Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

THE OPENING SHOT OF THE WAR was fired on May 4, 2009. By all appearances, it had nothing to do with war. “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!” When @realDonaldTrump blasted his first bland tweet

A few weeks after Trump’s first tweet, superstar entertainer Michael Jackson died. His passing convulsed the internet in grief. Pop music’s irreplaceable loss, however, proved Twitter’s gain. Millions of people turned to the social network to mourn, reflect, and speculate. The platform’s traffic surged to a record 100,000 tweets per hour before its servers crashed. People were using social media for something new, to experience the news together online.

Trump’s initial online messaging was sporadic, coming once every few days. In the first years of life, @realDonaldTrump was obviously penned by Trump’s staff, much of it written in the third person.

But in 2011, something changed. The volume of Trump’s Twitter messages quintupled; the next year, it quintupled again. More were written in the first person, and, most important, their tone shifted. This @realDonaldTrump was real. The account was also real combative, picking online fights regularly—comedian

Trump’s “flame wars” succeeded at what mattered most: drawing attention.

Trump began to use the feed to flirt with running for office, directing his Twitter followers to a new website (created by his lawyer Michael Cohen). ShouldTrumpRun.com, it asked.

The technology gave Trump immediate feedback, both validation that he was onto something and a kind of instant focus-testing that helped him hone and double down on any particularly resonant messages.

Trump was both learning how the game was played online and creating new rules for politics beyond it. All

The engineers behind social media had specifically designed their platforms to be addictive. The brain fires off tiny bursts of dopamine as a user posts a message and it receives reactions from others, trapping the brain in a cycle of posts, “likes,” retweets, and “shares.”

Exactly 2,819 days after his first tweet, @realDonaldTrump would broadcast a vastly different announcement to an incomprehensibly different world. It was a world in which nine-tenths of Americans now had social media accounts and Twitter alone boasted 300 million active users. It was a world shaped by online virality and “alternative facts.” And it was one in which the same account that had once informed hundreds of readers that “everybody is raving about Trump Home Mattress” now proclaimed to hundreds of millions, “I am honered [sic] to serve you, the great American people, as your 45th President of the United States!”

In the summer of 2014, fighters of the self-declared Islamic State (also known as ISIS or Daesh in Arabic) roared into northern Iraq, armed with AK-47 rifles, grenades, and even swords. Their dusty pickup trucks advanced quickly across the desert. Far from keeping their operation a secret, though, these fighters made sure everyone knew about it. There was a choreographed social media campaign to promote it, organized by die-hard fans and amplified by an army of Twitter bots. They posted selfies of black-clad militants and Instagram images of convoys that looked like Mad Max come to life.

the effort was organized under one telling hashtag: #AllEyesOnISIS.

Soon #AllEyesOnISIS had achieved its online goal. It became the top-trending hashtag on Arabic Twitter, filling the screens of millions of users—including the defenders and residents of cities in the Islamic State’s sights. The militants’ demands for swift surrender thus spread both regionally and personally, playing on the phones in their targets’ hands. ISIS

Their detonation would sow terror, disunion, and defection.

Iraq had changed dramatically in the years since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Where dictator Saddam Hussein had once banned mobile phones because ease of communication threatened his grip on power, three-quarters of Iraqis now owned

The true power of the German blitzkrieg was speed: a pace of advance so relentless that French defenders were consumed with an unease that turned swiftly to panic. The weapon that made all this possible was the humble radio. Radio allowed armored formations to move in swift harmony. Radio spread reports of their attacks—sometimes real, sometimes not—which spread confusion across the entire French army. Radio also let the Germans bombard the French civilian leaders and populace with an endless stream of propaganda, sowing fear and doubt among what soon became a captive audience.

Where the Germans had harnessed radio and armored vehicles, ISIS pioneered a different sort of blitzkrieg, one that used the internet itself as a weapon. The

With careful editing, an indecisive firefight could be recast as a heroic battlefield victory. A few countering voices might claim otherwise, but how could they prove it? These videos and images moved faster than the truth. Their mix of religiosity and ultraviolence was horrifying to many; to some, however, it was intoxicating.

internet in action. But the abrupt fall of Mosul showed that there was another side to computerized war. The Islamic State, which had no real cyberwar capabilities to speak of, had just run a military offensive like a viral marketing campaign and won a victory that shouldn’t have been possible. It hadn’t hacked the network; it had hacked the information on it.

The export of its message proved equally successful. Like a demonic McDonald’s, ISIS opened more than a dozen new franchises, everywhere from Libya and Afghanistan to Nigeria and Bangladesh.

Where franchises were not possible, ISIS propaganda spurred “lone wolves” to strike, inspiring scores of terrorist attacks from Paris and Sydney to Orlando and San Bernardino.

the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used Instagram to project a friendly face to the world, while it gassed its own citizens.

How much the novel had become normal was evidenced when a reconstituted Iraqi army swept back into Mosul in 2016, two years after #AllEyesOnISIS had chased it away. This time it came equipped for the new battlefield that extended far beyond Mosul’s battered streets. Eighteen-wheel trucks lumbered after tanks and armored personnel carriers, dragging portable cellphone towers to ensure bandwidth for its own messaging. The Iraqi military issued a rapid-fire stream of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter updates both practical (the status of the operation) and bizarre (grinning selfies of Iraqi soldiers as they detonated leftover ISIS suicide-bomb trucks). Naturally, the operation had its own hashtag: #FreeMosul.

For months, U.S. special operators and information warfare officers had trained for the assault by practicing “cognitive maneuvering” against pretend ISIS propagandists.

The Kurdish news network Rudaw didn’t just dispatch camera crews to embed with soldiers on the front lines; it also livestreamed the whole thing, promising “instant access” to the carnage across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. When an ISIS car bomb hurtled toward the screen and exploded, friends, family, and tens of thousands of strangers watched together as a Rudaw reporter struggled to his feet before screaming the name of his cameraman into the billowing smoke. Because the livestream included emojis—smiling and frowning faces, hearts, and the universal “like” symbol—the scene unleashed a cascade of cartoon emotions. Most viewers were fearful for the crew’s safety, so their yellow emoji faces registered shock. When the cameraman’s friend emerged safely, the emojis changed to a wave of online smiles. Scattered among them, however, were a few frowning faces. These were the ISIS sympathizers and fighters who had wanted the journalists to die.

more people were killed by gang violence in 2017 in Chicago than in all U.S. special operations forces across a decade’s worth of fighting in Iraq and then Syria. At the center of the strife is social media.

Digital sociologists describe how social media creates a new reality “no longer limited to the perceptual horizon,” in which an online feud can seem just as real as a face-to-face argument.

At its camps, former guerrilla fighters now trade in their rifles for smartphones. These are the “weapons” of a new kind of war, a retired FARC explosives instructor explained. “Just like we used to provide all our fighters with fatigues and boots, we’re seeing the need to start providing them with data plans.”

Diplomacy has become less private and policy-oriented and more public and performative.

Its impact is not just entertainment, however. As with the gangs, each jab and riposte is both personal and witnessed by the entire world, poisoning relations and making it harder for leaders to find common ground.

Carl von Clausewitz

war is politics by other means,

Winning is a matter of finding and neutralizing an adversary’s “center of gravity.” This is often a rival’s army, whose destruction usually ends its ability to fight. But routing an army is not always the most effective path. “The moral elements are among the most important in war,” Clausewitz wrote. “They constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole . . . They establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads the whole mass of force.” Figure out how to shatter a rival’s spirit, and you might win the war, while avoiding the enemy army entirely.

The internet, once a light and airy place of personal connection, has since morphed into the nervous system of modern commerce. It has also become a battlefield where information itself is weaponized.

Narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation are the most effective tools of online battles, and their mastery guides the efforts of most successful information warriors.

While social media has become a battlefield for us all, its creators set its rules.

five core principles, which form the foundations of this book. First, the internet has left adolescence. Over decades of growth, the internet has become the preeminent medium of global communication, commerce, and politics. It

Second, the internet has become a battlefield. As integral as the internet has become to business and social life, it is now equally indispensable to militaries and governments, authoritarians and activists, and spies and soldiers.

The result is that every battle seems personal, but every conflict is global.

Third, this battlefield changes how conflicts are fought. Social media has rendered secrets of any consequence essentially impossible to keep. Yet because virality can overwhelm truth, what is known can be reshaped. “Power” on this battlefield is thus measured not by physical strength or high-tech hardware, but by the command of attention. The result is a contest of psyc...

Fourth, this battle changes what “war” means. Winning these online battles doesn’t just win the web, but wins the world. Each ephemeral victory drives events in the physical realm, from seemingly inconse...

Fifth, and finally, we’re all part of this war. If you are online, your attention is like a piece of contested territory, being fought over in conflicts that you may or may not realize are unfolding around you. Everything you watch, like, or share represents a tiny ripple on the information battlefield, privileging one side at the expense of others. Your online attention and actions are thus both targets and ammunition in an unending series of skirmishes. Whether you have an interest in the conflicts of LikeWar or not, they have an interest in you.

Fittingly, the first message in internet history was a miscommunication.

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.

Benjamin Franklin, making him—among many other things—the founding father of fake news in America.

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.

On the eve of the 1939 German invasion of Poland, Hitler told his generals, “I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”

beamed into tens of millions of households. Not only did video provide a new level of emotional resonance, but it was also hard to dispute. When the government claimed one thing and the networks showed another, the networks usually won.

ARPANET’s original function had been remote computer use and file transfer, but soon email was devouring two-thirds of the available bandwidth.