Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

Shaquon Thomas’s fate has befallen thousands of other young men across the United States. His hometown of Chicago has famously become the epicenter of a new kind of battle that we would call “war” in any other nation. Indeed, 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. “Most of the gang disputes have nothing to do with drug sales, or gang territory, and everything to do with settling personal scores,” explains Chicago alderman Joe Moore, who witnessed one of the shootings

This was the world that Morse’s brother had prophesied in a letter written while the telegraph was still under development: “The surface of the earth will be networked with wire, and every wire will be a nerve. The earth will become a huge animal with ten million hands, and in every hand a pen to record whatever the directing soul may dictate!”

Television also changed what military victory and defeat looked like. In 1968, the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive against South Vietnam and its American allies. The surprise operation quickly turned into a massive battlefield failure for the attackers. Half of the 80,000-strong Vietcong were killed or wounded; they captured little territory and held none of what they did. But that wasn’t what American families watching in their dens back home saw. Instead, 50 million viewers saw clips of U.S. Marines in disarray; scenes of bloody retribution and bodies stacked deep. The most dramatic moment came when the U.S. embassy in Saigon was put under siege. Although the main building was never penetrated and the attackers were quickly defeated, the footage was mesmerizing—and, for many, deeply troubling. 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. In the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson watched. Forlorn, he purportedly told his staff, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Such was the power of moving images and sound, interspersed with dramatic narration and ...

My father was always pissed off by this dichotomy, blaming the reporters rousted from brothels and bars and other “comforts” by the insurgent communist guerrillas for the mismatched and poor sentiment.

online echo chambers; its effects can sow deadly consequences for society. A prime example is the anti-vaccine movement, which claims that one of the most important discoveries in human history is actually a vast conspiracy. The movement got its start in the 1960s but exploded in popularity along with social media. People with radical but seemingly disparate views—those on the far left suspicious of pharmaceutical companies, the far right suspicious of the government, and religious fundamentalists suspicious of relying on anything but prayer—found common cause online. Across Facebook groups and alternative-health websites, these “anti-vaxxers” shared made-up stories about the links between childhood vaccination and autism, reveling in conspiracy theories and claims they were the ones who faced a second “Holocaust.”

The third and final rule of narrative is novelty.

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

either hijacking or chance, a meme can come to contain vastly different ideas than those that inspired it, even as it retains all its old reach and influence. And once a meme has been so redefined, it becomes nearly impossible to reclaim. Making something go viral is hard; co-opting or poisoning something that’s already viral can be remarkably easy.

The study of internet “memetics” has steadily merged with studies of online warfare, attracting strange bedfellows. Both psychological warfare professionals and shitposting trolls began to explore how to co-opt old memes and spin off new ones.

It offered a glimpse of war’s future: organized but crowdsourced, directed but distributed.

But one story was lost amid the commotion: the motivations of any of the hundreds of demonstrators who had shown up in the first place. With a single act of misdirection, their purpose and message essentially disappeared.

The final law had one crucial tweak, however. Two younger U.S. representatives—Chris Cox, a Republican from California, and Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon—realized that unless something was done to protect websites that tried to police their own networks, the entire internet would be paralyzed by fear of lawsuits and prison time. Their consequent amendment became 47 U.S.C. § 230 (1996), known as Section 230. It was, in the words of Wired magazine, “the most important law in tech.”