Shitposting as a National Asset

On April 20, 1950, President Harry Truman gave an address to the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Flanked by some of the most prominent and influential media moguls of the time, Truman took the opportunity to formally state a pivotal shift in American foreign policy. “Deceit, distortion, and lies are systematically used by [the Kremlin] as a matter of deliberate policy,” Truman said. To combat the Soviets in the new information war, western democracies led by the United States “must make ourselves heard round the world in a great campaign of truth.” Little did those in attendance know that they were only one small piece of what became America’s most comprehensive information campaign in history; a campaign that relied just as much on stretching the truth as on the truth itself.

During the Cold War, the United States fought fire with fire, combatting Soviet information warfare operations with operations of its own. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spearheaded numerous active measures—covert or semi-covert state-backed operations designed to manipulate public opinion and destabilize adversaries without military action. As much as it was nuclear deterrence and savvy diplomacy that won the Cold War, it was the soft power of enabling people behind the Iron Curtain to hear jazz over the radio, read glossy American magazines, and watch Apollo 11 land on the moon.

Now, we find ourselves once again engaged in an information war. Russian trolls are sowing distrust in our democratic institutions. Chinese content farms are infiltrating social media in an attempt to destabilize Taiwan. Iranian operatives are spreading deepfakes to stoke unrest and inflame tensions across the Middle East.

As authoritarian regimes invest heavily in digital disinformation and influence campaigns, the United States finds itself on its back foot in the new war of information. This war is not being fought with bullets and bayonets but with memes, trolls, and shitposts. Yet, Americans have a natural advantage in the digital information war. Russia, China, and Iran may be deploying internet memes and shitposting troll farms, but we are the progenitors of the digital age. To paraphrase a certain Chrisopher Nolan movie, our adversaries merely adopted shitposting. We were born into it, molded by it.

If America and western democracy is to win the new Cold War, we must once again fight fire with fire. The United States must once again engage in active measures, but this time they must be designed for the digital age. By learning from America’s history of influence operations, we can better understand how to implement modern, digital active measures. By empowering American voices—especially shitposters and trolls—the U.S. can begin to regain its strategic advantage in global influence. In short, America must once again weaponize shitposting.

America is Losing the Information War

While not thought of as much as aircraft carriers and strategic bombers, shitposting—the use of ironic, irreverent, and culturally savvy content as part of information warfare—has always been a weapon of war. As global powers compete for territory and influence, narratives and public perception are an essential battleground and the internet has emerged as the primary theater of this conflict. The digital battleground is now host to sophisticated influence operations that blend propaganda, cyber tactics, and psychological manipulation.

Authoritarian regimes in particular have embraced information warfare as a low-cost, high-impact means of advancing geopolitical goals, exploiting the openness of liberal societies to manipulate public opinion, undermine trust, and fracture democratic consensus. Russia and China stand at the forefront of this digital contest: the former wielding disinformation and online trolling like a bludgeon to sow chaos and doubt, the latter deploying a more disciplined, long-term strategy to shape global narratives and expand its soft power. Meanwhile, the United States has struggled to mount a coherent, proactive response.

Confronted with an onslaught of foreign information warfare, the United States has, at times, recognized the threat and undertaken various initiatives. On the positive side, U.S. agencies have made strides in exposing and countering foreign active measures on specific fronts. In early 2022, the National Security Council (NSC) and Intelligence Community (IC) adopted a strategy focused on exposing disinformation.

Rapid public disclosure is intended to preempt disinformation. For example, the U.S. government worked swiftly to declassify intelligence about looming Kremlin false-flag plots in Ukraine and shared that information with allies ahead of the Russian invasion. This proactive transparency undermined Moscow’s pre-invasion narratives, denying the Kremlin the element of surprise in the information domain​. This modern “campaign of truth” has been relatively successful at blunting disinformation with facts.

U.S. law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies have also focused on protecting elections from foreign influence. In the wake of the revelations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence set up an Election Security Task Force that, by 2020, worked closely with social media companies to take down fake accounts and alert the public to foreign meddling attempts. In one landmark operation, U.S. Cyber Command went on the offensive in 2018 by launching a cyberattack that temporarily knocked the Internet Research Agency (one of Russia’s largest troll farms) offline on election day. This signaled a new willingness by the U.S. to use offensive cyber capabilities to disrupt shitposting at its source. More recently, Washington has tried to build international coalitions against disinformation: for instance, in 2023 the United States helped launch the Ukraine Communications Group with allied governments to coordinate truthful messaging about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine​.

Despite these efforts, the United States’ posture in the information war is mostly reactive and insufficiently organized. Programs and responses tend to be scattered across different agencies with overlapping mandates and legal barriers and the U.S. lacks any coherent, unified strategy with regards to information warfare, an approach that impedes holistic, synchronized action​. Indeed, the DoD, State Department, Intelligence Community, and domestic agencies often tackle pieces of the problem (foreign shitposting, cyber attacks, etc.) but struggle to coordinate.

One telling example of such a lack of strategy or coordination comes from the Global War on Terror. From 2008 until 2014, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) operated a program known as the Trans Regional Web Initiative (TRWI). As with most programs of the era, the stated goal of the program was to counter violent Islamic extremism. To achieve this goal, SOCOM operated several websites that hosted journalistic, pro-American content targeted at various regions around the world of particular importance to American interests. While the government did not advertise its involvement in the websites, this was far from a covert operation and the websites did little to hide their pro-American slant.

The efficacy of TRWI was questionable at best. A classified Government Accountability Office (GAO) report about SOCOM’s Military Information Support Operations (MISO)—including TRWI—that was leaked to the public in 2013 painted a particularly bleak picture:

Military Information Support Operations (MISO) programs are generally well coordinated with other U.S. government efforts ongoing in individual countries, but the Department of Defense (DOD) is missing opportunities to coordinate on some activities focused in regions around the world. … Special Operations Command’s regionally-focused MISO websites—which include articles that highlight positive aspects of counterterrorism efforts and negative effects of adversaries’ actions—are not well coordinated with other MISO or other interagency efforts operating the countries the websites cover. DOD’s policy stresses the importance of synchronizing MISO efforts, but until DOD improves coordination of its websites it risks expending MISO resources in ways that are not complementary to other agencies’ priorities.

For a notoriously risk-averse agency such as GAO to spell out the flaws of DOD’s approach in such an assertive way is telling. The fundamental problem with TRWI (and other MISO programs of the time) is that the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. GAO found several instances where SOCOM was unaware of similar websites being operated by other combatant commands. The Obama administration reportedly asked Congress not to spike the program by claiming that it was “[the] only synchronized online influence effort able to challenge the spread of extremist ideology and propaganda on the Web.” Then Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), agreed with the need to challenge the spread of extremist ideology but clearly disagreed that TRWI was the effective, synchronized program that the DOD presented it to be. He cut the program’s funding in 2014.

In recent years, the United States has been hesitant to engage in the kind of offensive propaganda or covert influence that adversaries practice. The reason for this is that the U.S. strongly values free expression and a free press, which means it cannot easily deploy state-directed misinformation as a tool without undermining its own credibility. This commitment to truthful, values-based communication—while a strategic strength in the long run—sometimes leaves Washington flat-footed against unscrupulous information warriors like the Kremlin. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the recent information war around the invasion of Ukraine where top American brass acknowledges that we lack the strategy, coordination, and resources necessary to combat our adversaries. “I still don’t think that we have all the tools that we need and we need to continue to develop at speed how we push back inside the information space,” Gen. Richard Clarke, commander of SOCOM, told the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in 2022.

The United States finds itself on the defensive in the information war. There is growing recognition in Washington that information is a domain of conflict just like land, sea, air, cyber, or space, but the U.S. response remains a work in progress. Unless the U.S. can craft a more unified, forward-leaning strategy—one that draws on its own innovative digital culture and the lessons of past active measures—it will continue to be challenged by the relentless information offensives of Russia, China, and other authoritarian players. The United States must develop a full-spectrum strategy for information warfare. Fortunately, there is a playbook from the not too distant past that offers critical insights into how the United States might regain the upper hand in information warfare.

Shitposting Lessons from East Berlin

The year is 1964. It’s midnight deep in the forests of Bohemia. Four men in diving suits and four tightly sealed, metal chests are riding in the back of a truck. The chests are grimy and beat up but, still clearly visible on the metal, is the image of an eagle grasping a swastika in its talons. The truck stops, the men file out, each grabs a chest, and they disappear into the dark water of Černé Jezero; the Black Lake. Not long after, they re-emerge from the water without the chests and inconspicuously drive back to Prague. Days later, the chests are found by a Czechoslovak television crew and are later revealed to contain damning documents detailing German war crimes including the forced expulsion of over 300,000 Jews living in Bohemia and Moravia. Amidst the international uproar over the documents, the West German Bundestag votes to extend the statute of limitation on prosecuting Nazi war crimes. The head of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate dictates a letter to the head of the StB—Communist Czechoslovakia’s secret police unit and intelligence service—congratulating him on the success of one of the most ballsy and ridiculous disinformation operations of the Cold War.

This scene sounds like it could be lifted straight from the pages of an Ian Fleming novel, but it really happened. As Thomas Rid recounts in his book Active Measures, when the producers of a Czechoslovak TV show, “intrigued by a high profile Nazi gold hunt in Lake Toplitz,” decided to “‘reveal the secrets’ of two mysterious Bohemian lakes,” the Communist government offered their help. After an initial exploration uncovered a soldered metal box, the head of Czechoslovak disinformation operations decided to exploit the opportunity “by dropping two to four chests of authentic Nazi documents—along with ‘two or three forgeries’ to compromise several top officials in West Germany.” Codenamed NEPTUN, the operation—a prime example of proto-shitposting from the Cold War—was a glowing success.

While this example is perhaps more cinematic than most Cold War era shitposting schemes, it is quite typical of the era. When the Iron Curtain descended across the European continent, it sparked the most significant period in the history of information warfare. If the United States is to once again go on the offensive in the information war then it is prudent to examine some of this history and relearn some of the lessons our fathers and grandfathers learned fighting a war of words and memes in a divided world.

One of the most important lessons from the Black Lake operation is that shitposting and disinformation is most effective when it is shrouded by truth. The Nazis really did forcibly expel hundreds of thousands of Moravian and Bohemian Jews and most of the chests contained real Nazi documents pulled from Soviet archives in Moscow and Prague. This made it easy for unwitting Western media to parrot Soviet disinformation and the Soviets did their best to make it easy for the media. As Rid recounts, the StB made sure that the documents contained tasty morsels of information for everyone:

Carefully selected [StB] intelligence analysts pored over the documents [sent from Moscow,] attempting to find materials they could use. …Czechoslovak diplomats, trying to malign West Germany, confidently shared documents related to the Nazi persecution of their citizens with the U.S., British, French, and Dutch embassies, as well as with Jewish community centers. …The French press mainly focused on the evidence of war crimes. The Italian press coverage focused on German spying on Mussolini. Austrian researchers published several Anschluss-related documents. The Los Angeles Times, publishing one of the few U.S. stories about the operation, only mentioned the lack of Nazi gold.

While perhaps not as dramatic as Operation NEPTUN, many Cold War active measures relied on inventive delivery as much as on message. In the early 1950s, for instance, West Berlin became a stage for creative clandestine mischief. American operatives lofted thousands of helium balloons over the Iron Curtain each month, each balloon trailing a bundle of leaflets that fluttered down into East Germany. On any given morning, factory workers in the GDR might find anonymous pamphlets on their doorstep containing memetic messages of hope or subversion delivered literally out of the blue.

Meanwhile, at street level, bands of young West Berliners took to clandestine graffiti campaigns. Under cover of night they swarmed into the Eastern sector to paint large white F’s on walls and shop windows: “F” for Freiheit (freedom), as the locals understood, or perhaps for Feindschaft (enmity) in the eyes of alarmed communist officials. The ambiguity was the point. The cryptic graffiti sowed confusion and defiance in equal measure, needling the regime with the specter of an underground resistance. In a prank worthy of a Chevy Chase movie, CIA-backed agitators even engineered stink bombs to disrupt communist rallies, unleashing noxious fumes in packed meeting halls so that party speeches ended in coughing​ and chaos. These tactics were sometimes comical, sometimes brazen, but never random. Each was carefully crafted to get a rise out of the adversary. From balloons to graffiti to malodorous “bombs,” the delivery mechanisms became as memorable as the propaganda they carried, proving that in information warfare, a dash of showmanship and inventiveness can be as important as the content itself.

Yet for all this theatricality, the masterminds of Western Cold War shitposting learned that blatant, heavy-handed anti-Soviet messaging often backfired. A pamphlet or broadcast that screamed American talking points would be dismissed outright in the East. The more effective approach was subtle and, more often than not, truthful. Ladislav Bittman, the Czech spy-turned-defector who orchestrated disinformation campaigns, put it plainly: for disinformation to succeed, it must “at least partially respond to reality, or at least accepted views.”

In practice, that meant cloaking shitposts within a credible, fact-based frame. In West Berlin, instead of blasting the Soviets with crude tirades, U.S. operatives set up a publishing front headed by a former U-boat commander that produced authentic-looking East German periodicals​. One of its most ingenious creations was a fake youth culture magazine which avoided overt politics and was instead stuffed with jazz music, western fashion, and other pop culture topics. The magazine became wildly popular with the East German youth who had no idea it was a CIA fabrication​. By design, it delivered pro-western ideals between the lines, without ever explicitly railing against Moscow. As the operation’s overseer, Bill Harvey, quipped in a memo to superiors, “Along with astrology, we consider [jazz] one of the most potent psychological forces available to the West for an attack on Moscow Communism.”¹​

Indeed, one of Washington’s sharpest weapons in those years was the “raw energy of youthful German organizations.” In 1949, the CIA’s newly minted Office of Policy Coordination opened “a new political warfare front,” that funneled support to a trio of West German activists groups, each run by impassioned young men and women determined to fight communist influence in their divided country. Though loosely connected and complementary, each group had a distinct mission. One group, Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU or Fighting Group Against Inhumanity), was the activist and paramilitary wing of the movement, responsible for direct action such as the graffiti campaigns, balloon launches, and disruption of East German rallies discussed earlier. Another group, Untersuchungsausschuss freiheitlicher Juristan (UfJ or Investigation Committee of Free Jurists), fought to record and expose Soviet crimes and injustices of communism in order to promote anti-Soviet sentiments in East Germany. The third group was far more covert than either of its sister organizations and was known only by its CIA code name: LCCASSOCK. This third organization, using information clandestinely gathered by the CIA, was primarily responsible for printing and distributing a range of magazines, newspapers, books, and other literature across the continent. It was, as Rid puts it, the “most prolific, innovative, and aggressive forgery factory, probably of the entire Cold War.”

What these three outfits shared was the youthful boldness and natural inclination towards trollish activities to challenge the Soviet bloc on its own turf (and CIA handlers savvy enough to let them take the lead). By leveraging indigenous activism, the agency gave its covert war a native face. A memo from this period praised the “raw vitality” of these German fronts and noted how their authenticity made the propaganda far more effective than any overt American effort. The West German public, seeing their own countrymen stand up to communist abuses, were more inclined to lend support; and behind the Iron Curtain, East German citizens were heartened to see Germans championing the cause of freedom.

The history of the Cold War leaves open the question of what the goal of active measures should be and how success is measured. Certainly some operations have direct, concrete goals such as Operation NEPTUN’s goal of discrediting particular West German officials and extending the statute of limitations for war crimes. But active measures more commonly have amorphous goals, particularly when they are part of a full-spectrum information warfare strategy. For example, the primary goal for Department X of the East German Stasi was zerstörungsarbeit or operations meant to “corrode the soft tissue of the Western body politic.”² The Stasi’s methods of achieving zersetzung were particularly cruel and inhumane, relying heavily on personal psychological attacks to damage the mental and physical health of those deemed dissidents. But the Soviet-directed goal of attempting to drive wedges between different groups among Western allies was smart. In particular, efforts to subvert the peace movement and play peace activists against western governments and more bellicose elements of society was a particularly effective Soviet tactic throughout the second half of the twentieth century.³ One need only be reminded of the events at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 or Kent State University in 1970 to see how effective “peacewar” could be.

All these lessons from the Cold War—the value of creative delivery, the need for credible messaging, the power of youth-driven activism, and the acceptance of loose objectives—speak to an overarching truth: active measures are most effective when they don’t look like propaganda at all. In the struggle for hearts and minds, the United States and its allies found an edge by fusing deception with authenticity. A fake story in a real-looking package, delivered by messengers who seemed trustworthy, could crack the enemy’s narrative and sometimes even inspire ordinary people to act.

Although the United States severely curtailed active measures as the Cold War heated up, by the mid 1960s, these methods had scored significant successes, from undermining East German morale to forcing the Soviets onto the defensive in the war of ideas. It is exactly this legacy of active measures, bold in form but subtle in content, that today’s information warriors should seek to rediscover. The historical record is not just tales of a bygone era, but a practical lesson plan in influence. If the United States is to re-engage in the digital information war, it will do well to remember the playbook it wrote in the Cold War. Dropping truth from a balloon can be more disruptive than screaming lies from the rooftops and, as Black Lake’s phantom Nazi treasure proved, a well-crafted shitpost delivered with panache and credibility can echo for decades.

Shitposters of the World, Unite!

When it comes to digital information warfare, the United States holds a unique and underutilized advantage. We are the birthplace of the internet’s most potent form of asymmetric communication—memes. We invented the troll and the shitpost. We are masters of digital imagery, ironic detachment, and rapid-fire, culturally fluent, emotionally resonant messaging. In the new information war, these traits are not bugs, they are features and it is time to mobilize them.

Authoritarian regimes like Russia and China have deployed troll armies and bot farms to advance their geopolitical narratives. But, for all their resources, they lack the native fluency and cultural legitimacy that define the chaotic discourse of Western internet culture. Their attempts at memetic warfare are typically derivative, stiff, and transparently orchestrated. They mimic our language but not our spirit. Where they use scripts, we use improvisation. Where they employ uniformity, we weaponize absurdity. Where they enforce hierarchy, we revel in decentralized spontaneity.

In developing a truly American full-spectrum information warfare strategy, the United States should not seek to create a copy of the Russian Internet Research Agency or the Chinese 50 Cent Party. Rather, it should harness the natural advantages of our decentralized, culturally savvy, and anarchically creative online communities. The same irreverent shitposters who ridicule bureaucrats, dunk on corporate brands, turn C-SPAN clips into viral content, and hack rival image boards just for the lulz could wage war on authoritarian narratives with a precision and reach unmatched by official government channels if given the right incentives. This is not a call for censorship or manipulation. It is a call to treat influence operations as a whole-of-society challenge and to recognize that the meme lords of 4Chan, Reddit, Twitter, and Discord are an integral part of that society.

We have already seen glimmers of this. The North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO), an informal group of pro-Ukraine meme warriors, emerged organically on Twitter in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Operating with no formal structure and driven entirely by volunteer enthusiasm, NAFO has relentlessly ridiculed Russian propaganda, disrupted official diplomatic communications, and elevated pro-Ukraine messaging to global audiences. In one particular “operation,” trolls dogpiled on Ambassador Mikhail Ulyanov until he grew frustrated and gave up the plot on false Russian narratives in real-time.

NAFO is a brilliant example of citizen-driven information warfare. It tapped into widespread public anger and channeled it through popular culture and laughter, achieving effects that official statements or fact-checks simply can’t​. Importantly, NAFO operates with plausible deniability—they’re just “ordinary citizens” joking online—and have zero direct cost to any government. Yet it has furthered U.S. and allied strategic goals by countering Kremlin disinformation and even helping to raise nearly $2 million for the Ukrainian military in the process. One commenter put it best: “NAFO can swim in online waters that governments would struggle to enter.”

Another example of organic meme warfare with strategic implications is the case of the Reddit community r/EnoughCommieSpam, which was central in countering Chinese-originated propaganda and spam campaigns during early COVID-19. Despite having no formal backing, communities like this employed crowd-sourced moderation and high-velocity shitposting to combat state-aligned narratives, often faster than platforms or governments could respond. Such forums are decentralized, leaderless, and unaligned with any formal ideology yet highly responsive to geopolitical events and capable of mobilizing cultural and linguistic assets in real time.

There’s even a strong argument to be made that streamer iShowSpeed’s excursions through China are doing more to benefit Sino-American relations than anything since Nixon!

The lesson is simple: irreverence is power. America invented much of the modern internet culture and so we hold home-field advantage in the realm of digital satire and meme-driven messaging. In the information war, the U.S. must be willing to cultivate allies who are subversive, humorous, and even offensive. Just as the CIA once empowered youth-led publishing collectives and graffiti campaigns in Cold War Berlin, today’s active measures should include partnerships with digital communities who can reach audiences unreachable by formal diplomacy or traditional media. The goal is not to control these actors, but to enable them, create space, offer resources, and build infrastructure that allows pro-democracy memes to flourish and spread. Given President Trump’s support for similar efforts in the past, now is an opportune time to reengage.

The United States has already invested in many tactical mechanisms to enable a new army of shitposters to get behind China’s Great Firewall and into Russia’s RusNet. One essential component of this work is the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a U.S.-backed nonprofit that supports technologies enabling secure, private, and uncensored internet access around the world. OTF funds and maintains circumvention tools such as Tor, Signal, Psiphon, Lantern, and nthLink, which are used by tens of millions of people in repressive environments. These tools work by creating encrypted tunnels and proxy networks that allow users to access blocked content and communicate without detection. For example, following Russia’s 2022 media blackout, usage of these tools surged. Psiphon alone saw daily Russian users rise from under 50,000 to over 1,000,000 within weeks of the invasion. Today, OTF-supported technologies help more than 40 million users each month access the open internet—a number that is only expected to grow—all for only 7 cents per user.

The ability to reach people living under authoritarian censorship is not a secondary consideration. It is foundational. No amount of compelling digital content can have a meaningful impact if it cannot penetrate the firewalls, filters, and surveillance regimes that define life online in China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere. If the United States is to succeed in this new era of strategic competition, it must ensure that the message of freedom is not just written but delivered. But the U.S. should go further, extending support to digital spaces where authentic satire and cultural insurgency emerge.

How, then, might the U.S. go about recruiting and mobilizing trolls and shitposters for an offensive information campaign while avoiding the ethical and practical pitfalls such an endeavor could entail? The approach should be multifaceted, part of a comprehensive strategy that blends official and unofficial efforts. Below are several strategies and tactics Washington (and Langley and Fort Meade) should consider to empower these digital guerrillas, all while maintaining plausible deniability and an ethical high ground:

Meme Contests and Gamification

The U.S. government (or allied NGOs) could sponsor online contests, hackathons, or meme challenges to incentivize the creation of viral content that satirizes autocrats or counters their propaganda. This approach leverages the competitive, playful spirit of internet communities and makes participation feel like a game rather than a chore. Notably, the Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, once demonstrated the power of online crowdsourcing with its 2009 Red Balloon Challenge which mobilized teams nationwide to locate ten weather balloons via social media. They succeeded in under nine hours. That experiment proved how quickly a motivated online crowd can be galvanized with the right incentives. Similar memetic contests could spark swarms of patriotic trolls to compete in pushing U.S.-friendly narratives. For example, it would be relatively cheap and simple to spawn national challenges to create the most viral video mocking Kremlin censorship or the catchiest meme campaign supporting Taiwanese democracy. Prizes need not even be monetary; the street cred of winning the internet for a day can be a huge draw. The key is that gamification lowers the barrier to entry and makes propaganda work feel fun, voluntary, and bottom-up.

Public-Private Platform Support

U.S. agencies could quietly collaborate with social media platforms and private internet companies to tilt the digital battlefield in favor of grassroots pro-democracy influencers. This doesn’t mean heavy-handed censorship, but rather subtle forms of support. For example, social media firms might tweak algorithms (within legitimate bounds) to boost content that satirizes dictators or exposes human rights abuses by authoritarian regimes, ensuring those posts reach wider audiences. They are already moving in this direction by labeling state-sponsored media and purging inauthentic bot networks. Likewise, American tech companies could provide back-end help to counter-trolls, perhaps by fast-tracking their abuse reports or sharing information on foreign disinformation campaigns so that troll-hunters have intel to work with. Platforms could easily set up tools and API’s similar to Meta’s CrowdTangle or YouTube’s Research Tab that are designed to help our state-sponsored shitposters engage efficiently and effectively.

Another avenue is creating digital safe zones on mainstream platforms: unofficially tolerated spaces where meme warriors can coordinate actions without fear of being algorithmically throttled for brigading. Since overt government direction of platforms would raise legal issues, much of this would rely on quiet understanding and common cause. After all, U.S.-based social media companies have their own incentive to rid their platforms of hostile foreign influence and improve genuine user engagement. By aligning those incentives with America’s strategic goals, platforms can become force-multipliers for our shitpost brigades rather than unwitting tools of the enemy. The CCP is already doing it with TikTok, so why shouldn’t the U.S. respond in kind?

Troll Training and PsyOps Integration

To truly weaponize troll culture, the U.S. military and intelligence community should integrate memetic warfare into their existing psychological operations programs. This could involve actively learning from the trolling community and even embedding in their networks. NATO-affiliated strategists have explicitly recommended engaging in “memetic war-gaming” and building relationships with internet trolls to understand their tactics. In practice, U.S. Cyber Command units or the U.S. War Colleges could run simulations of meme wars to hone their skills at seeding and amplifying narratives online. Such simulations could also be advanced to even higher levels within our national security apparatus with the wargaming divisions of various branches and agencies integrating memetic warfare into existing cyber wargamming exercises. They might also train select personnel (or allied activists) to operate undercover or catfish in extremist forums, Discord groups, or comment sections where authoritarian propagandists exert influence, with the goal of subtly steering conversations. By mastering the lexicon and humor of these subcultures, American psyop officers could act as spotters and enablers, identifying potent meme content and helping it spread at the right time, in the right places. Crucially, these operations would remain largely unattributed. The goal is to catalyze organic viral trends, not to launch obviously state-sponsored memes (which savvy netizens would immediately reject). The learning curve is steep, but the payoff is a cadre of cyber operators who can speak the trolls’ language and weaponize it for the West.

Non-GMO Troll Farms via Private Partners

Russian and Chinese troll and bot farms are heavily centralized and directed. In a word, they are inorganic. The beauty of American culture is that it is highly decentralized and organic so American trolls and bot farms should be non-GMO. Instead of military barracks full of uniformed bloggers, the U.S. should cultivate volunteer networks and proxy organizations to do the job.

One model is to use patriotic nonprofits, academic centers, or even defense contractors as cut-outs that organize and support meme warfare cells without direct government fingerprints. These intermediaries could provide funding, tools, or information to semi-autonomous groups of shitposters. For example, a nonprofit focused on internet freedom might host a secure forum or Discord server (a kind of digital safehouse) where anti-authoritarian influencers can congregate, swap intel, and coordinate campaign themes under the guise of a civil society initiative. Meanwhile, intelligence agencies could feed tips or data to these actors through back channels: say, alerting them to an upcoming Russian disinformation push so they can preempt it with spoof and ridicule. This approach mirrors the CIA’s involvement in Cold War organizations like KgU, UfJ, and LCCASSOCK. America could quietly empower digital privateers—free-range hacktivists and memesters—to harry authoritarian regimes online.

Russia itself already uses a version of this playbook: many of Moscow’s influence ops are run through oligarch-funded outfits like the IRA, creating plausible deniability​. By developing our own semi-deniable memetic militias, we can hit back at adversaries in the information domain while maintaining an official stance of clean hands. These non-GMO troll farms would be fed by native enthusiasm—people who genuinely want to spoof Xi Jinping or Putin for the cause of freedom—merely guided and fertilized behind the scenes by U.S. strategy. Importantly, because they are not under strict government control, they would be free to push the envelope in creativity and satire – often a key advantage over the more regimented troll brigades of autocracies.

Conclusion

The United States does not need to invent a new doctrine for digital active measures. We need only to update the one we already have; to apply the lessons of past influence operations to the chaotic, memetic reality of the modern internet. The information war is being fought on forums, in comment sections, and through viral videos. And in those spaces, the frontline troops are not bureaucrats or generals. They are the anon shitposters who, in mocking the powerful and ridiculing lies, tell a kind of truth no official channel ever could. It is time we treated them accordingly.

There are risks, of course. Trolls are unpredictable. Shitposting is, by definition, a practice that resists coordination. Attempts to overtly manage or direct it could backfire, alienating the very communities we seek to support. It is also essential to place guardrails on this engagement. Outright disinformation should not be laundered through memes, and the targeting of domestic populations must remain off-limits under existing law, including the Smith-Mundt Act.

But the lesson from Cold War-era active measures is not that control is necessary; credibility is. Operations succeed when they are cloaked in authenticity, when they channel genuine sentiment, and when they leave just enough ambiguity to be deniable. The same principles apply here. If we try to conscript shitposters into formal information campaigns, we will fail. But if we recognize them as a native insurgency against authoritarian control—as digital descendents of the graffiti artists, balloon-droppers, and underground publishers of the Cold War—we may find a powerful new ally. Memes do not have to say everything—they just have to break the spell of propaganda long enough for truth to slip in.