DARPA’s Digital Puppeteers: Engineering Behavior in the Age of AI 🧵

In the shadows of innovation, DARPA has been orchestrating programs that delve into the manipulation of human behavior through digital means. This isn’t science fiction… it’s documented research.

Social Media as a Behavioral Laboratory

DARPA’s Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program aimed to understand and influence online behavior by analyzing patterns on platforms like X and Reddit. The initiative sought to detect and counteract propaganda campaigns, essentially turning social media into a battlefield for psychological operations. For decades!

Furthering this agenda, the INfluence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking (INCAS) program was developed to exploit data from social media, messaging, and blogs to track geopolitical influence campaigns. By analyzing publicly available data, INCAS aimed to detect and categorize online influence operations, potentially allowing for preemptive countermeasures…

When? It started in… 2020!

The INCAS program, DARPA’s initiative to detect, track, and map influence campaigns across the digital realm, officially launched in 2020, right as the world went into lockdown and the global information war kicked into overdrive.

Nothing like being gaslit during a “pandemic” INCAS: Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking

Goal? To monitor and analyze online narratives, spot coordinated messaging, and map the behavioral impact of information flows..
especially from social media, news, and blogs.

Key tools?
- Natural language processing
- Behavioral analysis
- Network tracking
- Narrative evolution detection

All justified under the banner of “countering foreign propaganda.”
But as always: define “foreign”. Define “influence.”

2020: The Perfect Storm
- Global population suddenly forced indoors
- Entire societies funneled into digital platforms
- Social media use exploded
- Misinformation + fear + political volatility = maximum behavioral malleability

That’s not a coincidence. That’s an operational window.

INCAS wasn’t a reaction to 2020. It was timed to align with it.

It was planned!

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
Said every power structure, ever.

So What Was Really Happening?
- While the world panicked about toilet paper and case counts…
- DARPA was watching the narrative grid, training machines to read emotion, groupthink, and resistance patterns in real time.

And once you can map behavior, you can engineer it. ☺️

The VOX of SU 🧵

A cautionary tale of conspiracy, threats of freedom, and elitist authoratarian control in the age of digital information. Written by a scientist, conspiracy enthusiast, and logophile. “Just because the special conditions prevailing on this earth seem to favor the forms of life which are based on organ-chemical compounds, this is no proof that it is not possible to build up other forms of life on an entirely different basis.” – Nils Barricelli