Episode 239 - My YouTube channel is getting PSYOP'ed

[work in progress]

Intro

This will be a different video than I normally make. Every now and then, something happens on my channel that is so weird I literally have to stop everything I am doing and address it. All of a sudden, my privacy videos are getting flooded with trolls commenting the same defeatist position – no matter what you do you will never have privacy. They are usually posted extremely quickly, usually within minutes of me publishing my video. They instantly become one of the top comments in each video’s comment section. They are always broad general statements on the topic without discussing or critiquing any particular point I make in my videos, conveniently hiding the fact that they have never watched my video.

If this was one of those investment scams, I would just ban these accounts as spam and move on. But these accounts aren’t promoting anyone in particular. So what is going on? My channel has always been about offering solutions. I do highlight problems, yes, but then I promote reasonable things anyone can do, such as using Signal, GrapheneOS or privacy preserving alternatives. So where is all of this trolling coming from? I think I have the answer. I think I know who this benefits and who this is targeting. So let me show you what I am talking about.

The comments

This is where I first noticed something was off – my video on the most private phone. I was hoping to start a fruitful debate on how we should evaluate what makes a phone more private than the other and I pit all popular options against each other. Instead of that being the highlight of the comment section, it’s this: “2 cups and a bit of string. Attach a 3rd string if you want a conference call.” Notice how this comment doesn’t contribute anything of substance about how I compare iPhone with Google Pixel, or stock Android with Android forks… It’s a funny comment. But it’s a defeatist comment. Because the implication suggests that nothing modern can be reasonably private. So the most private phone is just as bad as the least private phone. Which is blatant disinformation. I like someone’s response though: “if you are both girls, you only need one cup”. A good one.

But there is more. “The best option is to live in a cabin in the woods, no tech around you, and spend the rest of life enjoying fishing trips”.

“Most private phone is the one you don’t use”.

“The three golden rules to ensure cell phone security are: do not own a cell phone; do not power it on; and do not use it.”

“There is no privacy on smarpthones.”

“Thank you for that big brain hot take.”

Yes, thank you indeed.

What do you notice about these comments? What’s the biggest thing they all have in common? It’s that none of them even mention anything I have to say in my video. They are so broad and general it’s clear they didn’t watch the video they are commenting on. They are just commenting on the general topic. Because nowhere in my video do I mention that no phone is private. In my methodology there are clear differences between the iPhone and most Android phones and there is a clear winner and a loser.

But these comments are not there to convince me. They are there to sow doubt in you, or rather, the general audience. Anyone could easily replicate my analysis and compare the results. But many viewers are not gonna do that so they are just gonna to the judgment of the community. If that judgment promotes apathy, then my efforts to encourage people to opt for more reasonably private options are nullified.

After this I went back to my video on how I don’t use a SIM card, where I lay out all the dangers of telecommunication surveillance. It’s not for everybody, but it’s meant to inform people and encourage them to find safer ways to connect with others. None of which, by the way, include secluding yourself to a cabin in the woods Ted Kazcynski style. But the comments are instead:

“Time to lock ourselves up in a room without electronics to get privacy these days.”

“This is next level paranoia. Honestly, why even have a ph if you’re never going to make or receive ph calls??”

“At this point, just don’t take your phone with you, use a beeper or a talkie walkie for comms, and look at stars for direction.”

So this is how I know none of the people commenting even bothered to watch the first 10 seconds of my video. They are just commenting based of the title and the thumbnail. Because right in the intro, I lay out exactly how I use my phone as a WiFi-only device, with all capabilities to text, make voice and video calls, navigate maps, watch YouTube videos or do you know... literally anything you can do on any other phone. Because you are not paying $1,000 for a smartphone to make phone calls and send SMS texts with. You are buying precisely and because it has Internet access. And for me, 99% of my phone usage happens over the Internet only on my own or someone else’s WiFi connection. But yeah, if I don’t use SIM I might as well ditch all 99% of things I do on my phone and just a use “talkie walkie”, or a “beeper” which has no up-to-date security and broadcasts to everyone, not just telecom companies.

Again, just low-effort disinformation designed to confuse users that privacy solutions are too extreme to be reasonable under any circumstance and if you consider them, then you must be mentally impaired with paranoid delusions.

The campaign

This is why I think these comments are either part of an organized campaign or the commentators are themselves a victim of one. That’s sounds exactly like something a paranoid person or someone who just lost an election would say. I understand the sentiment, so hear me out.

We know that half the governments around the world are directly engaging in manipulating social media content to control public discourse where censorship is inapplicable. They do this by paying bot farms or sometimes troll farms with real people to sit at their keyboards and engage in comments and threads on social media. Let me give you some of the craziest examples that I’ve found.

Vietnam, for instance, has 10k strong “cyber troop” dedicated to “fighting against wrongful views in cyberspace”.

The Chinese government hired as many as 2,000,000 people on a mission they call “Strategic Distraction”, which the government uses to fabricate half a billion posts and comments on social media every year.

And I can’t not mention infamous Russian “Active Measures”, which is a serious of Soviet-era tactic still employed in Russia today, that spread disinformation and deception to influence public perception, usually to lower the morale of society and confuse the public about what’s really true and what isn’t.

I am using these governments as examples but any government with an intelligence agency is engaging in some form of this kind of psychological operation. Because that’s what this fundamentally – a psychological operation.

The goal of a psychological operation is to find a target’s “capacity for self deception” and use it against them. A successful PSYOP will manage to spread apathy and make the populace disengage. In the words from Sun Tzu’s Art of War – it’s to make an “army of superior numbers not to fight”.

I think this is what’s happening in the comment sections on my videos. When somebody comments that your only bet is to live in a cabin the woods, it fundamentally promotes resignation. Don’t even try. There is nothing reasonable you can do short self-sabotage by locking yourself in a room without electronics.

If you think I am wrong, what else do you think these comments promote? Even if these comments are genuine and are not part of a PSYOP, intelligence agencies seeking to break your privacy rights definitely benefit when more people resign.

And if you don’t resign, you are the suspicious one. “What is bro hiding?” You have nothing to fear if you have nothing hide. It’s confusing, isn’t it – either the system is so bad you can do nothing to protect yourself; or you are paranoid for trying to protect yourself. It doesn’t matter if the messaging is contradictory. The goal isn’t truth. It’s confusion.

I love this comment: “It is the government’s job to protect digital privacy. All this tricks done by individuals is impractical.” It is the government’s job? The same government that tells companies not to fix vulnerabilities so that they can hack them more easily? The same government that couldn’t protect its hacks from getting stolen, which resulted in crippling ransomware attacks around the world?

Then there are comments that are designed to lead you into error and take away your initiative to take the right steps that would genuinely help you.

“Whenever they tell me somethings private and super encrypted I know that’s where the NSA hangs out the most.”

So if you can’t trust an encrypted service because the NSA is there, then you must use an unencrypted service? I love these conspiracies about the NSA. Because it is the ultimate spying agency, we know they have some of the best hacking capabilities in the world. But we also know that encryption works. It makes mass surveillance too expensive to conduct because it’s mathematically impossible to break modern encryption algorithms. If it wasn’t the case, then we wouldn’t have Internet banking, password managers or online accounts. This is the nuance of security – it’s impossible to build an impenetrable room, but you want to make it too costly for thieves to pick your house as their target.

Conclusion

PSYOP is propaganda. And as such, anyone can believe in it and spread it further. There are always gonna be people who genuinely believe that either nothing can be done or that there is nothing to worry about. But it’s really strange when these two contradicting opinions are the most popular comments on social media channels like mine that promote most reasonable and measured analysis and response.

It is hard if not impossible to tell when someone holds these beliefs genuinely and when they are just trolling. But I think there is a way you and I can combat this.

First of all – whenever you think there is a bot or a troll in the comments, report them. Fake accounts and bots should be purged from social media.

Second, whenever you see these fiery comments, think critically about them – do they promote apathy or resignation? Who do their comments benefit the most? Do they want to change your attitude?