What memes or pieces of media in general you believe are psyops or were pushed out as a psyop, but have no proof of it. - eviltoast

Observations I had:

  1. DEATH TO THE MPLA meme

refers to a clip from the 2012 video game Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 in which military leader Jonas Savimbi rallies his troops against the MPLA…

it became a meme 3 years ago, and the whole “meme” is having a screenshot of the clip in the middle of random videos… that’s the meme, just having a hidden dude that screams death to the MPLA in random videos.

  1. The Russian sleep experiment, I’m sure most of the people heard of it, basically it was this story of Soviet scientists torturing war prisoners through not making them sleep and using gas on them until they became barely human and were promised freedom if they survived… the story is obviously false and originates from a 2010s creepy pasta post, the story got extremely popularized that it even got made into short films, what makes me believe it’s a psyop is that it serves as a counter point to Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay, it’s also conveniently called “Russian sleep experiment” and not “Soviet sleep experiment”, it’s a lie protected by “it’s actually made in creepy pasta so it’s just a horror story not propaganda”.
  • LarkinDePark@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    “Fuck the CCP” on Reddit is without a shadow of a doubt in my mind, a product of pure propaganda. No way was that organic.

  • Amerikan Pharaoh@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    The whole of the CoD series. You can’t tell me there isn’t a kernel, if not a full-blown root that speaks the truth of the Pentagon’s floated and/or codified-for-the-future plans. It’s been interactive consent manufacture since they gave up on re-representing long-past conflicts(which was already creepy enough) and started fictionalizing the World Police Empire™.

    • Addfwyn@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      They have military consultants on staff, including Oliver North (a guy who was literally convicted of multiple felony war crime charges, that was only overturned on immunity)

      100% the CoD series is made at least partially as propaganda. The primary reason is probably still to make money, because capitalism, but the military propaganda is probably a close sceond.

    • proletarian_girlboss@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      Definitely. Along with all the other military shooters. I think I once read that the US military actively uses Call of Duty for recruitment (as in, seeks out g*mers directly). It is incredible the lengths this kind of propaganda can go to without raising suspicions, and how much has been built around it.

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      This is definitely true post the original Modern Warfare 2. In that game the Americans end up being the bad guys and you kill the top American general in the finale. You also spend the first mission as a CIA agent taking part in a terrorist attack. No way that kind of plot would be acceptable in Call Of Duty today. Ever since the start of the Black Ops series right after MW2 the plots have gotten more and more propagandistic. They also had to fudge the plot of the original Modern Warfare 3 and retcon some stuff from the first Modern Warfare game to make the US the good guys again. Then there was advanced warfare with the Kevin Spacey cameo, then the modern warfare reboot where real life American war crimes were falsely attributed to Russia.

  • Beat_da_Rich@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    Every leftist Hollywood movie villain is always some extreme ultraleft accelerationist. See: Killmonger

    And every leftist Hollywood hero is an anarchist.

    • Mzuark@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      Killmonger and Namor both bring up valid points but then do something needlessly evil so you don’t take them as seriously.

      • TeezyZeezy@lemmygrad.ml
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        11 months ago

        Exactly lol it’s always like “wait he’s spitting facts” then he has to eat babies or something to make sure we know those crazy tankies are out for blood

    • Soul_Greatsword@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      Even the ones that aren’t blatant leftists represent a break of the status quo. Big budget heroes always want to keep things as they are and are never fighting for positive change.

      • Beat_da_Rich@lemmygrad.ml
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        11 months ago

        Recently there was an Anarchist Spiderman in the latest Spiderverse movie, the Fireflies in Last of Us (while technically “antagonists” they were still very much portrayed as the heroes of the story), Green Arrow, V from V for Vendetta come to mind off the top of my head.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    I think that the whole anti-authoritarian left movement in the west is one giant psyop to divert people from effective organizing. The media actively promotes anarchism while demonizing Marxism, and I think the reason is precisely that anarchism is a roach motel for the left.

  • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    AirPods were seen as a joke, with people mocking them incessantly and demanding the headphone jack back… then one month before Christmas a mysterious “Oh no he can’t hear us! They have AirPods in” meme, shows up on Reddit, propagated by almost entirely bot accounts.

    It highlights the noise canceling, and it made everyone think of AirPods. Next thing you know everyone wants then and they’re now one of apples top selling products.

    • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      It absolutely was.

      The original joke was can you imagine if we lived in such a strange and alien universe that Biden actually did something good.

      Then they just slapped him with glowing eyes on anythingnhe did to insinuate it was good.

      Like the original memes were dark Brandon signing a bill for rent co trol, can you imagine if Biden actually did something to help working class people.

      Now we get news articles about how dark Brandon just pledged to give another 10 mil in arms contracts to Isreal. Which is about as on brand for him as you could possibly imagine.

    • BoxedFenders [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      It stopped being cool the moment his administration embraced it. They could have kept it going a bit longer if they refused to acknowledge the meme and pretended to distance themselves from it.

  • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    I think the original Russian Sleep Experiment is genuine creepypasta. It has that unnecessarily edgy vibe where they talk about “killing god” or whatever.

    The important thing to remember is that the US state department loves using existing media to further their agenda. They find something that fits their purposes, modify it and then broadcast their version of it. Having it originally be a creepypasta that can be traced back to just some regular person gives it way more legitimacy than if the whole thing was astroturfed.

    • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      It’s a bit funny when you realize the image is just an oversaturated picture of a Spirit Halloween Ghoul decoration lol

        • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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          11 months ago

          Not really in that case. That photo is still unidentified. There’s a bounty out currently for a few tens of thousands for whoever can bring proof of the image and its source.

  • Ronin_5@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    The systemic elimination of Marxism and left wing ideology, rewriting history conflating left wing ideology as originating from capitalism and the free market.

    • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      Is that even really up for debate though? We can see how worker’s movements have been systematically brought under the thumb of capital as they learned ways to pacify workers to prevent revolution.

      • Ronin_5@lemmygrad.ml
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        11 months ago

        I think it’s the fact that because they’ve found ways to pacify the workers through their widespread use of propaganda, that it becomes up for debate.

        Because if you go into the street and say this, nobody’s going to believe you.

        • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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          11 months ago

          That’s true. I was looking at the responses here and thinking “Really? People are just “suspicious” about that one?”

          But I’m thinking like an evil redfash tankie. If I tried to explain to my lib friends that Call of Duty is a psyop by the US military to increase recruitment and approval for their actions overseas, they would look at me like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist.

  • Mzuark@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    Tide Pods. I watch a lot of meme videos, partly because they’re funny (when they aren’t racist) and partly because it’s a good way to see where the mental state of young people is at. So in the weeks leading up to the big Tide Pod controversy of 2018, there were dozens of videos that had memes about Tide Pods being candy or harmless, knowing that kids and stupid adults would be interested in trying them out. Then, the Challenge went viral, the news made a circus out of it and everyone was like “Oh those stupid kids! Worst generation ever.”

    No way it was a coincidence.

  • Rafidhi [her/هي]@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    I suspect that a sizeable amount of the “Pro-Russian” telegram channels have been hijacked and taken over by Ukrainian propagandists who post basically the same content except every once and awhile they throw in fantastically fake news during high profile moments to agitate people. We saw it during the “Russian Civil War of 2023” and right after October 7th and a few other events where all of a sudden they were repeating basically NATO talking points. Intel Slava Z in particular is one of the sus ones.

    It wouldn’t be unprecedented.

    "In addition to official media outlets, Ukraine’s Information and Psychological Operations Centers rely on several thousand internet resources including information and news sites, social networks, and coordinated social media groups.

    Even before the start of Russia’s military campaign, certain Ukrainian volunteer internet information resources were controlled by IPsO centers. This included the volunteer communities InformNapalm, (informnapalm.org ), Peacemaker (psb4ukr.org ), Information Resistance (sprotyv.info ), as well as commercial sites (seebreeze.org.ua, petrimazepa.com, podvodka.info, metelyk.org, mfaua.org, burkonews.info, euromaidanpress.com , peopleproject.com and others) used for information campaigns and testing “social engineering” technologies. In particular, it was noted that IPsO officers often operated under the guise of “volunteers” and pseudo-bloggers.

    Ukraine uses various tools – including websites, social networks, and bots – to spread disinformation. In April, hackers from RaHDit and other groups revealed Ukrainian Telegram channels presumably supervised by the SBU, which posed as pro-Russian. An entire network of such channels, with an audience of 5-6 million people, was discovered during the investigation. The list includes channels Operation Z, Novorossiya 2.0, and many others."

    • Grimble [he/him,they/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      So many of those bowlcut + beard + Im-a-big-kid-now serious scowl guys have exactly the kind of genuine medically brain damaged way of talking and putting ideas together that I’d use if I ever wrote an undercover troll account. It’s like they got three concussions in a row, did nothing but play pulp shooter video games everyday of recovery, then were released into the world with only their insane spreadsheet ideologies. I get the impression that the ukrops running those badly spelled over-the-top whacko profiles really are dumb themselves and it shines through, but they’ve still tricked some of us.

  • Kirbywithwhip1987@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    That was a Creepypasta many thought was real for the longest time and I always thought that these were the nazis being tortured. And yeah it was always weird that it wasn’t called Soviet Sleep Experiment.

    And isn’t MPLA anti-colonial party from Angola which fought against Portuguese colonialism achieving liberation of Angola and independence from Portugal, so why are they screaming death to it?

  • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    I have some deep distrust of USA for Africa, specifically their “We are the World 25 for Haiti” event thing. It was all over the place at the time, even was played in some schools over here in Brazil to children, and completely drowned out the fact that Haiti had spent the past 6 years under US-led (and Brazilian implemented) occupation. And the following 7 years too.

    Michael Jackson was already dead, I can hardly find any results from the supposed aid, and they even made a Spanish version. It seems like some sort of orchestrated (heh) worldwide propaganda piece about “wholesome intervention” from the Obama era. Portray them as self-governing tragedies that “need our help” to justify denying them self-determination for yet another 13 years.

  • CptKrkIsClmbngThMntn [any]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Considering there’s a couple anti-anarchist comments in here, I’d like to call out a line I see too often insinuated if not said explicitly by the non-anarchist left; that there’s no left in the West, no party organization of any kind, no hope for one, and the best we can do is anti-imperialist posting since geopolitical tension between AES states and the imperial core is the only real front anyway.

    IMO while it’s crucial to reject anti-China propaganda, one community member bringing coffee and snacks to a picket line is worth a hundred Zenz debunks on hexbear dot net. I’ve become a bit frustrated with this side of the left because it moves the conversation to a space where it’s nearly impossible to follow it up with action or organize locally around the issues being discussed.