Exploring psyop-based conspiracy theories on social media

Psychological operations, or ‘psyops’ are routinely cited by conspiracy theorists online. The term, derived from strategic military actions designed to psychologically manipulate the enemy into a desired outcome, now (also) represents a conspiracy of a small group of actors to nefariously manipulate the general public into – for example – major social, economic, or political change. While psyops have been briefly acknowledged by academic research into conspiracy beliefs, to date no study has sought to comprehensively explore the growth and spread of the term’s use online. Utilizing soft clustering of large language model embeddings from half a million social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, 4chan, and Telegram, this study explores psyop content on social media over the past decade. The results point to a considerably wide use of the term as a conspiracy theory, both in public (i.e., Meta) and private social media settings. As the data reveals, the term’s popularity has gradually increased over the last decade, with a notable spike across all platforms near the March 2020 COVID-19 restrictions – offering some empirical evidence that the expression of psyop-based conspiracy theories has increased since the pandemic. The findings also show key (linguistic and topical) differences in how psyop conspiracy beliefs are discussed on Meta and extreme forums, though critically there remains considerable overlap across the platforms. From a theoretical perspective, the data also offers valuable – mass – evidence toward the existing psychological motivations we currently use to explain conspiratorial beliefs.