational corporations, mass social movements, and powerful governments, but a coincidence of technological, social, and political change means that it is also the age of the individual, and many of them are for hire. Suddenly the world is full of people who seem to be doing the work of states. Yet not as direct employees, nor even out of ideological commitment or patriotic passion. Journalists hired to write hit pieces. Scholars saying the right things for a grant. Think tanks producing recommendations to order. There may no geopolitical equivalent of uber yet, but lobbying, strategic communications - were I a cynic I would suggest this is what we call propaganda when we do it ourselves - and similar consultancy and service companies often act as the middlemen.
Transcript:
Matt
I’m Matt Strachbein.
Chloe
I’m Chloe Humbert.
Matt
Welcome to The Psych Grind. Psych! Most of us know what a heckler is, the guy yelling from the stands in order to disrupt the game or the event the rest of us are there for. But would you tolerate a heckler in regular conversation? How about as a member of the government making the laws that we live by?
In this episode, we’re going to talk about all the ways in which we are censored day to day, in a manner of speaking, through known tactics that should be more widely understood. So, whether you’ve come away baffled after watching a press conference or listening to a congressperson on a news segment, or even in interactions with others online,
that sense that you’ve missed the point, that may not be on you at all. It may be, and often is, 100% intentional.
Chloe
And there are names for it, too.
Matt
Like censorship by noise, or what many will be familiar with, flooding the zone, which we’ve sort of referenced in another episode when we talked about thought-terminating cliches as something we’ll need to drill down on more later. Well, here we go.
Chloe
Yes, so censorship by noise is also known as jamming.
Matt
Yes, it’s technically called jamming, which we can read about on this very well-crafted interactive chart you found online called Taxonomy of Influence Strategies, where anyone can easily do a deep dive on this and other elements or terms. and it’s by something called Playmaker Systems. But it’s no longer available on the original website,
although it is saved via the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive. So it’s still accessible, although you’ll have to be patient for the page to fully load.
Chloe
I first heard about this on a podcast called The Cognitive Crucible, I think back in 2021. And I definitely believe having a terminology for ideas is almost essential, not just for communicating what’s happening, but even thinking about concepts like this.
Matt
Agreed. But let me quickly describe how to use the page. Once the page is loaded, let your cursor hover over the element graphic for jam and click tap for more details to access a window that tells you all the various aspects, components, risks, rewards, and each of the characteristics of jamming, which is defined as, quote, So,
under jam, there are also some examples of the jamming at play, including, right at the top, the most crude no comment, when a politician or company spokesperson says no comment in response to a question from the press. And, I should add, That is the perfect example of a thought-terminating cliché.
Chloe
Thought-terminating cliché is also known as a semantic stop sign, which I quite like. The Australian Psychological Society has an article about it titled Explaining Thought-Terminating Clichés and Why We Should Be Wary of Them. And it starts with the example that’s everyone’s favorite.
Matt
It is what it is. It is what it is, is my all-time least favorite phrase. It is a sure sign of someone’s total laziness, and I’ve heard it from so many managers over the years who are unwilling to address a persistent problem. A situation may be what it is currently,
but that doesn’t mean we can’t avoid it next time or tidy up our process to account for it. Please, don’t let me digress into bitching about work.
Chloe
Having worked for the government myself, and that’s where I heard it is what it is all the damn time, I think of it less as laziness. Of course, I’m sensitive to any hint that government workers are lazy because it’s not true. But I do think it was more of a statement of resignation to the inevitable because
as a low-level civil servant, just like in any corporate job, you have very little control over anything. But unlike a lot of jobs, the government is bigger than companies or small businesses in a lot of... So even if something doesn’t make sense and people see it, it takes a long time to turn that big ship around.
So that leads to a lot of demoralization. So I guess I associate it is what it is with that demoralized resignation to the inevitable or the perceived inevitable. And I think a lot of what looks like laziness is actually people just having been demoralized. Of course, also people being actually sick.
A lot of disabilities and illnesses get labeled as laziness. Nevertheless, of course, the people who feel out of control... or helpless, will try to deflect demands that they feel or just know they can’t deal with. And I think it is most likely motivation for using a thought-terminating cliche. However,
there are definitely situations where people use this as a manipulative bullying tool to shut somebody up. You know, if they just want somebody to stop talking, stop mentioning something. The article from the Australian Psychological Society says, quote, Not always harmful. The thought-terminating cliche was coined by Robert J.
Lifton in the 1960s as when the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. He said they become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. Sounds heavy, but They can be used lightheartedly, too, says Dr. Davis-McCabe.
When we need to be careful is if the cliché could make someone feel invalidated or ignored. Dr. Davis-McCabe says phrases like, it’s not a big deal or stop being so sensitive can shut people down. They may think something is their fault or it stops them from exploring that feeling.
They can also be used by people who are trying to deflect criticism, says Suzanne Newcomb. She is a senior lecturer in religious studies at the Open University UK, who says if feelings or experiences are brushed aside with this kind of cliché deflection, it becomes gaslighting, unquote.
Matt
Even the term gaslighting has become a semantic stop sign of sorts these days. Saying stop gaslighting me is the quickest way to slam dialogue to a halt because now everyone is like, did I do that? How did I do that? I didn’t mean to do that,
which for me just further illustrates the need to understand these terms fully and then use that awareness in our conversations versus tossing the phrase around casually.
Chloe
Well, first of all, I don’t think gaslighting is always deliberate. I think it comes naturally for some people. But yeah, there’s definitely been some wokewashing usage of the term gaslighting. But those are actually two topics that deserve their own conversations. Noted.
Matt
But back to the taxonomy’s description of jam, the other examples are stalling for time and taking their time, which are typical and pretty obvious. Think of filibustering or using old and tired talking points over and over to the point where there’s too much to unpack, if you can even get a word in edgewise.
Then there’s something in the taxonomy called surrogate sabotage, which refers to messaging from a third party. The example the site gives is how during the 2016 presidential election, Russian interest purchased Facebook ads against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Chloe
Yeah, the website is that old, so it was a recent example at the time, actually.
Matt
but still relevant when it comes to third party influence with their own unique agendas, like the now scandalous tenant media influencers.
Chloe
Oh yes, the tenant me scandal, which I liked best described by then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. in Canada’s public inquiry into foreign interference in 2024, which, yes, I listened to at the time. And he was speaking in French, but I used Google Translate, and there’s a video of the original French recording with captions if you want to
see it. Trudeau said, quote, “...we saw anti-vax messages during the trucker convoy and during the pandemic that were amplified by Russian propaganda, particularly in right-wing media, continued by messages under the same people who were sharing anti-vax messages.” Now, not to say that there were not legitimately and authentically anti-vax people in Canada,
but it was amplified enormously by Russian propaganda. And once Ukraine was invaded, we saw a lot of these channels turn into pro-Putin propaganda. We see, and as I just mentioned, we saw just recently that RT is funding right-wing North American bloggers and YouTube personalities, including very, very well-known names and And in the testimony,
Trudeau strangely didn’t mention the actual tenant media personalities found to have taken money from Russia that was actually documented. He mentions a famous Canadian influencer who has notoriously spent some time in Russia and expresses support of Russia, but was not actually in the Tenet scandal. And another famous American influencer who has even done a softball interview with
Putin and whose content was promoted by Tenet, but who is not implicated directly. But overall, the point I think Trudeau addresses pretty well in that whatever Russia was doing was adding to the noise that was already present. And this is actually a well-known aspect of Russian disinformation campaigns, according to experts.
They don’t actually come up with anything new. They just jump on a bandwagon they see in progress and stir it up in whatever way they think is going to get the most play or benefit them the most. So Trudeau was kind of muddying the waters, but I don’t think it was deliberate.
He probably wasn’t as familiar with the people involved in the Tenet Media Russia scandal, because I had never heard of some of them. And I actually do pay attention to right-wing propagandists. There’s just so many of them, frankly, though. It’s hard to keep track.
Matt
I had heard of them, unfortunately, and I try to avoid bad-faith actors for the most part. So... Let’s move on to the next example described as Confuser-in-Chief. And there we have it, flooding the zones.
Chloe
Yes. Famously, the strategy articulated by Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon in a PBS Frontline interview from 2019. Though the strategy was very obvious before then, that Donald Trump says so many things, some contradictory, and it confuses people. And there is a censorship by noise effect because nobody can pay attention to everything at once.
Of course, the Friday night news dump isn’t actually new, though. It’s gotten more blatant. That’s when government officials, politicians, or companies who have bad news they don’t want analyzed too closely, they’ll dump it late on a Friday when there are less reporters and people won’t be in their offices to answer the phones and emails from reporters.
Donald Trump’s crew has made every day a news dump, though, and sometimes that has multiple meanings.
Wow.
Matt
Sometimes people only hear or only remember what they want to. And so the confuser uses specific words in order to deflect follow-up questions or comments and ultimately avoids talking about things directly or with any substance. Think of all the times Trump claims, I said maybe, or it might happen.
Any rational person would assume the President of the United States is talking about any given topic or answering questions for a purpose, but it turns out completely meaningless because of a semantic word salad, which only goes to show Trump’s true intent, which is to disrupt through confusion. He doesn’t want to make any logical sense.
Some will try to diagnose him with cognitive decline or inability, but I’m not personally qualified to do that, so I assume he knows what he’s doing. The story from anyone listening or reporting in the news then becomes about what we think he meant, what he may have really meant, or that he was yet again being oddly vague.
It’s like a word vomit for the cameras instead of the much simpler no-comment version of jamming. Or this next and even more deliberate example called drowned out, described by using an incident from back in 1989 on Quote, in 1989, U.S. troops in Panama City blasted head-splitting hard rock hits on the front lawn of the Vatican embassy,
all to confuse the clear thinking and good sleep of General Manuel Noriega. Unquote.
Chloe
That seems extreme, but this is a blunt force tactic after all.
Matt
Yeah, and that relates to the reasons you would run a jam play, also listed by the taxonomy of influence strategies. Quote, sometimes it’s eat or be eaten. The competition runs a propaganda factory. Better to dismantle the rival’s machinery than to be consumed by it. Sometimes it’s not possible to out-influence an opponent.
Sometimes, to progress, their own rhetoric has to be slowed or stopped. Unquote. Unquote.
Chloe
So basically it’s the last refuge of the desperate influencer. Donald Trump’s constant parade of palace intrigue, scandals, big and small, and outrageous comments have to be covered in the news. If anything, it’s gotten easier to confuse everyone now that Donald Trump himself sounds more and more confused.
And I’m not a medical professional either, but he sure sounds senile and crass. Maybe it’s kind of ageist, though, because even a lot of tragic cases of dementia aren’t this hostile. But some of the quotes I hear from some people in politics these days, politicians themselves or officials in government or pundits and whatnot,
they’re often sometimes so offensive. It reminds me of the New Yorker article I read years ago about paid trolls on social media and how people were wrong to assume that paid actors were deployed to change people’s minds. The piece was from July 2016 and titled The Real Paranoia Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks by Adrian Chen.
And the article says, quote, The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers, but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space, unquote. Though it’s disingenuous and wrong to think about propaganda as merely persuasion,
it can be about censorship by noise, about demoralization. The article goes on, quote, The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it. The opposition activist Leonov Volkov told me, unquote, Make politics so stinky, normal people won’t want to get involved.
I read this around the time I had a job in government where I was required to offer voter registration to people at certain times. It reminded me of one of the reasons people often gave me for not wanting to register to vote. That they just simply found politics so upsetting, stressful, ugly,
that they didn’t have the time in their busy life, and with whatever other stress they had... to get involved with trying to figure out who makes sense or who to vote for through the level of noise in politics. People literally told me, I can’t pay attention to this, and I don’t want to risk making the wrong decision.
This shows the need for having an apparatus to help people sort stuff out. For example, if they’re a member of a union, you have the load spread over a community so the group can act together. When I was phone backing for Sherrod Brown,
one of the most memorable conversations I had was with a woman who was obviously on a call list of probably registered Democrats. And she told me she had Republican Bernie Marino’s name written down to take to the polls because some friend or something had instructed her to go and vote for Bernie Marino,
probably because said friend was into crypto. she might not have voted at all otherwise. Or maybe she would have voted for Sherrod Brown in the absence of the friend who was into crypto. The crypto people, they sure got their supporters organized. This is sometimes more complicated and more deceptive than just news dumps or just
driving people out of the discourse. Sometimes the jamming is directed at people trying earnestly and diligently to debate topics. sea lioning comes to mind, which is the tactic that you will find in places people expect to have debates. And a lot of earnest people fall right into it and give people doing this the power to derail things.
Matt
This term sea lioning’s origin is from the long-running webcomic Wonder Mark by David Malky. In this particular strip from 2014, the typical recontextualized 19th century images are that of a couple talking poorly about sea lions when one overhears them. The eavesdropping sea lion then proceeds to incessantly and passive-aggressively engage with them in a debate,
but not so much a debate than harassing them repeatedly for evidence of their claims while casting them in a negative light.
Chloe
Yeah, the C-Line was doing a lot of, well, actually, and maybe some DARVO reverse victim offender stuff there with the demand for civility when the C-Line is the one being uncivil. And some tone policing, too. It’s a really good demonstration of how multiple tactics can be deployed at once to hijack things.
Matt
The sea lion is beyond intrusive and overbearing, which makes the couple increasingly upset, all while signaling for all to hear his own virtuous ability for staying calm and rational. He follows them home and into their bedroom like a stalker.
Chloe
The cartoon really vibes creepy. In fact, one might even say it’s anti-sea lion. It’s dehumanizing the sea lions as creepy creatures that invade your house. You see what I did there? I’m sea lioning the sea lioning metaphor. Clever Chloe strikes again. Perhaps not. Okay. The Wikipedia page for C-Lining,
there’s a quote from 2019 by someone with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. And I think it sums it up better than I could why this is a form of jamming, a form of censorship by noise. Amy Johnson says, quote, Rhetorically, C-lining fuses persistent questioning, often about basic information, information easily found elsewhere,
or unrelated tangential points with a loudly insisted upon commitment to reasonable debate. It disguises itself as a sincere attempt to learn and communicate. C-lining thus works both to exhaust a target’s patience, attention, and communicative effort. and to portray the target as unreasonable. While the questions of the sea lion may seem innocent,
they’re intended maliciously and have harmful consequences.” Yeah, it’s exhausting.
Matt
The popular social engagement website Reddit uses a system of upvoting and downvoting comments. If something is considered off-topic or irrelevant, you can downvote it to indicate someone isn’t contributing to the discussion, or at least that’s how it’s meant to work. Proper reticute, as they call it, denotes upvoting the valuable comments and downvoting anything else. Of course,
users misuse this system of voting to express disagreements or difference of opinions all the time because downvoting affects visibility when enough people do it. As a tactic, downvoting is censorship.
Chloe
This happens on my local city’s Reddit. It seems like there’s an intense influence operation there. Maybe automate it or just people who obsessively monitor and moderate. And it’s not just the usual Reddit BS because there’s another regional Reddit where I don’t notice this happening so much at all, like the type I see in the city’s Reddit.
What I suspect is that the local chamber of commerce or maybe business owners themselves and maybe people who work for politicians or who knows, maybe the politicians themselves, get on the city subreddit and make sure that anyone who criticizes any businesses in town gets downvoted.
It’s like the Reddit is just an extension comment section for the Visitors Bureau PR. Threads or links critical of politicians get downvoted. And if someone criticizes a business, especially a business’s labor practices or bad reputation with workers, their posts get downvoted into the basement. So they drop down to the bottom and get hidden.
They don’t get deleted because they’re not against the rules. Because how would the moderators running it justify just deleting all messages that aren’t positive about businesses? This still serves to censor that information, and then it disincentivizes people to even bother posting relevant information. Because why would you,
if you know it’s not going to be seen by anyone but some trolls who immediately pour in the downvotes?
Matt
And it may be no surprise that other ways of effectively downvoting comments are used online. Like, for example, when someone posts something they find important or in need of amplification to a Discord server, then the very next comment is 15 pics of someone’s garden.
Whether intentionally done or not, the first post is pushed way up and obscured from view.
Chloe
I will admit that I’ve done that. Maybe not with 15 photos of my garden, though I have those photos available and ready for the next time you step out of line.
Matt
Hey, I like gardening, so don’t threaten me with a good time, but let’s at least make it a separate channel.
Chloe
Right. But seriously, there have been times when someone’s posted misinformation or maybe just asking questions about misinformation, perhaps innocently or maybe not, but it’s exposing more people to the misinformation, so it may not get removed properly. from a Discord forum chat because it’s not technically breaking a rule, for example.
And so I do believe that more good information is often better than just trying to remove bad information. So there are times I’ve responded to that by providing a bunch of feedback that overwhelmingly provides a boatload of counter-messaging and then trying to move the conversation forward so that the misinformation topic kind of gets left behind.
But we’ve all seen this happen on social media where comments threads get jammed when they’re flooded by comments. It could be a situation where a post gets quote unquote ratioed. Does everyone know what ratioed means if they’re not extremely online?
Matt
A ratioed is basically slang for praising a negative response because it can be funny to embarrass someone online. But technically, according to Merriam-Webster slang and trending, a social media post, as on X, Facebook, or other platforms, is said to have been ratioed when it has received more comments and reposts than likes, implying that it was tremendously unpopular.
In other words, to ratio a post is to collectively give it more comments or reposts than likes or favorites. Ratio can also mean to receive more down votes than up votes on websites where such on-screen icons are an option.
Chloe
People are mad and they reply. Mostly, I think people like the idea of ratios because you’re taking the side of the underdog in most cases. It’s a famous person or someone with a big platform, someone with more power than the average person online. And through the power of numbers of the masses, their bad take gets ratioed.
But this is an influence tactic, and these tactics aren’t necessarily good or bad. Sometimes people just get mad about something, but sometimes it’s created inauthentically, too. Or perhaps sometimes the ratio is augmented inauthentically, for example, with botnets. So sometimes you’ll see some replies that seem out of place in the ratio replies.
And that’s sometimes because there’s just bots set up to just reply on social media to post with certain statements or keywords. And they have canned responses. And they may even be set up to reply. help ratios. One example of this, which could be authentic, but is sometimes automated, is where when someone posts about fascism,
there are often these replies that come along and accuse the person saying, anyone who disagrees with you is Hitler. which is another great example of a thought-terminating cliché. And you’ll find a lot of those in ratios. Sometimes that kind of automated response just takes the form of posts on social
media critical of cryptocurrency that will attract numerous pro-crypto trolls that fill up someone’s replies and mentions with crypto buzzwords promoting crypto. It’s really hard to tell what’s automated from the people who just parrot stuff because they’re true to believers. So invest it in the sort of meme stock investment cults. That’s a real thing.
And they operate this way. You have written about product cults a lot. Yes, because this is a real PR strategy where people get trained or train each other to go out and be digital soldiers. Sometimes it’s highly organized and funded. Everything from Taylor Swift to MAGA 3X.
Matt
We’ll have to take a closer look at examples of this in the future. The bottom line is that there are both real people and bots flooding the zone.
Chloe
Yes, and a bit similar to a ratio is the tactic of gish-galloping, which is a tactic people use in debates in the quote-unquote marketplace of ideas. Gish-galloping is when people just rapid-fire a bunch of claims, and then they just don’t give anyone else in the Because the claims are just so, there’s so many claims,
it’s impossible to address each one of them and debunk them all with brevity. If you want to obfuscate someone else’s argument, this can confuse onlookers about what’s true or what’s legitimately an argument or not. And basically negate the reason someone is engaging in the debate in the first place.
Matt
And that brings us to the bullshit asymmetry principle.
Chloe
the bane of every debunker’s existence. Also known as Brandolini’s Law, which is stated this way, the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Matt
According to Wikipedia, the origin dates back to 2013 and Alberto Brandolini in Italy who said that he read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and then watched a political talk show featuring media tycoon and Italian three-time Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Chloe
Oof, long for the days when I puzzled over Italy’s Berlusconi situation. Anyway, Daniel Kahneman’s book is widely recommended for understanding human cognitive biases that influence people’s choices in illogical ways and the human weaknesses that are leveraged for persuasion and, frankly, trickery. The problem is it’s not as simple as just telling someone something’s wrong. That’s not compelling.
People are busy. So to really explain misinformation or just a problem in a way that’s both understandable and compelling enough that anyone will bother hearing it, it’s sometimes a big lift to get past people’s biases with facts. Also, if you’re going to do a critique of somebody publicly, you have to do it right.
I sometimes write about things out there, debunk them, because usually multiple people have brought it to me, and maybe it’s about saving time on my part rather than to actually explain something over and over individually, giving people individual links online. And that’s where the bullshit asymmetry comes in. And in some cases,
people have asked me to publish something because they need to be able to send someone somewhere that has a bunch of the relevant content and information on something. But sometimes one-on-one outreach is the only thing that works. People won’t be willing to look into it. You have to take it to them. And that’s hard to scale up.
It takes organizing for that purpose. And privately debunking stuff, or at least doing it less publicly, is no guarantee you’re not going to be attacked for it. I don’t really hold to blame people who’ve been misled and then go back to the people who are misleading them. And they say, meh, meh, Chloe said this is anti-vax.
And then they go back to that person and say that because they still trust that person. And they don’t trust me for whatever reason. The scammers and the propaganda purveyors make it really easy to take their side. They make it appear as if they’ve done all the work,
and it’s just so much more appealing than telling people to go read counter evidence. There are debunking influencers who do get an audience, but unfortunately, sometimes it’s because they’re doing things that are actually helping the opposition. They’re a gift to rivals. So they get traction, quite literally, from the opposition’s paid troll farm action.
Many would be abhorred to realize that’s what’s going on. Many bristle when they’re warned that they might be helping spread the misinformation they’re trying to demunk. Of course, some of these people figure it out and they play to that because that’s where the money is.
I think that’s how you get some of these why I left the left people. And of course, there’s way more industry money pushing right-wing stuff because it’s corporate-aligned.
Matt
Honestly, I assume if I can debunk something or learn about something that’s been debunked, then anyone can. This isn’t a do-your-own-research situation. It’s an avoid-the-scam situation. I mean, look, these days, absorbing media and watching the news is more vital than ever. But the truth is,
we need to analyze the news we watch and read as well because we cannot safely assume it is authentic or without bias. So instead of being the authority on a topic myself, I try to point to a more popular source or YouTube channel that does it regularly, like the majority report. But you’re right.
There are some who exist purely as a type of gift. There’s evidence that this happens. It’s an obvious strategy to get certain things seen or pushed in your feed by creating inauthentic interactions to boost content in the algorithms.
Chloe
Yeah, you could hear about it from someone who runs a troll farm. They were interviewed by the BBC Trending podcast in 2023.
Matt
Quote, trolls are necessary and I’m going to explain why. We have a troll farm, a lot of them. What we don’t use are bots. Bots are different things. You can buy it in India and they give you 10,000 likes in a second. That doesn’t work because it’s not legitimate. What we do, for example with trolls,
is to generate some kind of relevance within the social network’s algorithms. They have become very rigid about what they show and what they don’t. And that has to do with the relevance of the publication. So what trolls do is give relevance to a certain publication, good publicity, so that it can be shown more than other publications, unquote.
So the gift to rivals comes straight from this taxonomy of influence strategies.
Chloe
Well, it’s from an article about it published in Small Wars Journal in 2022, written by Susan Sigris Thomas, titled, Why Responding is Losing, the Plays We Run and the Plays We Don’t to Defeat Disinformation. There’s a graphic that has the terms on there, but at the side of the graphic,
there’s an explainer that I think is really succinct. So I saved the graphic and circled and highlighted the part about the gift to rivals, or actually it says, I think, a gift to enemies. And that’s what I send to people when this topic comes up to try to explain the pitfall here.
It’s amazingly simple, but people fail to recognize this pitfall all the time.
Matt
I have it saved from the last time you sent it to me, and I’ll describe it. Okay, the graphic says, quote, When competitors ding your reputation or diss your brand, it’s a reasonable impulse to fight back, especially when the messages they’re making are mistaken or deceptive. But be careful.
The plays that often inspire response are usually better at scoring points than winning the games. Here’s why. Defensive plays. Whether it’s conservative policies, inexperience at narrative knife fights, or a bias for taking the proverbial high road, responders typically run plays that frame, divert, and press.
These are influence strategies that do more to defend and maintain a status quo than shift it. Accordingly, responders avoid plays that probe, freeze, or provoke. These are better for beating rivals, not simply beating them back. A gift to enemies. If this is you, beware. Rivals will welcome you to their arena. And why not?
A competitor with weak plays draws attention to the game but does little to steal a victory. Unquote.
Chloe
It’s a real catch-22. You need an audience to reach anyone with debunkings or warnings. But to get that audience, many use the very tactics they should be warning people about. And obviously that’s not great. So there are podcasts that don’t accept advertising, but then they have paid subscription and try to lure people into that with hooks
and what I’d say are influence tactics that are sometimes less than honest, I think. I don’t grudge people paywalling content per se. There’s nothing wrong with charging people. for information or entertainment in our system. That’s how it works. But it’s often certainly not influence-free, just because there’s no advertising or product promotion involved.
So that shouldn’t be an assumption, just because. you’re not accepting advertising that that means it’s free of any type of persuasion or influence operation. Even where it’s readers support it or listeners support it, then there’s a risk of audience capture. Authentic audience capture is bad enough because the content creator becomes
incentivized the same way media looking for advertisers do. Empty calories, controversy, or maybe even just mediocrity. And that’s the authentic audience capture. But there’s worse than that. There’s inauthentic attempts to audience capture content creators and even just social media hotshots. There are people who are paid to go out and hit subscribe, including paid subscriptions,
on anything putting out content they really want to see. They will also sometimes unsubscribe when you put out the wrong message. I’ve been there. But a lot of people doing this work find this an uncomfortable subject.
Matt
But some content creators talk about this publicly.
Chloe
Yes, the way I heard about the Vanguard show, I heard about it on the Majority Report in 2024 when they were discussing the Tenet Media scandal, and Matt Leck referred to how Gavin and Zach at the Vanguard publicly said on their show that they lost a bunch of Patreons after they came out in favor of a strong
public health response to COVID. Matt Leck said a bunch of lefty podcasts had lost thousands they’d had up to that point. And we know that right-wing dark money, especially from fossil fuel and commercial real estate investments, was hyper-focused on thwarting the public health response from COVID because remote
work was a threat to office rentals and fuel used on commutes. The Lover had a piece in December 2021 remarking that because of some businesses being shut down for several weeks and people who are not engaging in the economy so much because of avoiding COVID and especially remote work and remote school,
the industry that took a really big hit was the fossil fuel industry. And they referenced how the org Americans for Prosperity publicly started their campaign against COVID mitigations. We also know from multiple stories around the Standing Rock protests that they have been revealed from court records and personal stories that this is an industry
willing to hire essentially paramilitary mercenary outfits or maybe even just randos to do adversarial operations on advocates and activists. These essentially inauthentic subscriptions that people might get can be used like levers to audience capture content creators. It’s fake engagement, but it’s real money. It’s kind of like when somebody hits a bestseller list,
which makes it seem like it has the stamp of approval from other people. But really, as it happens, it’s only a bestseller because there’s somebody who or some org out there buying up books ostensibly to give them away or distribute them.
Matt
Like that time in 2019 when Donald Trump Jr.’ ‘s book hit the number one bestseller list, thanks in part to an advance purchased by the Republican National Committee of $94,800. Because of course...
Chloe
Oh, and there was a recent example of this where an AI-generated country song was on some chart, but it was just obvious that people just paid for downloads. Yeah. But it doesn’t even have to be so direct. Sometimes the purchasing is on a micro level, incentivizing a bunch of little publications that will never be on a bestseller
list or any kind of list, but nevertheless can make some money. From the MIT initiative on the digital economy presentation from 2023, one of the scholars in the presentation studying online information said, quote, There are also indirect economic benefits. These are people that create content farms. So for example,
there are businesses who are just as invested in getting people to click regardless of what side. We see this a lot in the political sphere where you’ll have the same company creating extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing content with a goal to monetize the clicks and revenues. And then you also see hidden benefits.
And this is where it gets a little tricky. These are companies that benefit from the discourse in ways that are slightly removed. So, for example, the latest conspiracy theory of 2023, which is the 15-minute city conspiracy, which we can talk about, that gives a lot of benefit to oil.
And that is being perpetrated by big oil influencers, which I’m sad to say actually exist. And so that is something to look at. That all of these end consumers are being accessed or being manipulated by very specific economic agendas, unquote. Of course people figure this out. And then they start doing what’s bringing in the revenue,
even if it’s not a totally conscious and deliberate effort to do propaganda per se. You don’t have to think of yourself as a fossil fuel influencer. There was a thread on social media a few years back I refer to often because it explains the transition,
the process of how someone like a doctor can get pulled into promoting anti-vax nonsense. And sometimes there are people promoting even anti-vax debunking because, again, a gift to rivals. Sometimes debunking anti-vax theories puts them in front of more audiences, for example, or it’ll muddy the waters to have more drama content. And then vaccines are quote-unquote politicized.
And then it’s so stinky, nobody wants to promote vaccination out of fear of getting in the dirt with politics.
Matt
This is from a 2023 Twitter thread by Alistair McAlpine, M.D. Quote, We’ve all wondered why scientists or M.D.’ ‘s turn. How respective folk can find themselves deep in the anti-vax community. It’s a decidedly simple but dangerous and malicious process. Below is a thread on how people become red-pilled.
Imagine you’re a YouTuber and you think you explain science well. Imagine you’ve built a loyal following on mostly reliable stuff and get 50,000-ish views per video. Now imagine you dip your toe into contrarian waters. There’s this new drug, ivermectin. One, you read a meta-analysis, which is favorable,
and you have on your show an enthusiastic guest with all the right qualifications. This seems legit. Could this work? Is science missing out on something big? Have you stumbled onto the cure for COVID-19? Two, suddenly 700,000 views. With those extra views comes a significant bump in revenue. You’re now earning fairly substantial amounts.
You go back to the fuddy mainstream stuff and interest in your videos tanks. You’re back to 50,000 again and minimal cash. And so, three, you once again do something controversial. You start wondering about the vaccine. Views skyrocket. People in the comments are telling you what an extraordinary truth seeker you are. What a great mind, unquote.
Chloe
Even the indirect payments where people don’t really know where it’s coming from, it’s influential. And if doctors get pulled into that, imagine what... the working-class YouTuber from some small town in the Midwest where a few hundred dollars a month for a few months can change somebody’s life.
So nothing in the information space is going to be free of the problematic, but obviously where people draw the line can be in different spots, and it’s fair to take a look at that. Mine is just that I wouldn’t accept specific advertising of bullshit on purpose.
I wouldn’t promise someone something behind a paywall that wasn’t tangible or clearly defined. Obviously, crap gets advertised through ad services or on social media platforms like YouTube, and a lot of this is simply horrendous. But I wouldn’t do an ad read for snake oil or... Medicare disadvantage, for example, and actually put my name to that.
And that’s something I have seen from left media. People are ostensibly, supposedly fighting far right wing conservatives. They’re advertising Medicare advantage or wellness company stuff. All right wing. It’s hard to stay the course and make a living doing anything in media. So that’s what happens. Someone who doesn’t put their newsletter behind a paywall is the author Sarah
Kensier, who’s remarked, and I’m paraphrasing here, that all the important information is behind paywalls and all the disinformation propaganda is free and available. She’s also written a few books I’d recommend, like Hiding in Plain Sight. You have to purchase a book, but her books are typically available at the library,
probably because of people like me who’ve either requested the book be bought at the library or bought it for the library. But the other reason I bring up Sarah Kensier is that there’s another aspect of where someone can become a vehicle for enemies rather than a gift to rivals.
The rivals go ahead and try to hijack the reputation of people with big platforms.
Matt
like the people who impersonate YouTubers in the comments section to try to sell them crypto. It’s a video from a familiar channel with an associated account or channel commenting. It’s not uncommon to see their avatar, and so you may be inclined to follow a link they’ve posted, even though it’s a scam.
I’ve seen it once or twice, and you can’t just dismiss it. You need to reply accordingly, report the comment in Phony Commenter’s channel, and especially let the actual content creator know it’s happening to them.
Chloe
That’s always creepy, and it must be very frustrating for the creator on their end. But what is even more ugly is what Sarah Kensier described in an August 2025 newsletter where she finds that her work has been made into AI slop, and she’s attributed it with fake quotes by, quote-unquote, hallucinating, lying chatbots.
She explains what happened to her and exactly how this type of tactic is deployed to flood the zone with confusion.
Matt
This is from Kenzier. Quote, when I stated, point blank, that she is not. The goal was to make me seem unreliable and discredit my accurate claims. This fake Russian agent quote was repeated on social media thousands of times over six years, even though it could be debunked in seconds.
I could not understand why it persisted until people told me chatbots were saying it in 2025. Social media repetition was necessary to make the false claim land. By contrast, my new fake quotes are slop. They are trite statements that often appear in a list of quotes from other writers with no source links for any of us.
I have yet to discern the point except to destroy the notion of reporting itself.”
Chloe
And that’s actually exactly the strategy in many cases. Destroying the notion of reporting itself to make confusion and people will not believe something even if it’s real. People warn that could be an issue with the video deepfakes. And even just the warning about deepfakes itself, the warning about it is demoralizing.
So there’s a danger in warning too much.
Matt
Often repeated Russian disinformation has made its way into chatbots in an unusual way. A Wired article from October 2025 has the subtitle, ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok are serving users’ propaganda from Russian-backed media. when asked about the invasion of Ukraine, new research finds. The article says, quote, Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, ISD,
claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids, where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine across the four chatbots they tested cited Russian state-attributed sources the ISD research claims, unquote.
Chloe
Somehow I expect there are people in industry trying to fill those voids as well. There’s quite a bit of research on the tobacco industry where people who’ve examined their tactics have come to the conclusion that the strategy was to wreck science in order to wreck anti-cigarette science.
So they didn’t just flood the journals with industry-friendly papers to try to convince people. They deliberately and flagrantly funded studies with very obvious conflicts of interest. So then people look and think, maybe we can’t trust this science at all. And I think we’re at the point with a lot of science out there is it’s fake.
And so you have to look closely at sources. There are fake conferences and even fake journals. Obviously, some people get into this because there’s money to be made. Sometimes people use it to sell things, even though just a cursory look at it from someone in the same field could say, yeah, don’t trust this.
Because normal science is for the people in the same field to work from, but fake science isn’t for science. It’s for PR purposes or for actual disinformation purposes.
Matt
They’re jamming science. One example that always comes to mind is the way in which most of the climate change talking points in use were supplied by the fossil fuel industry themselves.
Chloe
Yes, a lot of climate science and environmental thought leadership has come straight from the industry, the fossil fuel industry and others. They utilize weaponization of everything.
Matt
As a result... There’s a whole slew of scientists working part-time as peer reviewers, basically just to flag inaccurate and fake scientific articles and papers.
Chloe
And often these scientists are working on a volunteer basis. No matter how old a problem is, the firehose of AI slop can’t do anything but accelerate information noise, that’s for sure. this reminds me of how wikipedia has come up with a way to flag and deal with potential ai submissions um it’s because chatbots are conversational and wikipedia
isn’t conversational it isn’t like an influencer blog speaking directly to the reader uh and another style of chatbot writing is overly bombastic or promotional language uh like PR, but that really becomes obvious on Wikipedia because real Wikipedia entries wouldn’t be speaking directly to the reader, saying, I hope that helps,
or saturating the text with like PR hype language. Chatbots are, of course, a whole other source of disinformation flooding the zone. And Cory Doctorow compared AI slop to asbestos, saying, we’re shoveling into... Shoveling into the walls of our society and we’ll be digging out for generations.
Matt
People are being bombarded with all kinds of information.
Chloe
Information that’s true and untrue. Important, unimportant. It’s hard to figure out what’s important or what’s even true. So people wind up giving up. It’s called informational learned helplessness.
Matt
From Psychology Today, giving up informational learned helplessness. It’s exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2001 by Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D. and Michael Kimball, reviewed by Jessica Schrader. Quote, the plotting repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to cognitive exhaustion. But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev,
author of the book This Is Not Propaganda, Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of censorship by noise in which governments create confusion through information and disinformation overload. In time, people become overwhelmed. and even cognitively debilitated by the onslaught of information, misinformation, and conspiracy theories until it becomes almost impossible to separate fact from
fiction or trace an idea back to its source. And so censorship by noise, particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then like or share information without critical review because they lack
the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out, unquote.
Chloe
It’s a common pitfall for unwitting people to have their cognitive bandwidth overwhelmed, so they just check out from thinking things through at all. People get stunlocked. I first heard that used in relation to people... by left science twitch streamer in relation to members of their audience getting
fixated on a topic to where they can’t let something go and move on to the next topic but apparently it’s used to describe uh behavior by streamers it’s a gaming term that turned into jargon like a twitch terminology and it comes from where in video games where the character is incapacitated
are unable to move and fight back because of being on the receiving end of a series of uninterrupted attacks. And this strategy, it’s not just Steve Bannon who popularized fighting the zone. He didn’t come up with this. It’s a known military tactic. A few years ago,
someone recommended it to me to read a publication from the first NATO scientific meeting on cognitive warfare, which from France in 2021. And there’s this one part where they explain the process where this sort of information overload has knock-on effects, even beyond the primary target. There’s a recognizable process of disruption. And when hardly...
anyone ever thinks about or talks about directly, but everyone can recognize this. It’s a familiar pattern. In this paper, in Chapter 4, titled, What is Cognition and How to Make It One of the Ways of War by Professor Bernard Cloverie, a French cognitive scientist, He describes how cognitive warfare works with cognitive processes and says, quote,
But in order to act or to protect military or civilian actors, operators or decision makers, soldiers or commanders, citizens or elected officials, from deliberate attacks on cognition, it is necessary to understand the phenomenon of world knowledge of information processing by the brain, cognition, unquote.
All of us are subject to these cognitive processes as we live in the world and interact. And cognitive attacks are those which impair cognitive processes or hijack them. And this paper describes how there are two major harmful consequences to that. One will cause people to stumble, maybe miss something important in the moment.
It’s what Cloverie called temporary inhibition. But continuing these types of attacks can have a lasting effect. Clovery asserts it can lock people into what he says is, quote, a form of behavioral strangeness or inability to understand the world, unquote. And this describes something we may not talk about directly,
but this is something many of us have witnessed in others or even experienced ourselves. The military application here, of course, is that you can do this to people in certain settings, you can cripple people’s ability to react appropriately, and there’s even a knock-on effect. There’s a, quote, transformation of the decision-making principles of individuals who then become
disruptors or responsible for erroneous actions or even non-action, unquote. And there are two visual aids with this article on this point.
Matt
At first, one of the visuals looked like an alien to me. It has a large oval-shaped eye and an elongated head stretching backwards into two points. But when you look at it as if it’s facing the other direction, it could be a bird with its mouth open. It’s the rabbit duck. It’s not a rabbit duck.
Or a duck, if you ask me. It looks more like a Ridley Scott storyboard drawing from the first Alien film, but I get that isn’t the point. The second visual is a person wearing a helmet, sitting on a stump with a rifle at his side.
He’s in the traditional pose of the thinker and lost in thought or perplexed to the point of inaction.
Chloe
I do think this happens a lot in our current media environment, and you could easily see how this is wonderful for someone who wishes to neutralize us all, keep us in line, keep us doing nothing, just confuse people into inaction, into doing nothing. Carl von Klauswitz is mentioned several times in that NATO document,
and I’ve seen him quote it in relation to this strategy quite a bit.
Matt
Never heard of him.
Chloe
I don’t think most people would have heard of him or thought much unless you’re into military history or interested in the psychology of war. He was a Prussian general who wrote a book on the psychology and politics in military strategy after the Napoleonic Wars. A lot of people quote him having said something about how aggressors are always
lovers of peace and would prefer to take over a country unopposed. This is from a paper from 2007 titled The Tragedy of War, Clausewitz, on Morality and the Use of Force. Quote, Though Clausewitz uses the term aggression, there is no accompanying decision which attempts to argue that it is a crime.
An example is the following rather ironic passage. It is only aggression that calls forth defense. and war along with it. The aggressor is always peace-loving, as Bonaparte always claimed to be. He would prefer to take over a country unopposed. To prevent his doing so, one must be willing to make war and be prepared for it.
In other words, it is the weak, those likely to need defense, who should always be armed in order to not be overwhelmed. Clausewitz on War, note 1, page 370, unquote. A lot of people have drawn from this the concept of demoralizing people into not fighting back in order to be peace-loving.
And now people with lots of money can just hire masses of people to do cognitive warfare. A book I read a few years ago called The Weaponization of Everything, there was a part I saved, and I think about it from time to time.
Matt
Here it is. Quote, Outsourcing goes beyond direct warfare and into non-kinetic contests. This century has also seen the explosion of the gig economy. Individual freelancers and temporary workers sometimes recruited directly, sometimes through online platforms or third-party matchmakers. It may seem ridiculous to draw comparisons with the cycle courier that brings you your pizza,
But this is less fanciful than might appear in an age when conflicts may be fought through the medium of carefully curated newspaper articles highlighting a grievance or attacking a government. And when online influencers can pivot from hyping a hair product to pushing a political cause. This may be the age of multinational corporations, mass social movements,
and powerful governments, but a coincidence of technological, social, and political change means that it is also the age of the individual, and many of them are for hire. Suddenly, the world is full of people who seem to be doing the work of states, yet not as direct employees, nor even out of ideological commitment or patriotic passion.
Journalists hired to write hit pieces, scholars saying the right things for a grant, think tanks producing recommendations to order. There may be no geopolitical equivalent of Uber yet, but lobbying, strategic communications, where I, as cynic, I would suggest this is what we call propaganda when we do it ourselves,
and similar consultancies and service companies often act as the middlemen, unquote.
Chloe
Of course, sometimes people doing this are just finding ways to make money in the gig economy, not necessarily trying to subdue people per se for the sake of it. And even if they are being paid to work for that end, they don’t necessarily know it. But as all of this spirals out,
people find more and more bonkers ways to make money in this screwed up information environment.
Matt
Like the equivalent to what they call quiet quitting, quiet weaponization?
Chloe
Quiet quitting, you say? Is that a hint?
Matt
Yeah, there’s more to talk about. Never mind. It’s been a long podcast. Well, Chloe, anything else to add for now, or should we call it good for this episode?
Chloe
I don’t know, Matt. Should we call it?
Matt
Don’t answer a question with a question. It’s your podcast, Chloe. You tell me.
Chloe
Well, in that case, I guess we can call it then.
Matt
See? Wasn’t that easy?
Chloe
Not necessarily.
