Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by P.W. Singer

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. “Power” on this battlefield is thus measured not by physical strength or high-tech hardware, but by the command of attention. The result is a contest of psychological and algorithmic manipulation, fought through an endless churn of competing viral events.

Fourth, this battle changes what “war” means. Winning these online battles doesn’t just win the web, but wins the world. Each ephemeral victory drives events in the physical realm, from seemingly inconsequential celebrity feuds to history-changing elections.

Fifth, and finally, we’re all part of this war. If you are online, your attention is like a piece of contested territory, being fought over in conflicts that you may or may not realize are unfolding around you.

In 1999, musician David Bowie sat for an interview with the BBC. Rather than promote his albums, Bowie waxed philosophical about technology’s future. The internet wouldn’t just bring people together, he explained; it would also tear them apart. “Up until at least the mid-1970s, we really felt that we were still living under the guise of a single, absolute, created society—where there were known truths and known lies and there was no kind of duplicity or pluralism about the things that we believed in,” the artist once known as Ziggy Stardust said. “[Then] the singularity disappeared. And that I believe has produced such a medium as the internet, which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.”

Bowie shook his head. “No, you see, I don’t agree. I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying . . . It’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”

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.”

There was also a sort of raw entertainment to it—a no-holds-barred battle in which actual positions on policy no longer mattered. This, too, was infectious. Now taking their lead from what was trending online, traditional media outlets followed suit. Across the board, just one-tenth of professional media coverage focused on the 2016 presidential candidates’ actual policy positions. From the start of the year to the last week before the vote, the nightly news broadcasts of the “big three” networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) devoted a total of just thirty-two minutes to examining the actual policy issues to be decided in the 2016 election!

While many had gotten their start on 4chan, a notorious image board where anonymous users fight an endless battle of profane one-upmanship, the group is better understood through what is known as “Poe’s Law.” This is an internet adage that emerged from troll-infested arguments on the website Christian Forums. The law states, “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a [fundamentalist] in such a way that someone won’t mistake it for the genuine article.” In other words, there is a point at which the most sincere profession of faith becomes indistinguishable from a parody; where a simple, stupid statement might actually be considered an act of profound meta-irony. Taken to its logical conclusion, Poe’s Law could lead to a place of profound nihilism, where nothing matters and everything is a joke. And this was exactly where many of these internet denizens took it.

The videos of Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” were out there; they just needed to be hosted in one searchable, shareable place. And so YouTube was born.

First, for all the sense of flux, the modern information environment is becoming stable.

Second, the internet is a battlefield.

Third, this battlefield changes how we must think about information itself.

Fourth, war and politics have never been so intertwined.

Fifth, we’re all part of the battle.

It is not coincidental that among the first states to do so were Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden, all of which face a steady barrage of Russian information attacks, backed by the close proximity of Russian soldiers and tanks.