Are you in a PsyOp?

How to Tell If You're the Target

If you read my piece on why WW3 is here, but it’s happening in your mind, you probably remember this was coming: I am about to reveal how to tell if you’re the target of a psyop, and hand you a tool to spot psychological operations.

Before you get too excited and start checking out the tool, we need to make sure you’re protected from something that’s as dangerous as falling for an adversary narrative:

Confirmation Bias

Out of the hundreds of cognitive biases that exist, confirmation bias is easily the most essential one. Think about it. You end up in an echo chamber of opinions and worldviews, then the algorithms feed you exactly what you need to see, you slowly stop seeking different viewpoints, and in the end you find yourself trapped in a mental prison before you can say “op.”

But confirmation bias doesn’t apply just to those who are targets in a psyop. It also applies to people like you, reading this article, who start by wanting to know if something is truly part of an influence campaign and end up seeing cognitive war everywhere.

The point of a psyop is that it is hard to spot. And it is because manipulation initiatives and news cycles share the same features: emotion, urgency, uniform messaging, appeals to authority, and historical parallels. For instance, reporting on an earthquake shares the same traits a Russian or Chinese influence campaign would have, from the emotional components to the uniformity of the message and the opinions of the experts. If I just handed you a checklist, you would start seeing ops everywhere.

That’s where the difference between detection and paranoia enters the conversation. A smoke alarm that goes off every time you make toast for breakfast won’t make you safer: if anything, it will make you stop trusting the alarm. And when you truly need it… you’ll ignore it. That’s how you burn down the house.

Long story short, the goal of the tool is not to have you run it on narratives you already hate. It will always confirm your fears. What I want to give you is a machine that converts your bias into a score.

How To Detect A PsyOp: The 16 Indicators

Even the most refined operation has patterns. Those patterns come from the mechanisms that make a psyop work. More specifically, we are talking about 16 different indicators that converge into an organized campaign:

1. Novelty. The 1961 Milgram experiment, and the many others that followed, proved that novelty is a key factor in making people’s behavior more malleable. In the case of narratives, what you have to pay attention to are wordings like “shocking,” “unprecedented” or “never seen before.”

2. Bystander effect. Think about the smoke-filled room experiment by Darley and Latané (1968). For those unfamiliar, they placed people in a space that slowly filled with smoke and found that people were less likely to react in any way as long as nobody else did. you know that social pressure is another, powerful vector for manipulation. In the case of a psyop, you will find that there is pressure to accept a specific behavior because everyone else does.

3. Oversimplification. If you’re familiar with marketing best practices, you’ve probably come across the phrase “be clear, not clever.” The reason that sentence exists is that simplicity persuades, because our brains have evolved to save energy. Therefore, every time you encounter a ”good vs evil” framing, there is a high chance you’re being manipulated.

4. Urgency. The best manipulators (and performance marketers) know that psychological pressure gets people to make irrational decisions. It can be driven by time, fear, or scarcity - and it works regardless of which one you pick. Psyops tend to demand immediate decisions without proper reflection. Think about campaigns that push for immediate donations.

5. The illusory truth effect. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, infamously claimed that “a lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” This is the illusory truth effect. In simple words, repetition has a hypnotic element to it that reinforces ideas over time, and nurtures them until they seem like reality. Emotional repetition applies to both ideas and imagery.

6. Uniform messaging. Repetition works better when it comes from multiple sources. If you find the same ideas spread in the same way by multiple sources, that’s a key tell.

7. Timing. The right message has to come at the right time. If the timing feels suspicious, or if it coincides with other events, there might be a campaign underway.

8. Emotional triggers. For a message to run effectively, repetition and timing are not enough. Not necessarily. The key element, and one that has been proven to remarkably affect both memorization and behavior change, is the use of emotions: if a piece of information you’re looking at is aimed at provoking fear or outrage without evidence, that’s a tell. The perfect example is the use of images of children in poor conditions on materials (printed or digital) that request donations.

9. Tribal identity. The most persuasive messages tend to be those that appeal to identity. And nothing shapes our identity more than our environment. Our tribe. Pre-internet, you had to influence someone’s physical surroundings to influence them. In the internet era, all you need to do is spread narratives inside their digital tribe. Inside their echo chamber. The hallmark of a psyop is when alternative views or critical details are excluded or even manipulated to create an “us vs them” dynamic. Once the facts are altered and tailored to make a specific group of people feel in danger, it’s easy to trigger negative sentiments.

10. Binary choices. If all you’re given by the media or whoever is pushing a dominant narrative is two alternatives, there’s a high chance of manipulation. A classic example is “if you don’t support this decision, you’re hateful towards (insert cause or group of people.)”Reality is rarely black and white.

11. No dissent allowed. Think about major global narratives of the past years. There is a chance you were being manipulated if you noticed that critics of a dominant narrative were attacked and vilified instead of defeated through facts and debate. This applies even more if critics or skeptics were silenced, “canceled” or de-platformed. In this situation, you will see influential actors dismiss critics by applying blanket labels in an attempt to disqualify their opinions: for example, if a rich person opposes the narrative, they’ll be called an out-of-touch elite. If a John Doe does the same on social media, they’ll be labeled a conspiracy theorist or paranoid.

12. Data selection. The old saying goes “numbers don’t lie, but you can make them say whatever you want” comes in handy when dealing with psyops. You’re being manipulated if statistics are presented selectively and without key context, like how they were calculated.

13. Expert selection. Who is getting placed on key platforms (e.g. prominent podcasts or news shows) to push the narrative? Are they credible experts, or are they out of their realm of expertise and they’re given a voice because of their audience? And if they’re credible experts, are there other experts with contrarian opinions and evidence whose views are deliberately excluded?

14. Framing. Imagine a tragedy happens, and someone starts talking about it as something that was entirely preventable. If the blame gets placed exclusively on one person, institution or group without any nuance and without considering systemic factors, you’re likely being targeted.

15. Unexpected new behavior. Thousands of people start putting a specific flag on their usernames or as a filter on their profile picture. Social media fills with bots pushing a single narrative, or triggering arguments without people. Clear signs of people being under the influence of a powerful narrative, especially if it happens suddenly.

16. The money trail. An old Venezuelan saying goes “the monkey will dance for money.” Basically, people will do whatever they need to do for money. One of the best ways to detect whether you are being targeted by a psyop is to look into which powerful groups benefit massively from the current crisis. Always follow the money.

However, these indicators need to be split into two categories. That’s how we remove our own bias and avoid turning every event and every narrative as a coordinated operation:

● Circumstantial Indicators (low-signal). These are the indicators that are easily politicized because they are present in every narrative or major event. Emotional manipulation, oversimplified narratives, framing, good-vs-evil framing, urgency, data selection, urgency and novelty.

● Diagnostic Indicators (high-signal). These are hard to fake, and usually content-neutral. Think coordinated amplification like synchronized posting, news outlets saying the exact same thing word by word, or use of bot farms. You can include in this category also the suppression of dissent, and the money trail. Diagnostic indicators aren’t about what the narrative says (the content) but about how it’s being pushed (the pattern).

What This Is (And Is Not)

These indicators and the tool you are about to access will give you a core, but aren’t supposed to give you a yes/no verdict. They are supposed to provide prescriptive insight into your own behavior, for example pushing you to slow down before you believe, react, or reshare something.

A high probability of something being a psyop doesn’t mean “I was right,” it means “I need to verify this information before I let it affect me.

Ultimately, being able to tell whether something is or is not a psychological operation isn’t a matter of winning or losing. It is a matter of keeping your mental bandwidth protected, and making sure of two things: one, that you don’t engage with the psyop, and two, that you help others see through it.

The goal of any psyop is to hijack your mind and get you to take action. Your goal is to stay mentally sovereign. Remember: the real war is in (and for) your mind.

PsyOp Detection Tool

You can access the tool directly through this link.

Sebastian D. P. Hidalgo is the co-founder of DURINDAL, a strategic advisory firm for dual-use Defense companies that want to expand into the commercial space.

He is trained in hostage negotiation and psychological operations (PsyOps), a background he leveraged to create SWAT (Sales with Advanced Tactics) - a sales method is being adopted across 12+ industries and that earned DURINDAL an award as “Best Sales Training Firm in the USA (2025).”