Psychological Civil War: How a New Study Proves What We Already Knew
The New Confederacy is winning the war on a battlefield we don’t even acknowledge.
A groundbreaking study has confirmed what we already knew: changes to algorithmic feeds presented on social media can have a profound effect on people’s subconscious attitudes—and emotions.
Guardian UK: Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation
Polarizing
The study found that one week of small changes to the participants’ “For You” feeds on X could swing their attitudes about the opposition party as much as would historically take three years or more. The methodology was ingenious—and did not require the cooperation of the company: the researchers used a browser extension and AI to re-rank subjects’ feeds to change how many posts with “antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity” (AAPA) appeared.
Science: Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization
Most participants reported that they did not notice a change to their environment—but the change in their affective polarization was measurable to the outside world. This means the subject’s psychology was being altered involuntarily. This is an attack surface for the subconscious.
Moreover, the study’s authors noted that there was less engagement on less polarizing content, while “strong reactions generate more engagement.”
At the same time, our engagement analyses indicate a practical trade-off: Interventions that down-rank AAPA may reduce short-term engagement volume, posing challenges for engagement-driven business models and supporting the hypothesis that content that provokes strong reactions generates more engagement.
The business model of social media is polarization—we’ve known that for many years. But this reveals something deeper and crucially important: proof that a simple methodology of manipulation can control people subconsciously.
Changing Minds
If a few researchers can change people’s minds about the opposition party—without the subjects’ knowledge, using small changes to the environment—you have to ask how this capability might be used or weaponized in the real world with big changes.
In June, when Elon Musk said Trump would have lost the election, and gave a specific number of Senators that would otherwise have won, Musk was in a fit of rage—the same day he said (correctly) that Trump was in the Epstein files.
Given that Trump did somehow win every swing state despite tremendous odds against it—what did Musk mean by his boast? We know Musk donated $300 million to Trump’s campaign—but could money alone have had the kind of effect we saw in the results?
All reporting was that Trump’s ground game was inferior. As a close observer, I can say objectively that his events were just horribly managed cult rallies—while his speeches were a rambling “weave” of personal grudges, bigotry, and narcissistic grandiosity.
Nothing about his campaign made political sense. Nor does his regime—for a reason:
Americans are no longer in a political contest in a democratic society, we are unwilling participants in a psychological civil war.
The New Confederacy in this war is a collaboration of our foreign adversaries, techno-fascist oligarchs, and the theocratic religious right.
New Rules
The 2024 election was a battle fought by rules of conflict established in 2016, when the Russians helped steal the election by increasing polarization on Facebook and Twitter using data from Cambridge Analytica and hacked emails.
Despite the Senate Intelligence Report and the Mueller Report, which both showed how social media was manipulated by foreign governments to change American politics, America never faced this challenge. The singular failure of Joe Biden’s administration in my view was that he only understood the world through a political lens. Now, it is the singular failure of the Democratic Party to keep fighting battles on a political playing field that only exists in their minds at this point.
The solution to the American problem is not political—it is psychological. Elon Musk is not creating debate or free speech on his platform. He’s deliberately changing people’s brains to synchronize with his own deviant psychology—a sadistic psychopathy even darker than Donald Trump’s.
The opposition doesn’t need campaign managers; we need generals who understand psychological war. We have to fight fire with fire, or die pretending the house isn’t burning down.
New Confederacy
The New Confederacy’s power is in how it recruits through social media: psychologically, subconsciously, and involuntarily. It is the perfect political weapon, for the perfect political crime—getting away with stealing two presidential elections to benefit a small cadre of elites, and almost stealing a third one—not by hacking machines, or elaborate conspiracies with Starlink, but by capturing people’s minds through social media.
The New Confederacy currently controls the federal government, and is building a violent standing army to stay in power through ICE and repurposing the military. They also control most of the money supply and the media at this point. But despite all this, they seem to have hit a wall, psychologically speaking.
The reason for this is that the emotional levers people like Trump and Musk can pull through social media only work until other factors overwhelm them. When someone’s food security, health, safety, and sanity are under threat, the impact of a Truth Social post will not be ranked as highly in their minds as it would be in better times. The system of control is diabolical, but it is not impossible to understand—or to defeat.
Coup de Algorithm
Despite their struggles to keep psychological control, the New Confederates are trying to use the opportunity to execute a coup de grâce on American democracy. Musk’s algorithm saw fit to show me these posts today, for example—despite the fact that I don’t follow these accounts:
Normalizing monarchy and great replacement theory are two of the chief goals of the New Confederacy’s psychological warfare operation—because they represent the Big Demand of elite white men from the rest of us: acknowledge our self-perceived dominance.
In short, they’re trying to control our minds so they can control our labor and resources. Our job, collectively, is to take back control.
This cannot be accomplished through the political process alone: politics is downstream from psychology. We must learn this lesson right now, or we will collectively forget we even had the chance to do something about it.
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
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Threads: jimstewartson
I have never been on “X” or Twitter. I don’t have the patience for it or the proper reactionary skills to negotiate it.
I believe you are absolutely correct in your assessment of the situation.
That said, it’s time for those who value the freedom to choose their own future.
Those who are sick of the lawless hypocrites who suck all the wealth out of the country and leave crumbs for the rest of us to fight over.
For those who want the opportunity to have a family and a home and freedom of thought and movement.
It’s time to counter attack the algorithms of X and the other platforms that are working against us.
Whether it is done from the United States or Europe or Canada or elsewhere - blow up these assholes who are trying to destroy us!!
100 %.