Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

A resonant narrative is one that fits neatly into our preexisting story lines by allowing us to see ourselves clearly in solidarity with—or opposition to—its actors.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the more unyieldingly hyperpartisan a member of Congress is—best fitting our concept of the characters in a partisan play—the more Twitter followers he or she draws.

The third and final rule of narrative is novelty. Just as narrative frames help build resonance, they also serve to make things predictable. Too much predictability, though, can be boring, especially in an age of microscopic attention spans and unlimited entertainment.

These three traits—simplicity, resonance, and novelty—determine which narratives stick and which fall flat.

The big losers in this narrative battle are those people or institutions that are too big, too slow, or too hesitant to weave such stories. These are not the kinds of battles that a plodding, uninventive bureaucracy can win.

And yet, as we’ll see, narrative isn’t the only factor that drives virality, nor are narratives forever fixed in place.

“When we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”

What captures the most attention on social media isn’t content that makes a profound argument or expands viewers’ intellectual horizons. Instead, it is content that stirs emotions.

These are the sorts of feelings that create arousal, not the sexual kind (at least not usually), but the kind in which the heart beats faster and the body surges with fresh energy.

the stronger the emotions involved, the likelier something is to go viral.

anger was the emotion that traveled fastest and farthest through the social network—and the competition wasn’t even close. “Anger is more influential than other emotions like joy,” the researchers bluntly concluded.

A year later, an even larger and more insidious study confirmed the power of anger. Partnering with Facebook, data scientists manipulated the newsfeeds of nearly 700,000 users over the course of a week, without the knowledge of the “participants.” For some, the researchers increased the number of positive stories to which they were exposed. For others, they increased the number of negative stories. In each case, Facebook users altered their own behavior to match their new apparent reality, becoming cheerier or angrier in the process. But the effect was most pronounced among those whose newsfeeds had turned negative. The scientists dubbed this an “emotional contagion,” the spread of emotions through social networks that resembled nothing so much as the transmission of a virus.

Anger is not necessarily bad. After all, nearly every political movement that has risen to prominence in the social media age has done so by harnessing the power of outrage.

In 2013, Alicia Garza posted a passionate message about police shootings of African Americans on her Facebook page. She closed it with a simple note: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” A friend then reposted the resonant message on his page, adding the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

But the bigger picture is grim. If attention is the thing that matters most online—and as we saw in the last chapter, it is—brazen self-promoters will go to any lengths to achieve it.

“Anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering,” observed the wise Master Yoda. And that suffering leads to the Dark Side: what is better known on the internet as trolling.

Early online discussion boards copied both the term and the technique. “Trolling for newbies” became a sport in which experienced users would post shamelessly provocative questions designed to spark the ire of new (and unwitting) users. The newbies would then waste time trying to argue a point that was simply designed to make them argue.

Today, we know trolls as those internet users who post messages that are less about sharing information than spreading anger. Their specific goal is to provoke a furious response.

in 1946 by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in describing the tactics of anti-Semites: They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words . . . They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

team of researchers found that mounting anger turns users toward trolling behavior. And just like conspiracy theories, the more the anger spreads, the more internet users are made susceptible to it.

And as non-trolls engage with trolls, many embrace trolling tactics themselves. “Such behavior can . . . spread from person to person in discussions and persist across them to spread further in the community,” the team wrote. “Our findings suggest that trolling . . . can be contagious, and that ordinary people, given the right conditions, can act like trolls.”

Even those who escape the trolls’ ire must still contend with a digital environment that amplifies outrage and effectively mutes everything else. The power of trolls—which really represents the power of anger—transforms the internet into a caustic, toxic swamp.

Swift explained how she’d wowed the stodgy music executives by “explaining to them that I had been communicating directly with my fans on this new site called Myspace.” She added, “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.”

For U.S. defense analysts, one of the first examinations of the subject came in 2006, when U.S. Marine Corps Major Michael Prosser published a far-reaching thesis: “Memetics—a Growth Industry in US Military Operations.”

Prosser argued that armed conflict would increasingly be decided by dueling ideologies on a “nonlinear battlefield.” Accordingly, militaries would need to track the memes promulgated by their adversaries, counter them, and respond with memes of their own.

“Exploring the Utility of Memes for U.S. Government Influence Campaigns.”

“Now as never before we have the ability to reach out, learn, and spread truth as we know it to be . . . We are presented with a state of affairs unique to history, an age of ideological memetic warfare in which the controlling principles of mankind are loosed to spread with no physical barriers.”

The union came in the form of Jeff Giesea, a tech consultant who worked as an early and avid organizer for Trump. He was one of the cofounders of MAGA3X, a meme-generating hub for the Trump online army,

The memetic warfare envisioned by Prosser, Giesea, DARPA researchers, and internet anti-Semites alike turns on essentially the same principle. It recognizes the power of virality—the need to produce and propel viral content through the online system. But it also recognizes that the content that goes viral—the meme—can be quite easily hijacked.

“Own the moment, own the hour,” writes defense analyst August Cole. “Own the hour, own the country.”

The Israelis called it Operation Pillar of Defense. IDF air strikes perforated the buildings in which suspected Hamas fighters gathered, killing militants and innocent families alike. Hamas fighters responded with hundreds of unguided rockets, eager to kill any Israeli they could.

But this wasn’t the only fight that counted. There were now three fronts at work in any conflict, Israel’s chief information officer explained. Two were predictable: the “physical” fight, which Israel easily dominated, and the “cyber” fight, in which the IDF just as easily beat back the efforts of Palestinian hackers. But there was a third front, he said, “the world of social networks.”

The IDF deployed a Twitter account, Facebook pages in multiple languages, Tumblr blog pages, and even a Pinterest page. There were slick infographics and a stream of videos and statistics.

The IDF’s most widely shared image showed Hamas rockets bearing down on cartoon versions of Sydney, New York, London, and Paris. “What Would You Do?” the caption asked in bold red letters.

By contrast, the propaganda efforts of Hamas’s militants were less structured. Most of its social media response came from millions of unaffiliated observers around the world, who watched the plight of Palestinian civilians with horror and joined the fray.

The scourge of war left nothing untouched—including video games and fast-food chains. The IDF hijacked the hashtags for the World Cup, a new James Bond movie, and even the same Call of Duty franchise that Junaid Hussain of ISIS would weave into his own recruiting (“Playing war games on Call of Duty last night? Over a million Israelis are still under REAL fire#BlackOps2”). Meanwhile, pro-Hamas hackers took over the Israeli Facebook page of Domino’s Pizza, using the opportunity to threaten a merciless reprisal of “more than 2000 rockets” against Israeli cities.

What he found was shocking. In the case of Israel, a sudden spike in online sympathy for Hamas more than halved the pace of Israeli air strikes and resulted in a similarly sized leap in Israel’s own propaganda efforts.

you charted the sentiment (pro-Israel or pro-Palestine) of these tweets on a timeline, not only could you infer what was happening on the ground, but you also could predict what Israel would do next.

Taking place in 2012, Operation Pillar of Defense offered a glimpse of an emerging way of warfare.

Their battles drew in millions more international fighters.

The lesson was clear: Not only did modern war require a well-planned military campaign. It required a viral marketing campaign as well.

Although it would be wrong to suggest that children like Janna were responsible for this cycle of violence, it is also true that their dispatches formed part of this terrible, self-perpetuating system that drove people to kill and be killed. And online, the fighting never stopped.

The effort was as much out in the open as the battles themselves. The IDF’s recruiting page invited young people to “join the international social media desk”; its web ads showed a handsome Israeli man in an olive-drab uniform, smiling as he gazed at an iMac. The form explained how young Israeli citizens could fulfill their two-year draft requirement by serving as content creators, graphic artists, and photographers.

But the IDF’s official military efforts constituted only one part of the new apparatus of online battle. “Hasbara war rooms” were organized at Israeli universities to build out online armies.

During the 2014 conflict, one college boasted of 400 volunteers, their “operations” encompassing 31 different languages. As the years passed, the war rooms became permanent campus fixtures.

By 2017, Israel’s hasbara offensive had its first smartphone app, trumpeted by its creators as the “Iron Dome of Truth.”

They wrote programs to bombard ISIS-related search terms, replacing messages of jihad with a black-robed, green-haired anime character (named ISIS-chan) with a cute smile and a strange obsession with melons.

Although the Anonymous effort inspired plenty of thrill-seekers who jumped into anti-ISIS operations for only a few days (spending most of that time editing their own epic YouTube declarations of war), the churn and madness gradually forged a cadre of hacktivists cut from a different cloth. For these men and women, throwing

Teams of volunteers maintained a rotating list of tens of thousands of ISIS Twitter accounts, crafting algorithms to concentrate their fire and banish ISIS mouthpieces as quickly as they were created.

For Myspace, Megan’s death was a setback from which it never recovered. For Silicon Valley at large, it was a sign that “terms of service” could no longer be a simple check box to placate jumpy investors. These user agreements had to become a new kind of law, penned by private corporations instead of governments, to administer communities of unprecedented scale.