Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

The weapon that made all this possible was the humble radio.

Meanwhile, hundreds of contractors in the employ of the U.S. State Department stalked the conversations of potential ISIS recruits, reminding them of ISIS’s barbarity and its impending defeat.

Such a post is viewed as an invitation to “post up,” or retaliate.

80 percent of the fights that break out in Chicago schools are now instigated online.

To Clausewitz, war is simply another way to get something you want: an act of force to compel an enemy to your will.

“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,

As late as 1815, thousands of British soldiers would be mowed down at the Battle of New Orleans simply because tidings of a peace treaty ending the War of 1812—signed two weeks earlier—had yet to traverse the Atlantic.

Hearst cabled back: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

“disintermediation.” They described how, by removing the need for “in-between” services, the internet would disrupt all sorts of longstanding industries.

“Macaca moment” was a hint of the web-driven radical transparency that was just starting to change how information was gathered and shared—even

It doesn’t just allow wide geographic reach. It expands the circle of fundraisers, seemingly linking even the smallest donor with their gift target on a personal level.

In exchange for a sense of what the war was really like, the fighters asked for donations via PayPal. In effect, they sold their war online.”

From favela life to cartel bloodlettings to civil wars, social media has erased the distinction between citizen, journalist, activist, and resistance fighter.

Hrabove, it took under five minutes for the first reports to appear online.

They were then able to trace backward, finding the unit to which the Buk in the convoy belonged: the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian army.

Bellingcat posted their findings online, mapping out the odyssey of the weapon that had killed 298 people, as well as showing its Russian origin.

After nearly two years of research, Bellingcat presented its findings to the Dutch tribunal that had been tasked with bringing the killers to justice. It included the names, photographs, and contact information of the twenty soldiers who the data showed had been manning the missile system that had shot down flight MH17. It was an extraordinary feat, accomplished using only what was available on the internet. It was also damning evidence of Russian participation in a war crime.

Mahmoud Al-Werfalli for a series of mass killings in Libya. He was the first person ever to be charged with war crimes based solely on evidence found on social media.

“Truth” is a lost cause and . . . reality is essentially malleable. —PETER POMERANTSEV AND MICHAEL WEISS,

Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian, touched off the next outbreak of web-powered freedom.

“cyber-utopianism.” He decried “an enthusiastic belief in the liberating power of technology,”

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

“Imagine you have two dozen TV channels,” he said, “and it is all Fox News.”

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

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.

“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).

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

For four years, it had posted around a hundred tweets a day, more than 130,000 messages in all. At first, the chief focus was support for UKIP, a far-right British party. Then it shifted to pushing Russia’s stance on the Ukraine conflict. Then it pivoted to a pro-Brexit stance, followed by support for Trump’s candidacy. After his election, it switched to white nationalist “free speech” protests. The efforts of these networks continue to this day, ever seeking to sow anger and division within Russia’s foes.

There was one cardinal rule in the business, though: target the Trumpkins.

“nothing [could] beat” his supporters when it came to clicking on their made-up stories.

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.”

there exists a set of “facts” for every conceivable point of view. All you see is what you want to see. And, as you’ll learn how it works, the farther you’re led into this reality of your own creation, the harder it is to find your way out again.

Rather than expanding their horizons, people were just using the endless web to seek out information with which they already agreed.

“homophily,” meaning “love of the same.” Homophily is what makes humans social creatures, able to congregate in such large and like-minded groups.

In an exhaustive series of experiments, Yale University researchers found that people were significantly more likely to believe a headline (“Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President”) if they had seen a similar headline before.

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” declared the legendary sociologist and New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.” It was a preposterous claim, but in a certain way, it is true.

everyone may be entitled to their own facts, but rarely do they form their own opinions.

When polled after the election, nearly half of Trump voters affirmed their belief that the Clinton campaign had participated in pedophilia, human trafficking, and satanic ritual abuse.

Posobiec and his messages were retweeted multiple times by the most powerful social media platform in all the world, that of President Donald Trump.

In the final three months of the 2016 election, more of these fake political headlines were shared on Facebook than real ones. Meanwhile, in a study of 22 million tweets, the Oxford Internet Institute concluded that Twitter users, too, had shared more “misinformation, polarizing and conspiratorial content” than actual news stories.

President Trump quickly co-opted it (using it more than 400 times during his first year in office), turning “fake news” into an epithet to describe information that someone doesn’t like.

made. One of Coler’s most popular pieces told the tragic and wholly false story of an FBI agent and his wife who, amid an investigation of Hillary Clinton, had died in a suspicious murder-suicide. In a ten-day period, 1.6 million readers were drawn to the real-sounding but fake newspaper (the Denver Guardian) that had posted the fake story.

on social networks driven by homophily, the goal was to validate, not inform.

Trump announced his nationalistically themed presidential campaign in 2015, 58 percent of his Facebook followers, oddly, hailed from outside the United States. Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric and repeated calls for a border wall, 4 percent supposedly lived in Mexico.

first three months of 2016, the future president used his Twitter account to quote 150 bots extolling his cause—a

Internet Research Agency (that lovely building in St. Petersburg where our philosophy major worked) generated 2.2 million “election-related tweets” in just the final three months of the election.

“Terrorism is theater,” declared RAND Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins in a 1974 report that became one of terrorism’s foundational studies. Command enough attention and it didn’t matter how weak or strong you were: you could bend populations to your will and cow the most powerful adversaries into submission.

Similarly, the militants’ insistence that their actions were in accordance with Islamic scripture—a stance opposed by virtually every actual scholar of Islam—was parroted by this same subsection of far-right media and politicians, who saw it as a way to bolster their own nationalistic, anti-Islamic platforms.