Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

Each tweet posted on Twitter, for instance, carries with it more than sixty-five different elements of metadata.

In a minute, Facebook sees the creation of 500,000 new comments, 293,000 new statuses, and 450,000 new photos; YouTube the uploading of more than 400 hours of video; and Twitter the posting of more than 300,000 tweets.

At the current pace, the average American millennial will take around 26,000 selfies in their lifetime. Fighter

Less and less is there a discrete “news cycle.” Now there is only the news, surrounding everyone like the Force in Star Wars, omnipresent and connected to all.

Serious reflection on the past is hijacked by the urgency of the current moment; serious planning for the future is derailed by never-ending distraction.

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has described this as “present shock.”

The word “media” comes from the Latin word for “middle.” For the past century, “media” has been used to refer to the professional journalists and news organizations paid to serve as the conduit between the public and the news.

Predata uses such mass monitoring to discern online patterns that might be used to project real-world occurrences. Each Sunday, it sends out a “Week Ahead” mailer, breaking down the statistical likelihood of particular contingencies based on web monitoring. Billion-dollar Wall Street hedge funds are interested in any hints of unrest that might move markets. U.S. intelligence agencies are interested in signs of looming terror attacks or geopolitical shifts. For instance, North Korean missile and nuclear bomb tests have been predicted by analysts studying the correlation between past tests and social media chatter, using meta-analysis of online conversations and website visits.

Years after the first internet revolutions had sent shivers down dictators’ spines, the Belarusian regime actually seemed to be strengthening its hand.

Around the world, information had been freed. But so had a countering wave of authoritarianism using social media itself, woven into a pushback of repression, censorship, and even violence.

The web’s unique strengths had been warped and twisted toward evil ends. In truth, democratic activists had no special claim to the internet. They’d simply gotten there first.

because two-thirds of all ISPs reside in the United States, the average number per country across the rest of the globe is relatively small. Many of these ISPs hardly qualify as “businesses” at all. They are state-sanctioned monopolies or crony sanctuaries directed by the

sixty-one countries so far have created mechanisms that allow for national-level internet cutoffs. When the Syrian uprising began,

for instance, the government of Bashar al-Assad compelled Syria’s main ISP to cut off the internet on Fridays, as that was the day people went

“throttling.” Whereas internet blocks cut off access completely, throttling slows down connections. It allows vital online functions to continue while making mass coordination more difficult.

Often, these restrictions are wrapped in the guise of religion or culture. But almost always they are really about protecting the government.

More than religion or culture, this new generation of censors relies on appeals to national strength and unity. Censorship is not for their sake, these leaders explain, but rather for the good of the country.

Over time, such harsh policing of online speech actually becomes less necessary as self-censorship kicks in. Communications scholars call it the “spiral of silence.”

In 1996, there were just 40,000 Chinese online; by 1999, there were 4 million. In 2008, China passed the United States in number of active internet users: 253 million. Today, that figure has tripled again to nearly 800 million (over a quarter of all the world’s netizens),

Yuan Zhifa, a former senior government propagandist, described this philosophy in 2007. “The things of the world must have cadence,” he explained. His choice of words was important. Subtly different from “censorship,” “cadence” means managing the “correct guidance of public opinion.”

In 1998, China formally launched its Golden Shield Project, a feat of digital engineering on a par with mighty physical creations like the Three Gorges Dam. The intent was to transform the Chinese internet into the largest surveillance network in history—a database with rec-ords of every citizen, an army of censors and internet police, and automated systems to track and control every piece of information transmitted over the web. The project cost billions of dollars and employed tens of thousands of workers. Its development continues to this day. Notably,

The most prominent part of the Golden Shield Project is its system of keyword filtering. Should a word or phrase be added to the list of banned terms, it effectively ceases to be.

Web searches won’t find prohibited results; messages with banned words will simply fail to reach the intended recipient. As the list of banned terms updates in real time, events that happen on the rest of the worldwide web simply never occur inside China.

And, as social media has become more visual, the back-and-forth expanded to image blocks. In 2017, the lovable bear Winnie-the-Pooh was disappeared from the Chinese internet. Censors figured out “Pooh” was a reference to President Xi, as he walks with a similar waddle.

Through the possibilities offered by the Chinese internet, this mass-line philosophy has made a comeback. President Xi Jinping has lauded these new technologies for offering the realization of Mao’s vision of “condensing” public opinion into one powerful consensus.

China’s “social credit” system.

Much like a traditional financial credit score, each citizen’s “social credit” is calculated by compiling vast quantities of personal information and computing a single “trustworthiness” score, which measures, essentially, someone’s usefulness to society.

Slated for deployment throughout China in 2020, the scoring system is already used in job application evaluations as well as doling out micro-rewards, like free phone charging at coffee shops for people with good scores.

The score has even been woven into China’s largest online matchmaking service.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has even gone so far as to sign a pact calling for experienced Chinese censors to instruct Russian engineers on building advanced web control mechanisms. Just as U.S. tech companies once helped

resultant strategy as the “4 Ds”: dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience.

The reach of the RT network is impressive, broadcasting across the world in English, Arabic, French, and Spanish.

Its online reach is even more extensive, pushing out digital content in these four languages plus Russian and German.

RT is also popular; it has more YouTube subscribers than any other broadcaster, inclu...

Russia’s web brigades actually originated almost a decade earlier in a pro-Kremlin youth group known as Nashi.

When government authorities (firmly in control of traditional media) struggled to halt the fierce democratic activism spreading through Russian social media circles after the color revolutions and Arab Spring, the group stepped in to pick up the slack, praising Putin and trashing his opponents.

Internet Research Agency, located in an ugly neo-Stalinist building in St. Petersburg’s Primorsky District. They’d settle into their cramped cubicles and get down to business, assuming a series of fake identities known as “sockpuppets.” The job was writing hundreds of social media posts per day, with the goal of hijacking conversations and spreading lies, all to the benefit of the Russian government. For this work, our philosophy major was paid the equivalent of $1,500 per month. (Those who worked on the “Facebook desk” targeting foreign audiences received double the pay of those targeting domestic audiences.)

each employee is required, during an average twelve-hour day, to “post on news articles 50 times.

Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day.

By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least fi...

On Twitter, they might be expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers a...

sockpuppet takes thr...

@Ten_GOP called itself the “unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans” and was followed by over 136,000 people (ten times as many as the official Tennessee Republican Party account). Its 3,107 messages were retweeted 1,213,506 times. Each retweet then spread to millions more users, especially when it was disseminated by prominent Trump campaign figures like Donald Trump Jr., Kellyanne Conway, and Michael Flynn. On Election Day 2016, it was the seventh most retweeted account across all of Twitter.

Indeed, Flynn followed at least five such documented accounts, sharing Russian propaganda with his 100,000 followers at least twenty-five times.

second sockpuppe...

@tpartynews presented itself as a hub for conservative fans of the Tea Party to track the latest headlines. For months, the Russian front pushed out anti-immigrant and pro-Trump messages and was followed and echoed out by some 22,000 people, including Trump’s controversial advisor Sebastian Gorka. Finally, sockpuppets pose as seemingly trustworthy individuals: a grandmother, a blue-collar worker from the...

The fake accounts posed as everything from right-leaning Tea Party activists to “Blacktivist,” who urged those on the left to “choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”

A purported African American organizer, Blacktivist, was actually one of those Russian hipsters sitting in St. Petersburg, whose Facebook posts would be shared an astounding 103.8 million times before the company shut the account down after the election.

According to a dataset of 2016 Facebook advertisements purchased by Russian proxies, the messages received engagement rates as high as 24 percent—far

Secured Borders, an anti–Hillary Clinton Facebook group that totaled over 140,000 subscribers. It, too, was actually run out of the St. Petersburg office of the Internet Research Agency.