How the US used science to wage psychological war

I have a new book coming out in June, and New Scientist is to blame. Back in the summer of 2020, I wrote this column about a study led by computational social scientist Meysam Alizadeh, who worked to algorithmically predict waves of propaganda on Twitter and Reddit. Alizadeh said he and his colleagues wanted to create a “propaganda weather report” so that people on social media would be forewarned about incoming influence campaigns. It seemed like a great idea.

As we talked, I told Alizadeh about a complex psychological operations (psy ops) campaign I had witnessed on Twitter –…