Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

It mastered the key elements of narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation, each of which we’ll explore in turn.

Flesch-Kincaid score). They found that Trump’s vocabulary measured at the lowest level of all the candidates, comprehensible to someone with a fifth-grade education.

“Only peer-to-peer relations can change minds,”

“three warfares”: psychological warfare (manipulation of perception and beliefs), legal warfare (manipulation of treaties and international law), and public opinion warfare (manipulation of both Chinese and foreign populations). Where China is strong, its strengths must be amplified even further in the public imagination; where China is weak, attention must be diverted.

When a white nationalist terrorist drove his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, and killed a peaceful demonstrator, it was discovered that his Facebook page was peppered with Pepe memes.

“The computers in which memes live are human brains,” Dawkins wrote. Memes are born from human culture and shaped and transmitted by language.

Confiding in their diaries at the time, they wrote that they feared more the anger of their populace if they didn’t go to war than the consequences if they did. They had used the new communications technology of the day to stoke the fires of nationalism for their own purposes, but then found that these forces had moved beyond their control.

“TEN_GOP,” which posed as a hub for Tennessee Republicans. On Election Day, it was the seventh-most-retweeted account across all of Twitter.

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.

part of what leads the average person to touch their phone 2,617 times each day.

Section 230 provided “protection for ‘Good Samaritan’ blocking and screening of offensive material,” essentially ruling that no website could be held accountable for the speech of its users.

Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) was the first and most important Supreme Court case to involve the internet.

At its peak, the ISIS propaganda machine would span at least 70,000

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

“I believe the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.”

Combine all these pernicious applications of neural networks—mimicked voices, stolen faces, real-time audiovisual editing, artificial image and video generation, and MADCOM manipulation—and it’s tough to shake the conclusion that humanity is teetering at the edge of a cliff.

However, an event only carries power if people also believe that it happened.

Today, a significant part of the American political culture is willfully denying the new threats to its cohesion. In some cases, it’s colluding with them.

Sean Parker created one of the first file-sharing social networks, Napster, and then became Facebook’s first president. However, he has since become a social media “conscientious objector,” leaving the world that he helped make.

It is not just shameful but dangerous that the purveyors of the worst behaviors on social media have enjoyed increased fame and fortune, all the way up to invitations to the White House. Stopping these bad actors requires setting an example and ensuring that repeat offenders never escape the gravity of their past actions and are excluded from the institutions and platforms of power that now matter most in our society. In a democracy, you have a right to your opinion, but no right to be celebrated for an ugly, hateful opinion, especially if you’ve spread lie after lie.

In response, we should practice a technique called “lateral thinking.”