Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

Much of this violence starts with gangs’ use of social media to “cybertag” and “cyberbang.” Tagging is an update of the old-school practice of spray-painting graffiti to mark territory or insult a rival. The “cyber” version is used to promote your gang or to start a flame war by including another gang’s name in a post or mentioning a street within a rival gang’s territory. These online skirmishes escalate quickly. Anyone who posts about a person or a street belonging to a rival gang is making an online show of disrespect. Such a post is viewed as an invitation to “post up,” or retaliate. 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. The difference in being online, however, is that now seemingly the whole world is witnessing whether you accept the challenge or not. This phenomenon plays out at every level, and not just in killings; 80 percent of the fights that break out in Chicago schools are now instigated online. In time, these online skirmishes move to the “bang,” sometimes called “Facebook drilling.” (There are regional variants of this term. In Los Angeles, for instance, they use the descriptor “wallbanging.”) This is when a threat is made via social media. It might be as direct as one gang member posting to a rival’s Facebook wall, “I’m going to catch you. I’m going to shoot you.” Or it might be symbolic, like posting photos ...

“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world [was] automatically going to be a better place,” confessed Twitter cofounder Evan Williams. “I was wrong about that.”

Narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation are the most effective tools of online battles,

We identify the challenges that lie ahead, especially as these engineers of communication yet again try to solve human problems with new technology, in this case artificial intelligence—machines that mimic and may well surpass humans.

Marconi’s radio made him a conflicted man. He claimed that radio would be “a herald of peace and civilization between nations.” At the same time, he aggressively peddled it to every military he could. He sold it to the British navy in 1901 and convinced the Belgian government to use it in the brutal colonization of the Congo. In the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, both sides used Marconi radios.

As radical transparency merges with crowdsourcing, the result can wander into the grotesque. In 2016, a hard-line Iraqi militia took to Instagram to brag about capturing a suspected ISIS fighter. The militia then invited its 75,000 online fans to vote on whether to kill or release him. Eager, violent comments rolled in from around the world, including many from the United States. Two hours later, a member of the militia posted a follow-up selfie; the body of the prisoner lay in a pool of blood behind him. The caption read, “Thanks for vote.” In the words of Adam Linehan, a blogger and U.S. Army veteran, this represented a bizarre evolution in warfare: “A guy on the toilet in Omaha, Nebraska, could emerge from the bathroom with the blood of some 18-year-old Syrian on his hands.”

“The things of the world must have cadence,”

Margarita Simonyan,

“Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,”

Our bodies are programmed to consume fats and sugars because they’re rare in nature . . . In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that [sic] gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.

The sockpuppets and bots had created the appearance of a popular consensus to which others began to adjust, altering what ideas were now viewed as acceptable to express. The repeated words and phrases soon spread beyond the fake accounts that had initially seeded them, becoming more frequent across the human users on each platform. The hateful fakes were mimicking real people, but then real people began to mimic the hateful fakes. This discovery carries implications that transcend any particular case or country. The way the internet affects its human users makes it hard enough for them to distinguish truth from falsehood. Yet these 4 billion flesh-and-blood netizens have now been joined by a vast number of digital beings, designed to distort and amplify, to confuse and distract. The attention economy may have been built by humans, but it is now ruled by algorithms—some with agendas all their own.

Junaid Hussain

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.

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.

Among its opponents, ISIS achieved resonance by being similarly cartoonishly evil. Among its supporters, it achieved resonance by promising the mystery, adventure, or lofty purpose they’d been hoping for their entire lives.

It’s innately human to want to feel as if you’re at the center of a sweeping plotline

To control the narrative is to dictate to an audience who the heroes and villains are; what is right and what is wrong; what’s real and what’s not.

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

Amusement, shock, and outrage determine how quickly and how far a given piece of information will spread through a social network. Or, in simpler terms, content that can be labeled “LOL,” “OMG,” or “WTF.”

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.

Anger remains the most potent emotion, in part because it is the most interactive. As social media users find ways to express (or exploit) anger, they generate new pieces of content that are propelled through the same system, setting off additional cascades of fury. When an issue has two sides—as it almost always does—it can resemble a perpetual-motion machine of outrage. The graphic online propaganda of ISIS, for instance, served a dual purpose. Not only did it elicit waves of shock and outrage in the West; it also drove a violent anti-Islamic backlash, which ISIS could use to fuel renewed anger and resolve among its own recruits.

Anger is exciting. Anger is addictive. Indeed, in a digital environment suffused with liars and fakes, anger feels raw and real in a way that so many other things never do. This authenticity carries an additional power of its own.

from 2014 to the end of 2017 fifty people were killed and another eighty-two injured by young white men fueled by alt-right ideology and white nationalist social media.

“There’s a war on . . . for your mind!”

amplify, expand, suppress, or distort

“Even if China is a graveyard, still need to kill all Japanese. Even if no grass grows in China, still need to recover Diaoyu Islands.”

For the Chinese regime, dependent above all else upon the illusion of consensus, the spontaneous political movements enabled by the internet represent a potentially existential threat. When the crowd cries for violence, its desires cannot be satisfied—but neither can they be wholly ignored. “Domestic voices calling for a more muscular Chinese foreign policy have created a heated political environment,” writes former U.S. State Department official Thomas Christensen. “Gone are the days when Chinese elites could ignore these voices.” Even if politicians disregard this fervor, it’s unclear if the generals will. The door is being slowly opened to a bizarre but not impossible future where the world’s great powers might fall to bloodshed due—in part—to matters getting out of hand online.

There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think . . . it’s all about the information! —COSMO, in Sneakers

This is the DNA of the social media ecosystem: nearly universally male, white, drawn from America’s upper middle class, and dedicated, at least initially, to attacking narrow problems with equally narrow solutions.

“This is the original sin of Silicon Valley,” writes design ethicist Mike Monteiro. “The goal of every venture-backed company is to increase usage by some metric end over end until the people who gave you that startup capital get their payday.”

Consider something as innocuous as the “notification” icon—the red dot that has haunted the Facebook app for a decade. No part of the design is an accident. Red is the color of agitation and psychological arousal, the mere glimpse of which can lead to a spike in heart rate. It feels good to make red things go away. Because notifications are purposefully vague until touched, following them can feel like opening a present. (Is the notification a long, heartfelt comment from a close friend, or just another forgotten acquaintance’s birthday?) While the notification icon was certainly intended to make Facebook users’ lives easier, it was also intended to keep users buried in the app—part of what leads the average person to touch their phone 2,617 times each day. In short, that red button provides the good news of the company’s value to hand to Facebook shareholders at their annual meeting. Although Facebook engineers were essentially putting a drug in users’ pockets, it wasn’t their—or anyone’s—job to consider the potential side effects.

“We connect people. Period,” a senior Facebook vice president wrote. “That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it . . . Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”

There’s also the technocratic, optimistic worldview that comes from companies staffed mostly by engineers working hard to build products. “You’re so focused on building good stuff,” explained Mike Hoefflinger, a former Facebook executive and author of Becoming Facebook, “you’re not sitting there thinking, ‘If we get lucky enough to build this thing and get two and a quarter billion people to use it, then this other bad stuff could happen.’”

As a senior executive at one of these companies put it to us, “If we could use code to solve all the world’s problems, we would.”

When he vows that his company will devote itself to “spreading prosperity and freedom” or “promoting peace and understanding,” he is no longer simply a tech CEO. He is a new kind of leader, who has begun moving, reluctantly, to claim his position on the world stage.

Anwar al-Awlaki

One such “speech synthesis” startup, called Lyrebird, shocked the world in 2017 when it released recordings of an eerily accurate, entirely fake conversation between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. Another company unveiled an editing tool that it described as “Photoshop for audio,” showing how one can tweak or add new bits of speech to an audio file as easily as one might touch up an image.

And finally, there are the MADCOMs. The inherent promise of such technology—an AI that is essentially indistinguishable from a human operator—also sets it up for terrible misuse. Today, it remains possible for a savvy internet user to distinguish “real” people from automated botnets and even many sockpuppets (the Russified English helped us spot a few). Soon enough, even this uncertain state of affairs may be recalled fondly as the “good old days”—the last time it was possible to have some confidence that another social media user was a flesh-and-blood human being instead of a manipulative machine. Give a Twitter botnet to a MADCOM and the network might be able to distort the algorithmic prominence of a topic without anyone noticing, simply by creating realistic conversations among its many fake component selves. MADCOMs won’t just drive news cycles, but will also trick and manipulate the people reacting to them. They may even grant interviews to unwitting reporters. Feed a MADCOM enough arguments and it will never repeat itself. Feed it enough information about a target population—such as the hundreds of billions of data points that reside in a voter database like Project Alamo—and it can spin a personalized narrative for every resident in a country. The network never sleeps, and it’s always learning. In the midst of a crisis, it will invariably be the first to respond, commanding disproportionate attention and guiding the social media narrative in whichever direction bes...

be found in other machines. Recent breakthroughs in neural network training hint at what will drive machine evolution to the next level, but also save us from algorithms that seek to manipulate us: an AI survival of the fittest. Newer, more advanced forms of deep learning involve the use of “generative adversarial networks.” In this type of system, two neural networks are paired off against each other in a potentially endless sparring match. The first network strains to create something that seems real—an image, a video, a human conversation—while the second network struggles to determine if it’s fake. At the end of each match, the networks receive their results and adjust to get just a little bit better. Although this process teaches networks to produce increasingly accurate forgeries, it also leaves open the potential for networks to get better and better at detecting fakes. This all boils down to one important, extremely sci-fi question. If both networks are gifted with ever-improving calibration and processing power, which one—the “good” AI or the “bad” AI—will more often beat the other? In the answer quite possibly lies not just the fate of content moderation policy, but also of future wars and elections, as well as democracy, civilization, and objective reality. Within a decade, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and every other internet company of scale will use neural networks to police their platforms. Dirty pictures, state-sponsored botnets, terrorist propaganda, and sop...

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. —STEWART BRAND, “We Are as Gods”

Social Media Environment and Internet Replication, SMEIR

Battle on the internet is continuous, the battlefield is contiguous, and the information it produces is contagious. The best and worst aspects of human nature duel over what truly matters most online: our attention and engagement.

Their inoculation efforts include citizen education programs, public tracking and notices of foreign disinformation campaigns, election protections and forced transparency of political campaign activities, and legal action to limit the effect of poisonous super-spreaders.

When someone engages in the spread of lies, hate, and other societal poisons, they should be stigmatized accordingly.

Rather, dangerous speech falls into one or more of five categories: dehumanizing language (comparing people to animals or as “disgusting” or subhuman in some way); coded language (using coy historical references, loaded memes, or terms popular among hate groups); suggestions of impurity (that a target is unworthy of equal rights, somehow “poisoning” society as a whole); opportunistic claims of attacks on women, but by people with no concern for women’s rights (which allows the group to claim a valorous reason for its hate); and accusation in a mirror (a reversal of reality, in which a group is falsely told it is under attack, as a means to justify preemptive violence against the target).

Much like the U.S. Army playing war games at Fort Polk, these companies should aggressively “game out” the potential legal, social, and moral effects of their products, especially in regard to how the various types of bad actors discussed in this book might use them.

maturation to do so. As internet sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has reminded us, “Facebook is only 13 years old, Twitter 11, and even Google is but 19. At this moment in the evolution of the auto industry, there were still no seat belts, airbags, emission controls, or mandatory crumple zones.”

the new matrix that binds and fools us today isn’t some machine-generated simulation plugged into our brains. It is just the way we view the world, filtered through the cracked mirror of social media.