Fox News ran a conspiratorial segment saying the Pentagon wanted to use Taylor Swift as a psy-op

• Jesse Watters floated a theory the Pentagon wanted to make Taylor Swift a pro-Biden "asset."

• The Fox News host pointed to comments a researcher made at a 2019 panel about online misinformation.

• The researcher told BI she was merely using Swift as an example to help the audience understand.

Fox News' Jesse Watters floated a brand new theory about Taylor Swift on Tuesday night, saying that the Pentagon had planned to make her into an "asset" in a pro-President Joe Biden "psy-op."

Speaking on "Jesse Watters Primetime," Watters started out with the conundrum of why Swift has so many fans.

"I mean I like her music, she's all right," he said. "But I mean, have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?"

The answer, he suggested, is that Swift had entered a covert pact with the Biden administration to promote its agenda and swing voters his way — although, he later said, he had no evidence this pact had actually happened.

He said: "Around four years ago, the Pentagon's psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting," he said. "What kind of asset? A psyop for combating online misinformation."

He then shared footage from a 2019 conference on misinformation, framing the speaker as "the Pentagon's psyop unit pitch[ing] NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset for combating misinformation online."

The speaker — data engineer Alicia Marie Bargar — told Business Insider that she has no connection to NATO or the Pentagon, and that her remarks were taken out of context.

"No one reached out to me for comment," she said.

Here's what Bargar said in the clip shown by Watters:

"You came in here wanting to understand how you just go out there and counter the information operation," she said.

"The idea is that social influence can help encourage or promote behavior change, potentially as a peaceful information operation. I include Taylor Swift in here because she's a fairly influential online person."

In other parts of the presentation — not aired in the Fox segment — Bargar shared the largely uncontroversial idea that "social influence can help encourage, help promote behavior change," adding that this should be done "with people," and in an ethical manner.

Bargar was speaking on a panel entitled "Information Warfare: defining and analyzing" at the 11th International Conference on Cyber Conflict in Tallinn, Estonia, which took place in May 2019.

It was organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, whose mission, its website says, is to support member states in cyber defense. The listing said the panel was moderated by NATO StratCom's then-COE Donara Barojan.

A LinkedIn profile lists Bargar as working, at the time of the conference, as a research engineer for Johns Hopkins.

"This was an academic presentation at an open conference for discussing cyber security challenges," Bargar told BI on Wednesday.

Discussing Swift was "an incidental example of a famous person to explain a social network analysis concept to the audience," she said.

"This is a commonly used approach in academia to make theoretical concepts easier to understand," she added.

In the Fox News segment, Watters admitted he had "no evidence" that Swift is "a front for a covert political agenda."

"If we did, we'd share it," he said. "But we're curious. Because the pop star who endorsed Biden is urging millions of her followers to vote."

Nonetheless, he went on to speak as if it were real, calling it "the psy-op" and musing: "I wonder who got to her, from the White House, or wherever."

Representatives for Fox News and Swift did not respond to requests for comment from BI.

This story has been updated with comments from Bargar received after publication.

Read the original article on Business Insider