Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

“The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared . . . What’s more, the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to [weaponize] the web at scale.”

WeChat, a truly remarkable social media model, arose in 2011, unnoticed by many Westerners. Engineered to meet the unique requirements of the enormous but largely isolated Chinese internet, WeChat may be a model for the wider internet’s future. Known as a “super app,” it is a combination of social media and marketplace, the equivalent of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Yelp, Uber, and eBay all fused into one, sustaining and steering a network of nearly a billion users. On WeChat, one can find and review businesses; order food and clothing; receive payments; hail a car; post a video; and, of course, talk to friends, family, and everyone else. It is an app so essential to modern living that Chinese citizens quite literally can’t do without it: they’re not allowed to delete their accounts.

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 whim of local officials.

sixty-one countries so far have created mechanisms that allow for national-level internet cutoffs.

even a hasty retweet—carried “real-world consequences.”

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),

the “Chinese internet” had become defined by a new barrier: the Great Firewall.

One story tells how, when a forerunner of the KGB set up an office in 1923 to harness the power of dezinformatsiya, it invented a new word—“disinformation”—to make it sound of French origin instead. In this way, even the origin of the term was buried in half-truths.

Ben Nimmo, who has studied this issue for NATO and the Atlantic Council, has described the resultant strategy as the “4 Ds”: dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience.

U.S. Army colonel turned historian Robert Bateman summarizes it pointedly: “Once, every village had an idiot. It took the internet to bring them all together.”

Fact, after all, is a matter of consensus. Eliminate that consensus, and fact becomes a matter of opinion. Learn how to command and manipulate that opinion, and you are entitled to reshape the fabric of the world.

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.

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.

In a world where there is a wealth of information, there is always a poverty of attention,

the purpose of these Russian information offensives was to add a fifth “D” to the classic disinformation goals we explored in chapter 4. In addition to dismiss, distort, distract, and dismay, these messages were intended to divide.

Even as they complain about how big it has gotten, they make it bigger.

It was exactly as observed by writer Upton Sinclair a century earlier: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”