A proposed messaging campaign for anti-vandalism (Counter PsyOps Campaign)

The outer world reflects into the inner world of the weak minded, but the inner world of the strong minded projects out as the outer world.

Broken Windows Theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behaviour and civil disorder creates a social environment that encourages further crime and disorder. This is a serious issue for raising families in safe neighbourhoods and creating healthy well adjusted members of society.

In the past few years vandalism has been on the rise, which includes graffiti as shown in the image below. This document provides a proposed Counter PsyOps Campaign to raise public awareness to address vandalism issues.

This theoretical methodology could be applied to other civil issues as well.

At minimum it’ll help you understand how these campaigns are used against you.
(Think back to the COVID campaign and see if you notice a structural similarity).

PsyOps are all about information that influences behaviour.

A PsyOps Campaign contains a series of operations that are executed to achieve a large-scale objective. A campaign is akin to a traditional commercial project.

PsyOps Products are custom designed artifacts that are deployed as specific operations within a campaign. Each product has an objective that attempts to influence an audience, also known as targets, by exploiting a vulnerability or need.

Overview

This proposed PsyOps Campaign utilizes a 3 phased strategy:

1. Phase 1 — General Awareness

2. Phase 2 — Outrage

3. Phase 3 — Redirection

The 3 phased approach is a project management technique that reduces risk and provides upfront value. The power of this technique is that the campaign can be halted at the first phase with minimal upfront effort invested, which reduces sunk cost risk. Upon validation, the campaign is designed to grow and scale.

Each phase represents a class of PsyOps Products, which require entrance and exit criteria to deploy.

Criterion are dependent on Impact Assessments of deployed PsyOps Products.

The 3 phases represent a higher order Hegelian Dialectic:

1. Phase 1 = Problem.

2. Phase 2 = Reaction.

3. Phase 3 = Solution.

Figure 1 — 3 Phase PsyOps Campaign (see PsyOps Point Model for colour scheme)

(See PsyOps Overview for an explanation of this structuring for COVID-19 PsyOps and PsyOps Dialectic how this is used linguistically through dialogue).

This PsyOps Campaign utilizes two orthogonal narratives — Official and Guerrilla.

1. The Official narrative uses recognizable community symbols, which requires authorized access to a Community Watch Program, Church or other organization.

2. The Guerrilla narrative is intended to access community members that are ignorant or apathetic to the Official narrative. It also appears as community involvement and spread.

3. Both narratives operate in harmony, but are disjoint, i.e., there is no direct perceptual link between the two — which may require leading and lagging effects — but each complements the other discretely through the PsyOps Campaign.

Figure 2 — Official and Guerrilla Narrative

Figure 2 illustrated the structure of a paired narrative. This PsyOps strategy offers a two-side approach to a given story, where a set of messages are produced by a recognized organization with a complementary set of messages as the so called, “word on the street.”

Phase Structure and Theory

1. Each phase represents a unique narrative, which is used to sell one or more persuasive messages using PsyOps Products.
   (See PsyOps Point Model regarding narrative capture and conversion).

2. Narratives must synchronize with accepted colour schemes, words and images to reduce perceptual opposition, catch attention and establish credibility.
   (See PsyOps Product Strategy regarding Signal Hijacking).

3. Each narrative must produce an accepted belief, which is either a possibility or a necessity. A PsyOps Product is designed to either install or satisfy these beliefs.
   (See PsyOps Guide for the hierarchy of need and product implementation).

4. Multiple PsyOps Products are created for each phase, which should contain one or more persuasive messages that satisfy one or more necessities. The products in aggregate — through correspondence — creates a high amplitude signal for the audience over consecutive cycles.
   (See PsyOps Wave Model regarding broadcasting and telecommunications).

Phase 1 — General Awareness

Purpose: The goal of the first phase is to create an emotional reaction to the vandalism problem — i.e., ideas and symbols of vandalism produce an emotion. Most people prioritize personal problems over vandalism problems and expect someone else to deal with vandalism. The public likely doesn’t understand the long term risks associated with Broken Windows Theory.

PsyOps Objective: Produce Anti-vandalism Advocates.

PsyOps Audience / Target: Public.

Tasks:
(Follow PsyOps Guide for more detail).

1. Perform an Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace (IPB) analysis.

   (i.e., Characterize and classify audience based on culture, beliefs, etc.).

2. Identify target vulnerabilities.
   (i.e., Immediate, short term and long term needs).

3. Identify and gain access the most commonly used medium:

   1. Official narrative — Community Watch or Church.

   2. Guerrilla narrative — Public spaces and public directory.

4. Design, develop, deploy and monitor PsyOps Products for both narratives.

Tactic: Use the Signal Hijacking method from PsyOps Product Strategy.

1. Identify the desired emotional state associated with vandalism.
   (e.g., Fear, anger, etc.).

2. Identify words and colour schemes currently associated with that emotional state.
   (e.g., Keywords/colour schemes from COVID-19, Russia/Ukraine, climate change, etc.).

3. Embed schemes in PsyOps Product and associate it with vandalism.

4. Deploy PsyOps Products along an emotionally escalating narrative:

   1. Start with suggestive possibility — Conflict of possibility creates fear.
      (e.g., Could, can, maybe, possibly, suggested, etc.).

   2. End with active necessity — Conflict of necessity creates anger.
      (e.g., Should, have to, need to, must, etc.).

5. Create positive reinforcement PsyOps Products that promote anti-vandalism sentiment in the form of necessity.
   (e.g., ‘Doing the right thing,’ ‘working together,’ positive colour schemes, etc.).

Exit Criteria: An impact assessment identifies members of the community repeating and advocating persuasive messages embedded in PsyOps Products.
i.e., The word or image of vandalism produces an emotional response.

Phase 2 — Outrage

Entrance Criteria: The emergence of Anti-vandalism Advocates.

Purpose: The goal of the second phase is to channel the emotional response produced by vandalism to various abstract groups as scapegoats. This increases the perceived reaction to the problem and provides an opportunity in Phase 3 to focus on solutions. This is a riskier phase as it destabilizes positive public sentiment.

PsyOps Objective: Produce Vandalism Scapegoat Advocates.

PsyOps Audience / Target: Public.

Tasks:

1. Reuse IPB and proven tactics from Phase 1.

2. Aggravate emotional response by targeting public’s guilt, shame and inaction, which produces projection and triggers psychological defence mechanisms.

3. Alter the narrative to associate negative emotional responses with:
   (Avoid sewing internal discord — unite don’t divide public).

   1. Outside abstract groups.
      (The less specific and more opaque the scapegoat, the more concerning it appears).

   2. Miseducated and delinquent members of society.

   3. Civil institutions.

4. Scapegoat variety creates collective discomfort — making the problem seem large and unknown— which sets up Phase 3 where all scapegoating is redirected to civil servant incompetence.

Exit Criteria: An impact assessment identifies members of the community repeating and advocating persuasive messages embedded in PsyOps Products. Vandalism Scapegoat Advocates produce an emotional response to vandalism and associate it with an abstract group.

Phase 3 — Redirection

Entrance Criteria: The emergence of Vandalism Scapegoat Advocates.

Purpose: The goal of the third phase is to redirect public outrage and reaction to civil servants. This puts pressure on the established civil system to address issues due to increased public awareness. Solution advocates are created who help guide civil servants and the public’s response to correct, reduce and avoid vandalism.

PsyOps Objective: Produce Vandalism Solution Advocates and Vandalism Scapegoat Advocates That Blame Civil Servants.

PsyOps Audience / Target: Public.

Tasks:

1. Reuse IPB and proven tactics from Phase 1/2.

2. PsyOps Products redirect all scapegoating to civil servant incompetence.

3. PsyOps Products create advocates for the desired solution(s).
   (e.g., Additional police routes, new by-law/tickets, etc.).

4. PsyOps Products guide solution advocates to actively address vandalism.
   (Remember the solution is not to target scapegoats, but prevent vandalism).

Exit Criteria: An impact assessment identifies members of the community repeating and advocating persuasive messages embedded in PsyOps Products.

1. Vandalism Scapegoat Advocates produce an emotional response to vandalism and associate it with civil servants to encourage action.

2. Vandalism Solution Advocates promote solutions to vandalism, who actively address vandalism collectively.

Teams

It’s possible to execute a slice of the initial phase as a single individual.

This may be considered a risk management strategy to validate the approach, which also minimizes information leak. As the need for campaign growth increases, a team should be formed as described by the following Resource Breakdown Structure (RBS):

1. Intelligence Officer — PsyOps background knowledge, manager/supervisor experience, project planning and execution skills.

2. Agents — PsyOps application knowledge and task execution skills.

3. Detachment units — Contracted roles to produce PsyOps Products, augment execution and have media production skills.

4. Security — Risk management skills, situational awareness during task execution.
   (May be satisfied by team pairing).

5. Medium Access — Access and authorization to distribution methods.

If funding and transactions are required, avoid electronic settlements.
Cash, commodity or barter exchange is preferred.

Conclusion

The goal of this document is to develop a PsyOps Campaign to:

1. Create emotional responses to vandalism.

2. Create vandalism scapegoats.

3. Offer solutions and redirect emotional scapegoating towards civil servants.

Figure 3 — Emotional Feedback Circuit

Be sure to keep an Issues Log and Lessons Learned if you’re considering a PsyOps Campaign. It’s best practice and may help others in the future to avoid similar mistakes and risks.

Please remember to follow local laws and regulations.

If you find any research or examples of persuasion messaging, PsyOps, etc., please feel free to submit them to my thread.

Persuasion Techniques and Experimental Research (Input Thread)