Have you heard the claim that music star Taylor Swift is a secret “psy-op” used by the Pentagon to influence public opinion? It was a claim largely relegated to conspiracy theorists on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, before Jesse Watters did a segment about the idea on Fox News on Tuesday. But the Fox News segment takes a viral video wildly out of context.
Watters played a clip from a NATO conference, but didn’t give any necessary context to his viewers about what they were watching.
“Well, around four years ago, the Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting. What kind of asset? A psy-op for combatting online misinformation,” Watters told viewers on Tuesday night in a segment first flagged by Mediaite.
“Yeah, that’s real. The Pentagon psy-op unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset,” Watters continued.
But what’s actually going on here? Something much more nuanced and less sensationalistic than what Watters is telling his audience.
The woman in the clip, Alicia Marie Bargar, was giving a presentation about research she’d conducted with her team at Johns Hopkins University about how information spreads online. Bargar was presenting at the 11th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, organized by NATO in 2019, though she’s a civilian and has no known contracts or relationship with the U.S. military. Bargar is an academic who was simply presenting her research at a conference on how information travels through social media.
The entire presentation from 2019 is available on YouTube and it’s clear from the introduction that Bargar’s presentation is about hypothetical scenarios for how information can be manipulated. Bargar uses Taylor Swift as an example clearly because she’s the biggest pop star in the world right now, something that becomes even more clear when she jokes that you’ve probably heard of Swift.
“The first one, and the most common [example of influence], is working with famous people or influencers to share information of a particular message. I include Taylor Swift in here because she’s a fairly influential online person, I don’t know if you’ve heard of her,” Bargar said jokingly.
Bargar goes on to explain that Swift was standing next to a sign promoting voting in the most general way possible. The image from the presentation is a screenshot from an Instagram post where Swift showed herself waiting in line back in 2016 to vote.
“Celebrities, at least in the U.S., regularly will post pictures of themselves with an encouragement for people to go vote and this has a measurable affect on voter turnout,” Bargar said in her 2019 presentation.
That’s it. Bargar wasn’t saying that anyone should use Swift as a way to influence public opinion on any given topic, just that she’s an example of a famous person with influence who once gave a generic “go vote” message to her fans on Instagram.
And by watching the full presentation you can see how Watters stripped all the nuance and context out of what his viewers were watching, instead presenting a very distorted and intellectually dishonest argument. The way Watters tells it, this was a NATO “meeting” where people were just floating ideas about how to turn Taylor Swift into a tool for propaganda against the American public.
In reality, it was a conference where an academic presented research about the flow of information and gave Swift as an example of someone with influence because she’s literally the biggest musician on the planet right now. There’s absolutely no evidence that the U.S. government or anyone else is using Swift as a tool of spreading misinformation, as Watters continually suggested on Tuesday.
Watters didn’t stop there, though. The Fox News host brought on Stuart Kaplan, a former FBI agent, to elaborate on all the spooky hypotheticals about how Swift would indoctrinate the country’s youth to vote for Joe Biden.
Again, this is all speculation with virtually nothing grounded in reality. The video of Bargar’s full presentation is quite interesting, showing how researchers are able to identify various threats, like social media accounts associated with the terror group ISIS. Bargar also notes during her presentation that her influence operations are often inspired by how public health messages operate, a subject that was obviously less controversial in 2019, before the covid-19 pandemic would become a political football.
However, the nuances of that research apparently don’t interest Watters. For Watters, he’s more concerned the idea that major music figures would be trying to brainwash kids.
Swift has long been thought by relatively fringe elements to be a psyop. After Time magazine named Swift person of the year near the end of 2023, chatter about how Swift would be “weaponized” in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election got louder, with allegations that Swift fans are zombies who can’t think for themselves.
“Taylor Swift has a cult-like following that would drink poisoned Kool Aid for her. The media knows this and is feeding it,” the X account known as End Wokeness tweeted roughly a month ago.
“Music. Entertainment. Sports. Now they crowned her Person of the Year. The next step? Politics. If you don’t think the regime has plans to weaponize her just in time for 2024, you clearly have not been paying attention,” the account continued.
End Wokeness may be seen as a fringe voice online, but none other than Elon Musk, the owner of X, has frequently engaged with the account’s content. And that’s how many of the stranger conspiracy theories online now find their way into the public discourse, eventually landing on mainstream channels like Fox News.
Call me crazy, but if I was going to run a psychological influence operation with a major celebrity, I probably wouldn’t produce a video about that exact possibility. But that very obvious fact isn’t going to dissuade conspiracy theorists online. Well, conspiracy theorists and Jesse Watters, who seems to be quickly transforming Fox News into something to compete with Alex Jones and the fringe conspiracy-obsessed media empire of InfoWars.
