New York Times is Trying to Explain Psyops

This feels like an important milestone in mainstream reporting, and a very positive one

On Jan 28, 2025, the New York Times “The Daily” podcast published an episode that I would describe as “Anatomy of a Psyop”. A psyop is short for “psychological operation”. You can think of it as a marketing campaign, or propaganda, designed to change people’s behavior (without them realizing it’s happening). The most effective psyops are true: as in, they use completely true information to lead you to behavior that may be against your best interests.

Hollywood smear campaign

In this NYT episode, they’re analyzing a smear campaign that a Hollywood actor (Justin Baldoni) paid for to discredit the work of his collaborator (Blake Lively). The most notable part is that they’re describing the existence of secretive companies you can pay to perform “narrative engineering”, and how genuinely effective it is:

They hired a digital contractor who offers crisis management services. His name is Jed Wallace, and there's actually very little trace of him online, but in a deleted LinkedIn profile, he described himself as a “hired gun”, with a proprietary formula for defining artists and trends

This is not new, but a source like the NYT spelling it out like this IS new, as far as I’m aware. It’s not a conspiracy anymore that you can manufacture narratives and change the opinions of smart, reasonable people en-masse. It’s mainstream now.

They describe text messages of this propaganda work, obtained from a lawsuit these actors filed against each other:

Well, for instance, one PR person texts Melissa, “the narrative online is so freaking good and fans are still sticking up for Justin. You did such amazing work”.

She writes and Nathan replies, “narrative is crazy good. The majority of socials are so pro Justin and I don't even agree with half of them. LOL.”

Does propaganda actually work?

One way that mass persuasion has been dismissed before is that people will claim these tactics don’t work, that no one actually has the power to “brainwash people”, that things spread & go viral randomly, and you can’t prove that the marketing campaign changed what was going to unfold naturally.

They bring this up in the episode:

But Megan, do we know actually whether the online backlash against Lively is the result of these very specific things that the team is doing?

We don't, I mean, it's difficult to know how much of the backlash was authentic and how much they might have seeded and amplified the discussion. What we do know is that in addition to the backlash against Lively, by the end of the movie's promotional run, there was also a very strong pro Justin narrative online, which the team was celebrating.

The answer is: it absolutely works. People are fairly predictable. The easiest way to prove this is to run narrative A/B tests on human populations & watch their behavior. This infrastructure already exists, at all big tech companies. Which narratives spread, and how they affect human behavior, is a science. But the scientists at credible institutions aren’t allowed to run experiments like this, for ethical reasons. The missing piece is for someone to do what all the companies & governments are already doing, and publish what they learn.

This is one of the things I tweeted that got me a lot of attention & funding:

I need something in between the Russian troll farms @bennjordan described, and like, a public research lab. An "open culture institute" that A/B tests people and publishes the result, for the general public

tweet thread

“But if people know they are being watched, they change their behavior!” “you can’t reproduce these experiments, once people see the results, so it’s not a real science!” → these are lame excuses. The source of truth is predictive power. People changing their behavior because of your test is itself one more variable for you to model. Whether what you predict happens, consistently, is the unfakeable test¹.

Do journalists inform or do they manipulate?

I was on the edge of my seat throughout the whole episode: will this be self aware? Will they call out how often journalists themselves use these tactics?

They stop just shy of admitting it, but I was VERY pleased that they made this connection to politics explicit, saying, “if this happens in Hollywood, imagine how much of what we consume online is being manipulated to serve one interest or another” (where the stakes are much higher, and there’s much greater incentive)

I hope this trend continues. I hope we see good faith news say things like, “remember, to get the full story, listen to what the other side says for yourself”². Aggregators like Ground News do a really good job here, and individual publications like Tangle which steelman both sides and give you their own biased opinion, all clearly marked.

I’ve been wanting to write an essay called “The Myth of the Unbiased Journalist”. The summary is: there is no such thing, and anyone who claims they are unbiased is either a fool or trying to manipulate you. The correct way to understand journalists is to see them as lawyers. A good lawyer does not lie, but they are extremely biased, and it would be crazy to listen to only one lawyer and make up your mind. One unbiased lawyer fails to surface the truth compared to two very biased lawyers + a judge. All of this is true for journalists.

I feel like the day is coming soon where a lawyer/journalist who gets up & says “trust me, I will explain both sides to you so that you can make an informed decision” will be laughed out of the room.

One thing I’m looking forward to is the book

Guy

has been writing where he’ll spell out how to spot manipulation like this, and most importantly for me: invite the readers at the end to apply what they learned to the news they consume, and share their results. I think it’s brilliant because it doubles as a way to practice spotting these techniques, but also raise awareness about who is using them, crowdsourcing this monitoring. I notice this all the time now, and I wish I had a kind of study group that met weekly where we all share what we found and write a blog about it.

I think this fits very well with my “Criticizing your own tribe is how you win” thing, we can just hold the people we trust accountable. We do this not (just) out of respect for the commons, but because we want to win. Because manipulative tactics hurt those with truth on their side more than they help.

1. @speakerjoshnash wrote about this in “the prophet incentive”, about how a world that rewards those that make successful predictions generally is a better, more beautiful world

2. This would be the polar opposite of the John Oliver technique of strawmanning the other side so that your mind is primed with counterarguments, a kind of inoculation against opposing ideas.