To Silicon Valley, anything could be a ‘psyop’

(CNN) — Most Americans don’t want AI data centers near them. There are plenty of well-reported reasons why: People may be concerned about the environmental impacts, or angry over AI companies threatening mass unemployment and skeptical of promises that data centers will usher in a jobs boom. They could be worried about higher utility bills. Then there’s the noise. The constant, maddening noise.

But in Silicon Valley, a different, more sinister explanation for the anti-data center movement has taken hold.

“Reminder: the datacenter discourse is a documented psyop and they’re winning,” the venture capitalist and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan wrote on X last week. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian concurred. “It’s been brilliantly executed ngl,” he replied. “Facts are not gonna win this, esp at this point, it’s gotta be on emotional appeal.”

Accompanying Tan’s claim was a flow chart that presented the Chinese government and state media as amplifying anti-AI and anti-data center messaging, based on reports from a cryptocurrency advocacy group.

OpenAI has made similar statements about China, and the AI-powered threat intelligence company Alethea found that China, Russia and Iran have attempted to exploit data center backlash. Their effect on public opinion, though, is unclear.

In calling opposition to data centers and artificial intelligence a “psyop,” Tan and other industry leaders have picked up a term and a rhetorical strategy popularized online and in right-wing media in recent years, said Daniel de Zeeuw, a lecturer in new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam.

“It just manages to establish this field of uncertainty where nobody knows what’s true anymore,” he said. “Everything can be a psyop. Everything can be an influence operation.”

“Psyop” is short for psychological operation, a technical term for a military campaign meant to influence an opponent’s attitudes or beliefs. Though the idea of subduing an adversary without physical force is at least as old as Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” modern psychological warfare developed in the 20th century, with warring parties in both World Wars using planes and hydrogen balloons to drop propaganda leaflets on enemy lines.

The word “psyop” came later. A 1949 US Army field manual titled “Psychological Warfare in Combat Operations” codified the concept, and the shortened “psywar” appeared in a Washington Post article in 1951. The US continued to use leaflet drops and loudspeaker campaigns, in which the military broadcast propaganda to adversaries, during the Cold War and Korean War.

The US military ramped up its use of psychological warfare during the Vietnam War. In a campaign known as Operation Wandering Soul, US forces played recordings of eerie sounds and voices where combatants were fighting in the jungle. The “ghost tapes” were meant to mimic dead Viet Cong soldiers and preyed on local beliefs that those without proper burials would roam aimlessly. A 1962 Army field manual referred to these practices of manipulation and influence as “Psychological Operations.” The abbreviated “psyop” began appearing in newspaper stories in 1965, and later featured in a 1979 Army field manual.

“A new key element in the Vietnam struggle against Communist forces is a stepping up of the pace in the battle of ideas,” reads a 1965 article in the Christian Science Monitor. “The expanded effort in psychological operations, or ‘psy ops’, as the program is called, was one of the topics taken up at last week’s White House discussions.” US Army Psyop became a formal regiment in November 1998 and a regular Army branch in October 2006, according to Army historian Jared M. Tracy.

Psyops can be overt or covert, but they’re designed with a clear objective, said Jan Goldman, a professor of intelligence and security studies at The Citadel who has also worked on psyops. Overt leaflet and loudspeaker campaigns, which the US military also used during the Gulf War and in Iraq and Afghanistan, were meant to weaken morale and instill fear (to dubious success). The US also used more complicated psyops in Latin America in the ’60s and ’70s to undermine socialist and communist regimes and install leaders more favorable to its own aims, said Goldman. In 1964, the CIA enlisted US ad agencies to stoke fears about communism in Chilean media and help elect a US-backed candidate.

Psyops also figured in US attempts to topple the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In addition to assassination plots, US intelligence agencies also considered ways to diminish his authority and standing among the Cuban people — one especially bizarre idea involved sprinkling thallium salt on his shoes to make his iconic beard fall out, Goldman said.

As details of US psyops became public over the years, the word “psyop” developed a negative connotation. In 2010, the armed forces replaced “psyop” with the less freighted acronym MISO, or military information support operations. Last year, however, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — in his ongoing effort to make his department’s work sound more menacing — ordered the military to revert back to “psyop.”

In the internet era, “psyop” made its way onto 4chan and other niche platforms where conspiratorial belief proliferated, typically implying a nefarious plot by a small coalition to manipulate others, said Justin Bonest Phillips, a political scientist and lecturer at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Phillips’ research found a spike in online usage of the word around the Covid pandemic in 2020; he noted that it’s since been used in reference to any number of purported conspiracies, not just by anonymous users but also influential figures including Elon Musk. In the years following the pandemic, the term also moved into more mainstream conservative media.

A 2024 Washington Post story described Fox News host Jesse Watters as “perhaps the most influential superspreader of the term.” Watters ran a segment that year suggesting that Taylor Swift was a Defense Department asset, or in the words of the chyron, a “Pentagon psyop.”

The basis of his accusation? A speaker at a NATO cybersecurity conference in 2019 used Swift as an example of an influential celebrity in discussing how counterintelligence officials might work with public figures to sway people en masse — though, as the Post journalist Jeremy Barr noted, the speaker did not call Swift a government asset nor was she speaking on behalf of the US government.

On other occasions, as Barr reported, Watters and his Fox News colleagues used “psyop” more vaguely to suggest government conspiracies to influence Americans, without any evidence or clear rationale around why the government was supposedly targeting its constituents.

“Psyop” is no longer just a right-wing or conspiratorial term. It’s routinely thrown around online, both sincerely and in jest, to describe anything that feels inauthentic. When it was revealed that the band Geese used a digital marketing firm that deployed thousands of social media accounts to boost their music in users’ feeds, critics called the band a psyop. Whenever something or someone explodes in popularity seemingly overnight, psyop accusations tend to follow. See also: the gay dating app Goose, the looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular, pickleball.

The word psyop today is a kind of shorthand for “information I don’t trust,” said William Marcellino, a senior behavioral scientist and policy analyst at RAND Corporation. “If you don’t agree with something, you can just say, ‘Oh, that’s disinformation. It’s misinformation. It’s a psyop. It’s fake news,’” he added.

Navigating disinformation, paid promotion and AI-generated content is now a routine aspect of being online — conditions that de Zeeuw said can feel like living under a state of information warfare. As militaries adapted persuasion techniques from the advertising world, and as former intelligence officials applied their skills to political advertising (as in the case of Cambridge Analytica), the lines have blurred.

Whether it’s a foreign actor conducting an influence operation or a tech company using sophisticated algorithms to target individual users, for the end user, the effect starts to feel the same. “There’s this pervasive sense of suspicion or ambiguity about being online that I think this psyop term really captures quite well,” de Zeeuw said.

Two things can be true. US adversaries stand to benefit from slowing down the growth of America’s AI sector. And Silicon Valley founders and CEOs stand to gain by building data centers as fast as they can.

In trying to discredit public concerns about data centers as a psyop, Goldman and others said, tech leaders are taking a page out of the intelligence playbook themselves.

“There are real concerns about that AI,” said Goldman. “The best way not to address those concerns is to attack and do your own psyop campaign.”

The-CNN-Wire
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