Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

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.

“Most of the gang disputes have nothing to do with drug sales, or gang territory, and everything to do with settling personal scores,”

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

Clausewitz’s (and his wife’s) theories of warfare have since become required reading for militaries

Concepts like the “fog of war,” the inherent confusion of conflict, and “friction,” the way plans never work out exactly as expected when facing a thinking foe, all draw on his monumental work.

In his view, war is politics by other means, or, as he put it in more opaque terms, “the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.”

“War in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs.” War is political.

For the internet’s optimistic inventors and fiercest advocates, so sure of its capacity to bring peace and understanding, this is a bitter pill to swallow. “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.”

First, the internet has left adolescence. Over decades of growth, the internet has become the preeminent medium of global communication, commerce, and politics.

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.

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.

Fourth, this battle changes what “war” means. Winning these online battles doesn’t just win the web, but wins the world.

Fifth, and finally, we’re all part of this war. If you are online, your attention is like a piece of contested territory,

For years, Chinese internet users referred to “censorship” as “harmony”—a coy reference to Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society.” To censor a term, they’d say, was to “harmonize” it. Eventually, the censors caught on and banned the use of the word “harmony.” As it happens, however, the Chinese word for “harmony” sounds similar to the word for “river crab.” When a word had been censored, savvy Chinese internet users then took to calling it “river crab’d.”

Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today, or RT), a state news agency founded in 2005 with the declared intention of sharing Russia with the world.

The network’s goal is no longer sharing Russia with the world, but rather showing why all the other countries are wrong.

There’s another piece of the puzzle still unaccounted for, perhaps the information battlefield’s most dangerous weapon of all. Our own brains.

Alexis de Tocqueville—one of the first foreigners to travel extensively in the new United States of America—pondered the same question. “It is an axiom of political science in the United States,” he concluded, “that the only way to neutralize the influence of newspapers is to multiply their number.” The greater the number of newspapers, he reasoned, the harder it would be to reach public consensus about a set of facts.

The Filter Bubble. “You’re the only person in your bubble,” he wrote. “In an age when shared information is the bedrock of shared experience, the filter bubble is the centrifugal force, pulling us apart.”

This phenomenon is called “homophily,” meaning “love of the same.” Homophily is what makes humans social creatures, able to congregate in such large and like-minded groups. It explains the growth of civilization and cultures. It is also the reason an internet falsehood, once it begins to spread, can rarely be stopped.

What counted most was familiarity.

Fact, after all, is a matter of consensus. Eliminate that consensus, and fact becomes a matter of opinion.

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.

“Content-marketed identity media speaks louder and more clearly than content-marketed journalism, which is handicapped by everything that ostensibly makes it journalistic—tone, notions of fairness, purported allegiance to facts, and context over conclusions,”

59 percent of all links posted on social media had never been clicked on by the person who shared them.

The hateful fakes were mimicking real people, but then real people began to mimic the hateful fakes.

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.