How the US used science to wage psychological war

I have a new book coming out in June, and New Scientist is to blame. Back in the summer of 2020, I wrote this column about a study led by computational social scientist Meysam Alizadeh, who worked to algorithmically predict waves of propaganda on Twitter and Reddit. Alizadeh said he and his colleagues wanted to create a “propaganda weather report” so that people on social media would be forewarned about incoming influence campaigns. It seemed like a great idea.

As we talked, I told Alizadeh about a complex psychological operations (psy ops) campaign I had witnessed on Twitter – a likely Russian effort to sow chaos around Black Lives Matter protests in Washington DC. Something in my tone must have tipped him off that I was obsessed. “You should write a book about this,” he said. I laughed and demurred that writing about psy ops was way too depressing and not very scientific.

Four years later, I have a book in my hands called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological warfare and the American mind. It is a deep dive into psychological warfare campaigns waged by the US government, starting in the late 18th century with a fake newspaper produced by Benjamin Franklin, full of lies about British war crimes during the American Revolution. I follow the thread to the present-day US, looking at online propaganda and culture wars. I spoke with a lot of people like Alizadeh who are trying to stop psychological warfare and rebuild the public sphere. Some use technology, but others are doing it by preserving history in independent archives, or telling new kinds of stories.

I was right that the book would be depressing to research, but I was wrong about the science. In the US, psy ops grew out of the military’s efforts to control the minds of its enemies as efficiently as possible, using cutting-edge science. This isn’t unusual – many countries have taken a so-called rational approach to creating propaganda – but the US’s unique history gave its brand of psy ops its own peculiarities.

Psychological warfare became a professional branch of the military during the first world war, but the US government honed its psy ops skills during the 19th century, when it was at war with hundreds of Indigenous nations and confederated tribes. Often, the War Department deployed anthropologists alongside its troops, tasking them with recording the languages and traditions of communities while the military destroyed them.

Visiting an Indigenous archive at the University of Oregon in Eugene, I pored over notebooks kept by wartime anthropologists who vainly attempted to answer lists of questions provided by the government. What is the word for “God” in the Coos language? What is the tribe’s origin story? They would often give up, writing that they couldn’t make their questions understood. Sometimes they would ignore the questions and fill their books with stories from the people they interviewed.

One reason for these battlefield anthropologists was to understand the enemy. Another was to bolster claims that Indigenous people lacked the social values of “civilised” Americans and needed re-education. Among the papers were letters from the War Department about shipping Indigenous children to distant residential schools, where they would be forced to speak English and read the Bible. University of Oregon anthropologist Jason Younker, currently chief of the Coquille Indian Tribe, led the effort to preserve the documents and said the whole process was “absolutely psychological warfare”.

It was also a template for psy ops the US government would use for decades. Operatives would study their targets’ cultures and ideals, then use what they had learned to destabilise and traumatise them. In the 20th century, the military discarded anthropology and adopted psychology for this purpose. Experts taught the military how to use images and stories to arouse the emotions of their enemies, then mislead and demoralise them.

Then things got weirder. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, worked with US intelligence to combine his uncle’s work with public relations. Ultimately, he used his marketing acumen to help the CIA foment a coup in Guatemala in the 1950s. His work is partly why so many propaganda campaigns resemble ads – both use psychology in an attempt to change audiences’ behaviour.

As the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed in 2018, US political operatives continue to use this toolkit. Instead of sending anthropologists into war zones, they build “psychographic profiles” of people by harvesting their data from social media sites, then targeting them with ads.

US psy ops today are cobbled together out of scientific techniques and old-fashioned flimflammery.

Annalee’s week

What I’m reading

Victor Manibo’s delightfully evil novel Escape Velocity, which is basically Knives Out in space.

What I’m watching

The Fallout TV series, which is a disgusting and hilarious satire of US propaganda in a nuclear post-apocalypse.

What I’m working on

A novella about robots who make noodles.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological warfare and the American mind, which is out in June. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com