Techniques from the 2002 AJP- 3.7 NATO PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS DOCTRINE in active use today? (Part 3 of 3)
How the Trust of the most Loyal Establishment News Viewers is being Maintained...Is this by ACCIDENT or BY DESIGN?
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Canadian Shareable News presents a 3-part Series commemorating the 3 year anniversary of the 2022 Freedom Convoy
Part 1 - Introducing the BIGGEST ATTEMPTED CON JOB in Canadian Media History
(Here we look at Omission Lying, at NATO guidance on UNDERSTANDING PSYOPS & other INFORMATION WARFARE TECHNIQUES and we rate a Freedom Convoy related mainstream news report to see if it meets the Product Development Centre (PDC)/Media Section of PSYOPS Commanders…)
Part 2 - Two COUNTERMEASURES AGAINST MEDIA SILENCING TECHNIQUES
(Here you will find the brochure with links to Convoy related books and videos; a video of James Topp and his heroic cross-Canada march — unreported in the mainstream media) AND a list of topics with the question: What else is not not being reported on?)
(Here we compare 10 NATO Psychological OperationTechniques with News Coverage of Canada’s Freedom Convoy.)
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Part 3 of 3.
Quick Question:
Who in Canada is more likely to believe that that Establishment Media are “more reliable sources of information” than Social Media?
The Trusting Boomer Generation
A number of members of the 40-and under crowd, have observed that it is the baby boomers (their parent generation, the folk 60 and over) who cannot shake what they were taught in high school over 40 years ago. It is clear from brain scans and other neurological studies that the more often an idea is revisited in the brain, the more solidly it is imbedded in a person’s neural networks. Back in the Boomers’ youth, media literacy lessons included messages like:
Do not trust “activist media” because it has an “agenda”
Only three types of sources are “reliable and trustworthy”:
state funded media because it has an obligation to ensure that information being reported on has been carefully verified for accuracy
corporate media that avoids extreme views and stays firmly on the “middle of the road”
scientists and researchers from well-known and recognized institutions—check their publication records, as academic journals wouldn’t publish their work if it was shoddy and biased
With fewer years of habitual exposure and mental programming, and more openness to independent thought and insightful questions being discussed online, and more access to internet based long-form interview podcasts, increasingly, members of the younger generations are less apt to hold fast to trust in Establishment Media.
But there is also this angle to consider:
Image Source: https://creativemarket.com/bsd-studio/7321117-Psychological-warfare-svg-icon
PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS: FROM THE COMMUNICATION, MEDIA, PROPAGANDA, AND SOCIAL-CULTURE PERSPECTIVE
Here we share excerpts from a study published in August 2020 by Hendra Kaprisma (Lecturer on Media and Information Studies, University of Indonesia)
The main mission of psychological operations is to influence the behavior of the target to support the interests of the state. Changes in target behavior are the main target of psychological operations. This operation conveys selected information and recommends actions that can affect the target's emotions, intentions, goals, and behavior. When disseminating selected information in psychological operations, the organization will develop a product or message in the form of visual, audio, or a combination of the two. The organization will determine the right media to be able to provide maximum impact to reach the target. The implementation of psychological operations will involve all forces, including diplomacy, information, economy, and military operations to influence targets….
Media becomes a tool for senders to deliver messages effectively, efficiently, on target, and able to reach a wide audience….
Nowadays, psychological operations cannot be separated from the media as a component in the success of the operation….
As much as possible, the idea must be acceptable to the target, not contrary to the way of life of the general public, and make the target comfortable and even entertained. The appropriate composition will facilitate the idea of the operation influencing the target audience's daily behavior. Such conditions will also build a sense of trust between the target audience and the operations team.
In psychological operations, the role of the media is crucial. In the concept of communication, psychological operations as a tool that contains a variety of messages or information will be able to influence the target audience. As a tool, the media has various forms, ranging from audio, visual, to audio-visual. The use of media in psychological operations is a more effective and efficient way rather than the sender having a direct meeting with the target audience. By using media, the scope of access to messages or information will be wider and the time spent will also be shorter. Moreover, the media has been adapted to the needs and conditions (physical and socio-cultural environment) of the targets and the process of receiving messages or information will be even better….
Apart from being a tool, the media has value as consumption, especially for the receiver of the message (the target audience). This consumption value is potential for the psychological operations team in delivering messages that will later be able to influence the target's behavior and attitudes. Moreover, the consumption of the media has become a habit of the target audience, thus the psychological operations team must maximize this potential. The pattern of consumption of media that has become a habit will create "trust" in the media. Targets for those who are accustomed to consuming certain media have the potential to have trust in the media. In this case, the media has the power and important role to influence and change the attitudes and behavior of the general public.
A study by Donald Shaw and Maxwell McCombs in the 1970s stated that “the media played a vital role, not so much in "telling people what to think, but what to think about" regarding important campaign issues and other matters” (Dimaggio, 2009). Shaw and McCombs prioritize the power of media which can change people's perception of an issue because of the high level of consumption and trust in the media. In the context of psychological operations, the level of trust and consumption (access) to the media is a variable that must be considered because it is related to the dissemination of ideas following the objectives of the operation. In other words, consumption and trust in the media are very influential on the results to be achieved in a psychological operation.
The media is an important tool to influence public opinion and convey various kinds of information, in the form of facts, opinions, and false news. The level of trust and access to the media is a potential for the psychological operations team to instill values that are consistent with the objectives of the operation. Antony R. Dimaggio (Dimaggio, 2009) states, “if consumer trust in media is strong, then propaganda originating from within that media system will be more effective in influencing the opinions and ideologies of audiences; conversely, if public trust in media is relatively weak, media propaganda may be less accepted or convincing to those who follow the news.” www.researchgate.net/publication/343586582_PSYCHOLOGICAL_OPERATIONS_FROM_THE_COMMUNICATION_MEDIA_PROPAGANDA_AND_SOCIAL-CULTURE_PERSPECTIVE
mpsotc.army.gr/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/1.-AJP-3.7-NATO-Psychological-Operations-Doctrine-1.pdf
NATO PSYOP TECHNIQUES - Could they explain the way the Freedom Convoy news coverage was handled?
Below is a copy of the list of “Possible techniques” from the 2002 NATO Psychological Operations (PsyOp) document shared in our post from February 28, 2025. We added the bold font to highlight certain techniques that we believe can be detected in an examination of Convoy related news-reporting (or lack thereof).
D0108. Possible techniques. The following is a palette of techniques, which have been used successfully in the past….
Direct Refutation. Point by point rebuttal of the hostile message. The aim is to completely discredit the message and, by implication, other messages originating from the same source. The disadvantage of this technique is that it requires the enemy’s message to be repeated in full, which re-advertises it.
Indirect Refutation. The refutation here is by introducing a new line of argument which will, to the audience, dispose of the enemy’s allegation. The audience must be led to make the connection itself.
Forestalling. Beating the enemy to the punch. Announcing our reverses before the enemy announces their victory.
Diversion. Direct audience's attention away from the issues being raised.
Initiative Deception. The deliberate distortion of the adversary psychological
activities. His own themes and symbols are turned against him.
Minimisation. Reduce the importance of an issue and dismiss it as trivial.
Immunisation. Insulate people from outside influences. Pre-conditioning or indoctrination ensures that the audience will automatically dismiss messages from a particular source.
Silence. By saying nothing it may blow over and soon be forgotten.
Restrictive Measures. Deny the target audience access to an adversary’s
psychological activity.
Rumour Control. Counter with education of population and delivery of timely information and data to population.
Note the way in which citizen voices are reframed as “the hostile message”, one that is to be discredited, along with other messages also coming from this same source.
The Psyop handbook tells its psy-op agents to introduce a new line of argument to refute the “enemy’s allegation.”
Trish Woods has reported on how the combined Government + Establishment Media voices “beat Canadians to the punch” by announcing even before the first trucks crossed the BC border into the rest of Canada, that this convoy was already known to be racist.
So, what better diversion AWAY from the truckers’ and doctors’ request to see the data upon whic the vax, mask and lockdown mandates were predicated than to pull out the Swasitika flag? That diversion was certainly effective at sidelining the main issue!
So, Canadian truckers went from “heroes” to “zeroes” once they started heading to our capital city. During the lockdowns, they were praised (even by the Prime Minister) for having kept the supply chains going. In this “truckertarian” society in which we live (eating primarily food delivered by truck) truck drivers are ESSENTIAL SERVICE WORKERS and were lauded alongside of workers within the health care system for having kept society intact during the first few years of the declared pandemic. And yet, the psy-op was to deliberately distort the positive image Canadians had built up around truckers at the time. This was now done by painting these generous, tough and hardworking fellow Canadians in negative tones — suddenly, mainstream government-funded Established media referred to the NOISE they made in their OCCUPATION of our Capital City. All manner of false news stories came out about them, a technique included in the Hendra Kaprisma write-up shown above.
Many of the truckers had been persuaded to receive the mRNA COVID-19 injections. Yet one of the key reasons for the truckers’ willingness to undertake the grand venture of the Convoy was to stand up for the rights of their fellow truckers to freely be able to CHOOSE what to allow into their bodies. If “my body, my choice” worked in other contexts, why not in this one? By this time, there had already been countless cases of severe adverse events (and sudden deaths) covered in alternative media. Not being able to deny the correlation, the next official tactic was to minimize the frequency of occurrence… We started hearing lines like: “Well, there always will be sooooome cases where adverse events happen, but overall, that number is sooooooo tiny with respect to the total number of vaccines given. Really, as a whole, the shots are still truly safe and effective.” Another word for this is “gaslighting.”
This “immunization” against the ‘adversary’s’ message occurred in multiple ways. In the 2000s a new academic disciple arose:
Infodemiology utilizes a variety of methods and techniques, including data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and social network analysis. It also involves collaboration between different disciplines such as public health, computer science, sociology, and psychology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infodemiology
Covid-19 created a perfect demand for practitioners of this new science. Suddenly, people without much background in immunology, virology and the like were issuing pronouncements on the work of experts in these fields — any findings that did not align with government narratives could now be rejected as “misinformation, disinformation or malinformation”. Infodemiologists went so far as to attempt not only to “debunk” inconvenient scientific findings, contrary historical facts, or the views of dissident doctors and other whistleblowers, they also spoke of the need to “prebunk” their statements. Newswatchers were to be purposely introduced to tiny bits of misinformation in a controlled environment in order to hone their skills at recognizing more of such misinformation later on their own. Here is one creative example, as described by Psychology Today:
www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/misinformation-desk/202108/what-is-prebunking
“while mainstream media is silent on the matter” Since we started Canadian Shareable News a year ago, we found ourselves using variations of this phrase in nearly everything we published. If it were not for media silence on so many crucial issues of our time, there would have been no reason to start our publication at all.
If no one talks about someone or something, few people will be aware of its existence. It might well have simply never occurred. George Orwell referred to a “memory hole” for this reason. Silence is the perfect technique for “memory holing” inconvenient, counter-narrative information.
Image Source: https://study.com/academy/lesson/memory-hole-in-1984.html
With ZERO accounts of the Freedom Convoy three years after the fact, mainstream, establishment news watchers might well forget it ever took place. Did any journalist in any of the mainstream outlets put out the suggestion that it might be time to revisit the topic? Or were all of these techniques so successful that NO ONE in mainstream news outlets even wanted to address this topic at all?
This technique of information restriction is ongoing. Tell employees not to discuss this or that topic at work. Withhold funding to a physician unless x% of their patients of a certain age take a certain procedure. Make an example of colleagues who do not comply, punishing them with extreme measures (loss of licence, impossibly high fees, etc.) Make use of a certain advisory panel to go around to every top level (fill in the profession… from chief of police, to chief of a court bench, to religious bishops, to school administrators) telling them that xyz topic must be dealt with a certain way, and so weaponizing their compassion. Pass new laws without transparency. Shadowban key influencers so that their posts don’t widely show up. Imprison them, locking them up in maximum security, as has been done with German American lawyer Reiner Fuellmich in Germany for the past 17 months…
Do anything and everything to shield the target audience (i.e. the compliant population) from messaging that could sway it away from your narrative through exposure to information and experiences being shared by the “dissidents” (aka the “adversaries”).
The second part here is the weakest point. For those carrying out what certainly does appear like a series of mass psychological operations, it is easy to control “rumours” by referring to them as “conspiracy theories”. But it is less easy to ‘Counter with education of population and delivery of timely information and data to population.’ In the absence of verifiably accurate timely information and data, the countering has mostly consisted of producing more propaganda.
The realization that what one has relied upon for one’s entire life is NOT TO BE TRUSTED, can be quite overwhelming for many people. Once this realization takes root, these people may well need the support of others who have already had a similar transformation in their thinking.
Image source: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/brain-explosion-19111285.jpg
Even without referring to the NATO list of psy-op techniques, increasingly more people are losing trust in the establishment media. The following sentiment is growing…
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Canadian Shareable News presents a 3-part Series commemorating the 3 year anniversary of the 2022 Freedom Convoy
Part 1 - Introducing the BIGGEST ATTEMPTED CON JOB in Canadian Media History
(Here we look at Omission Lying, at NATO guidance on UNDERSTANDING PSYOPS & other INFORMATION WARFARE TECHNIQUES and we rate a Freedom Convoy related mainstream news report to see if it meets the Product Development Centre (PDC)/Media Section of PSYOPS Commanders…)
Part 2 - Two COUNTERMEASURES AGAINST MEDIA SILENCING TECHNIQUES
(Here you will find the brochure with links to Convoy related books and videos; a video of James Topp and his heroic cross-Canada march — unreported in the mainstream media) AND a list of topics with the question: What else is not not being reported on?)
(Here we compare 10 NATO Psychological OperationTechniques with News Coverage of Canada’s Freedom Convoy.)
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