Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

In other words, “What is Internet, anyway?”

“In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion.” That was the prediction of J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, two psychologists who had seen their careers pulled into the relatively new field of computer science that had sprung up during the desperate days of World War II.

That all changed in 1968, the year Licklider and Taylor wrote a paper titled “The Computer as a Communication Device.” It posited a future in which computers could be used to capture and share information instead of just calculating equations.

They called it the Intergalactic Computer Network.

Reflecting their past study of the human mind, Licklider and Taylor went even further. They prophesied how this network would affect the people who used it. It would create new kinds of jobs, build new “interactive communities,” and even give people a new sense of place, what Licklider and Taylor called “to be on line.”

The “binary information digit,” or “bit,” had first been proposed in 1948 by Claude Shannon of Bell Labs. The bit was the smallest possible unit of data, existing in either an “on” or “off” state. By stringing bits together, complex instructions could be sent through computers, with perfect accuracy.

By arranging bits into “packets” of information and establishing a system for sending and receiving them (packet switching), it was theoretically possible for computers to relay instructions instantly, over any conceivable distance. With the right software, the two men foretold, these bits could be used to query a database, type a word, even (in theory) generate an image or display video.

When a team of researchers proposed a similar idea to AT&T in 1965, they were bluntly rejected. “Damn it!” exclaimed one executive. “We’re not going to set up a competitor to ourselves!”

Luckily, Licklider and Taylor were in a position to help make their vision of computers exchanging bits of information a reality. The two were employees of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

But the real selling point for the other scientists working for ARPA was something else. Linking up computers would be a useful way to share what was then an incredibly rare and costly commodity: computer time. A network could spread the load and make it easier on everyone. So a project was funded to transform the Intergalactic Computer Network into reality. It was called ARPANET.

On October 29, 1969, ARPANET came to life when a computer at UCLA was

Within a century, the press became both accessible and indispensable. Once a rare commodity, books—some 200 million of them—were now circulating widely in Europe.

In what would become a familiar pattern, the new technology transformed not just communications but war, politics, and the world. In 1517, a geopolitical match was struck when a German monk named Martin Luther wrote a letter laying out 95 problems in the Catholic Church.

By the time the pope heard about the troublesome monk and sought to excommunicate him, Luther had reproduced his 95 complaints in 30 different pamphlets and sold 300,000 copies. The result was the Protestant Reformation, which would fuel two centuries of war and reshape the map of Europe.

In 1605, a German printer named Johann Carolus found a way to use his press’s downtime by publishing a weekly collection of “news advice.” In publishing the first newspaper, Carolus created a new profession. The “press” sold information itself to customers, creating a popular market model that had never before existed.

The world changed decisively in 1844, the year Samuel Morse successfully tested his telegraph (from the Latin words meaning “far writer”). By harnessing the emerging science of electricity, the telegraph ended the tyranny of distance. It also showed the important role of government in any

This was the start of a telecommunications revolution. By 1850, there were 12,000 miles of telegraph wire and some 20 telegraph companies in the United States alone.

President James Buchanan captured the feeling best when marking the laying of the first transatlantic cable between the United States and Britain, in 1858. He expressed the belief that the telegraph would “prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument designed . . . to diffuse religion, liberty, and law throughout the world.” Within days, that transatlantic cable of perpetual peace was instead being used to send military orders.

Beginning in the Crimean War (1853–1856), broad instructions, traveling weeks by sea, were replaced—to the lament of officers in the field—by micromanaging battle orders sent by cable from the tearooms of London to the battlefields of Russia.

In the Wars of German Unification (1864–1871), Prussian generals masterfully coordinated far-flung forces to the bafflement of their foes, using real-time communications by telegraph wire to replace horseback couriers.

In the American Civil War (1861–1865), Confederate and Union soldiers, each seeking an edge over the other, laid som...

The electric wire of the telegraph, though, could only speak in dots and dashes. To use them required not just the infrastructure of a telegraph office, but a trained expert to operate the machine and translate its coded messages for you. Alexander Graham Bell, an amateur tinkerer whose day job was teaching the deaf, changed this with the telephone in 1876.

The number to call President Rutherford B. Hayes was “1,” as the only other phone line linked to it was at the Treasury Department. The telephone also empowered a new class of oligarchs. Bell’s invention was patented and soon monopolized by Bell Telephone, later renamed the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Nearly all phone conversations in the United States would be routed through this one company for the next century.

Telegraphs and phones had a crucial flaw, though. They shrank the time and simplified the means by which a message could travel a great distance, but they did so only between two points, linked by wire.

Guglielmo Marconi, a 20-year-old Irish-Italian tinkering in a secret lab in his parents’ attic, would be the first to build a working ...

Radio’s promise, however, went well beyond connecting two points across land or sea. By eliminating the need for wire, radio freed communications in a manner akin to the printing press. One person could speak to thousands or even millions of people at once.

The first radio “broadcast” took place in 1906, when an American engineer played “O Holy Night” on his violin.

Quite quickly, radio waves collided with politics. Smart politicians began to realize that radio had shattered the old political norms. Speeches over the waves became a new kind of performance art crossed with politics. The average length of a political campaign speech in the United States fell from an hour to just ten minutes.

But radio also unleashed new political horrors. “It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio,” said Joseph Goebbels, who himself was something new to government, the minister of propaganda for Nazi Germany.

Yet the reach and power of radio was soon surpassed by a technology that brought compelling imagery into broadcasts. The first working television in 1925 showed the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy named Stooky Bill. From these humble beginnings, television soon rewired what people knew, what they thought, and even how they

Unfolding across a hundred South Vietnamese cities and towns, Tet was the biggest battle of the Vietnam War. But the war’s real turning point came a month later and 8,000 miles away. Legendary journalist Walter Cronkite was the anchor of the CBS Evening News and deemed “the most trusted man in America.” In a three-minute monologue, Cronkite declared that the Vietnam War was never going to be the victory the politicians and generals had promised.

They are more likely to believe what it says—and then to share it with others who, in turn, will believe what they say. It is all about us, or rather our love of ourselves and people like us. This phenomenon is called “homophily,” meaning “love of the same.” Homophily is what makes humans social creatures, able to congregate in such large and like-minded groups. It explains the growth of civilization and cultures. It is also the reason an internet falsehood, once it begins to spread, can rarely be stopped.

Similarly, the militants’ insistence that their actions were in accordance with Islamic scripture—a stance opposed by virtually every actual scholar of Islam—was parroted by this same subsection of far-right media and politicians, who saw it as a way to bolster their own nationalistic, anti-Islamic platforms.

ISIS militants had internalized another important lesson of the social media age: reality is no match for perception.

On the battlefields of Libya and Iraq, it concealed its losses and greatly exaggerated its gains. Far from the battlefields of the Middle East, it could take credit for killings that it had nothing to do with—such as the 2017 Las Vegas shootings in the United States and a ...

ISIS’s legacy will live on long after the group has lost all its physical territory, because it was one of the first conflict actors to fuse warfare with the foundations of attention in the social media age.

It mastered the key elements of narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation, each of which we’ll explore in turn. Importantly, none of these elements are unique to terrorism or the Middle East. Indeed, anyone—digital marketers, conspiracy theorists, internet celebrities, politicians, and national militaries—can employ them. Whatever or wherever the conflict, these are the weapons that win LikeWar.

In other words, they’d built a “narrative.” Narratives are the building blocks that explain both how humans see the world and how they exist in large groups.

The story of Spencer Pratt, the vain villain, was simpler—and more engaging—than the story of the conflicted self-promoter who pretended to leave his girlfriend on the curb in order to pump the ratings.

Human minds are wired to seek and create narrative. Every moment of the day, our brains are analyzing new events—a kind word from our boss, a horrible tweet from a faraway war—and binding them into thousands of different narratives already stowed in our memories. This process is subconscious and unavoidable.

By simplifying complex realities, good narratives can slot into other people’s preexisting comprehension.

Following World War II, for instance, some U.S. statesmen advocated the massive aid package known as the Marshall Plan because of its “psychological political by-products.”

They saw that the true value of the $13 billion program was the narrative it would build about the United States as a nation that was both wealthy and generous. This single story line was valuable in multiple ways. It not only countered Soviet narratives about whose economic system was best, but it also cast America as a great benefactor, which linked the U.S.-European relationship to other narrative themes of charity, gratitude, and debt.

“Now everyone is a reality star,” Pratt added. “And they’re all as fake as we were.”

In 2000, the average attention span of an internet user was measured at twelve seconds. By 2015, it had shrunk to eight seconds—slightly less than the average attention span of a goldfish. An effective digital narrative, therefore, is one that can be absorbed almost instantly.

Donald Trump also capitalized on the premium that social media places on simplicity.

They found that Trump’s vocabulary measured at the lowest level of all the candidates, comprehensible to someone with a fifth-grade education.

Starting with George Washington’s first inaugural address, which measured as one of the most complex overall, American presidents communicated at a college level only when newspapers dominated mass communication. But each time a new technology took hold, the complexity score dipped.

To put it another way: the more accessible the technology, the simpler a winning voice becomes. It may be Sad! But it is True!

The second rule of narrative is resonance. Nearly all effective narratives conform to what social scientists call “frames,” products of particular language and culture that feel instantly and deeply familiar.