Canadian military tested propaganda mission on Canadians that went off the rails

I mean, clearly yours was the best.

- Krusty The Clown

Everyone with a little bit of sense knows that democracy is a façade.

It's that this propaganda contained false information on both the source and the details that is problematic. Black propaganda is wrong. We don't need it to win, and when it is exposed it undermines our credibility, which undermines our white propaganda and efforts to contrast our values with the values of our adversaries.

I take a similar stand with politicians. I'd rather vote for an honest person that I disagree with on a majority of issues than a dishonest one that shares my political party. For especially honest politicians I go out of my way to vote for them. Trust in government is paramount. The rest breeds corruption and eventual democratic decline.

Your personalized propaganda, brought to you by your own tax dollars.

I am Canadian and find such deceit sickening.

I know some guys in military intelligence in that neck of the woods, I doubt there was any malicious intent here.

In some parts of the world it's folklore already.

Yes, and the Canadian military is very good at it. The fact that your reaction upon reading on it is incredulity and denial is proof enough at how good they are.

Keep in mind that "propaganda" does not necessarily mean nefarious. Almost all countries use propaganda, and I'd argue that most corporations use it too.

Shouldn't there be?

I feel like if military personnel and politicians were told "If you try this kind of thing, for training purposes or otherwise, you will serve <X> years in prison" it would be a good deterrent. And I feel like such strong laws should exist.

You ought to look up Operation Mockingbird, the Nariyah testimony, there are other examples. The activities you describe are widespread in the US. There was also someone did a study of some cable news network that found 92% of guests were current or former government officials, retired generals etc (AKA likely on CIA or military intelligence payroll)

This assertion is patently false. The goal of the military is to force your will onto others while stopping others from imposing their own will onto you. You don't achieve that exclusively by killing. In fact, arguably propaganda and intelligence is far more effective than military action.

Please bear in mind, for example, that the Normandy invasion, and consequently WW2 and the preservation of liberal democracies in Europe and the world, was won due to the role of a single man in posting this sort of propaganda: Juan Pujol García.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_Garc%C3%ADa

Note they say "a loudspeaker" and "the loudspeaker" (singular) in the article, so the setup needn't have been arduous: it could have been as simple as a single person walking through the woods with handheld equipment.

Thumbs down for the term “massive” for the ethical concerns. “Massive” violations of ethics occurred during the Nazi regime.

Thumbs down for the term “colossal”. “Colossal” stupidity was shown by governments during the 1940s Bengali famine and the 1960s Chinese famine. Nothing here reaches “colossal”.

Never underestimate the folly of large organizations of any stripe. They are all comprised of individuals who are just as silly as you are. There are just more of them and sometimes they have greater firepower.

Don’t know what you mean by “such operations” in the final sentence. Do you mean no “psyops”? Talk-talk is almost always better than bang-bang. If you were targeted with both, I think you would agree as well...

Many Canadians (as elsewhere in the world) are falling victim to propaganda like "Covid is a hoax", "Covid is a plot by Bill Gates to implant everyone in the world with microchips", "Masks don't work", "Your rights are being trampled upon", etc etc.

One crux of the messaging that comes along with those is that the government is lying to you about absolutely everything and will do whatever they can to prevent you from seeing that information and the "truth".

So the Canadian government and military working to identify and stop propaganda in any method validates the misinformation for those people who have fallen victim to it, and subsequently validates the rest of the nonsense they're ingesting that is coupled with it.

Catch 22.

So I'm just guessing that it was decided the best way to beat it is to undermine it by "being there first"... in short.

Distribution/guiding matters too, especially on the internet: what's the best way to place it so it will spread? What techniques will be caught? Should you run a botnet? How difficult is it to evade detection? Light touch or heavy handed? Do you need a base of fake accounts years in advance, or can you create them at the time?

Red team/blue team exercises are valuable for defense. If you "practice" only by examining real-world propaganda, you can't debrief the opposition at the end. And if you can't debrief the attacker, you can't find out what you missed and what would have been effective.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy

And this is coming from someone who lives in a US state that is certainly in the top 10 for "blind deference to government".

No. The line of reasoning was there was a deep shortage and with the information they had at the time, they did not think that masks were necessary or useful for the average person. They didn’t lie and say masks don’t work, they said masks don’t work like people think they do and they didn’t believe it was necessary or productive to wear them. And masks don’t provide meaningful protection to the person wearing them. They provide meaningful protection to the people around the mask wearer. So going and getting a non-N95 to keep from getting covid, was and is wrong.

> “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.” - Dr. Fauci, March 8, 2020…How on earth could we pull a 'moral 180' on some behaviour so quickly without really any new information?

This can’t possibly be serious. We have been learning new information about this completely novel virus every single week. It is a completely new virus we knew nothing about a year ago. That statement was made on March 8th, when there were a few thousand cases in the US. We had a very different understanding of the fatality rate, the R naught value of infection rates, the methods of transmissibility, the incubation period, the rate of asymptomatic cases. The list goes on.

> This is a pretty good example of what propaganda is because it demonstrates the moral ambiguity of 'truth, communication and outcomes'.

This is a terrible example because it relies completely on both hindsight bias that people knew then what we know now about a novel virus, and on a basic lack of understanding of how masks even work, failing to understand the statements made about them.

What was true about masks 9 months ago is true now. Wearing a non-N95 mask will do very little to protect you if you are exposed to Covid. Wearing a mask will drastically reduce you transmitting the virus to other people. The mask shouldn’t be seen as an individual prophylactic. The mask should be seen as a collective protection measure.

How about “Snafus during in-country training exercise on propaganda techniques by Canadian military”? As close as I could get...