cyber-front-blog

[cyber-front-blog]

The Future of War Will Be ‘Liked’ | Foreign Policy

In the social media age, what you share is deciding what happens on the battlefield.

BY PETER W. SINGER, EMERSON BROOKING

| OCTOBER 2, 2018, 10:00 AM

It was, perhaps, the strangest demand in political history:

“The middle photo is taken from Hungarian porn. Stop using fake photos to ‘trick’ people into supporting your lost cause.”

This Nov. 18, 2014, tweet from a now-defunct Twitter account run by the U.S. State Department offered an early glimpse into a new front in the future of war: trolling. The message was the outgrowth of an effort the department had launched in 2011 to track and counter terrorist propaganda, first against al Qaeda, then against the fast-growing Islamic State that had spun out of its Iraqi remains.

The campaign may have sounded sensible, but it soon backfired. Instead of cheering on the online battle against extremism, Twitter users piled on with more questions than the staid Foggy Bottom bureaucrats manning the account were prepared to answer. “How did the State Dept. know it was Hungarian porn?” @SpaSuzy asked. “dude … it’s really weird you know so much about hungarian porn,” @7thhorse added.

How did the State Dept. know it was Hungarian porn?  #TheXXXFiles

After an avalanche of criticism, the State Department decided it was inappropriate for the U.S. government to get stuck in the muck of social media—better to stick to airstrikes—and pulled the plug on the Twitter account.

Four years later, such scruples seem almost quaint. In an era in which President Donald Trump didn’t just rise to power through his deft use of the same medium, but then even used it to fire his first secretary of state, the old notions that government should stay above the social media fray have evaporated. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have become crucial battlegrounds for politics, war, and even truth itself. Social media has emerged as an arena in which virality—how far and wide a message spreads—trumps veracity. In this domain, attention is power. Win enough of it and you can reshape the very fabric of reality.

A generation ago, the new notion of what was called “cyberwar”—the hacking of networks—began to take conflict into a new domain. Today, what we call “like wars”—the hacking of the people and ideas on those networks—mark the latest twist in the ever-evolving nature of warfare.

* * *

On the surface, many of these battles waged on social media can seem like mere propaganda and an often silly version at that—like teenaged trolling transposed onto the global stage. In August 2017, for example, the Ukrainian government’s official Twitter account attacked Russia with a mocking South Park GIF; in June 2018, the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., answered a fire-and-brimstone threat by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with a Mean Girls meme; and in May 2018, the U.S. Air Force cracked jokes about airstrikes in Afghanistan while the Taliban returned the favor by poking fun at former U.S. commander David Petraeus’s illicit love affair.

The goal for all such actors is not merely the lulz but to ridicule their foes and expand their influence, in a world where online sway can drive real-world power. Yet beneath it all, a more serious side of conflict also takes place, its ammunition the bevy of images taken from actual battles. Today, nearly all our moves are tracked, including those in anything from election campaigns to military ones.

Some of it is intentional: selfies taken in the midst of battle, observers watching events, smartphone in hand. Others are captured in the background: be it images that lay in the distance or even information in the digital background, from the geolocation of CIA black sites revealed by guards’ use of exercise apps to the metadata that accompanies every online post. The result is that the smallest of firefights is observed by a global audience, while terrorist attacks are even shared out live by the killers themselves. Open-source intelligence analysts then use these very same digital breadcrumbs to reveal new secrets, documenting war crimes that would go otherwise untracked or assessing the strength of enemy formations that would go otherwise unobserved. It works for both good and bad: Terrorists use this information to win new recruits; human rights activists use it to highlight the plight of civilians caught in harm’s way and even steer rescues their way. During the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul—the most livestreamed and hashtagged siege in history—thousands of virtual observers waited for each new snippet of content, spinning it to all of these ends at once.

These battles that play out in the digital shadows are not just about unveiling secrets but burying truths—and even shaping hearts, minds, and actions. Russian sockpuppets and botnets, for instance, did quite a bit more than simply meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They used a mix of old-school information operations and new digital marketing techniques to spark real-world protests, steer multiple U.S. news cycles, and influence voters in one of the closest elections in modern history. Using solely online means, they infiltrated U.S. political communities so completely that flesh-and-blood American voters soon began to repeat scripts written in St. Petersburg and still think them their own. Internationally, these Russian information offensives have stirred anti-NATO sentiments in Germany by inventing atrocities out of thin air; laid the pretext for potential invasions of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by fueling the political antipathy of ethnic Russian minorities; and done the same for the very real invasion of Ukraine. And these are just the operations we know about.

Such online skirmishes may appear insignificant compared with real fights conducted with real weapons, but they have become just as important. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the highly decorated former commander of Joint Special Operations Command, stated at a military conference in 2017, for the foreseeable future what happens on social media will be crucial to the outcome of any debate, battle, or war. The reason, he explained, is that battles are now being waged over truth itself. In these fights, “the line between reality and perception will be blurred,” he said. “Separating fact from fiction will be tough for governments but almost impossible for populations.”

McChrystal’s comments may seem to echo the ravings of the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose website Infowars uses the tagline, “There’s a war on for your mind!” But that doesn’t make them any less truthful. With our personal and political understanding of the world increasingly filtered through online sources, images and ideas distributed and created on social media may become more important than objective facts. As McChrystal put it, “Shaping the perception of which side is right or which side is winning will be more important than actually which side is right or winning.”

Indeed, the messages coursing through social media today shape not just the perceived outcomes of conflicts but the very choices leaders make during both military campaigns. Russia, for instance, has crafted its information operations into a potent, nimble weapon that can target U.S. voters or pinpoint artillery strikes in Ukraine, using what happens in the online world to geolocate soldiers—and then message their looming death right before the cannons fire. Social media even shapes the overall flow. A 2016 study by the American University professor Thomas Zeitzoff of the Israel Defense Forces’ 2012 air campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip found that the conflict followed the pace set on Twitter; the tempo of operations and targeting shifted depending on which side was dominating the online conversation at the time. The military officers and civilian leaders were watching their social media feed and reacting accordingly.

Sometimes, social media posts can even spark new fights, especially when they play to long-standing tensions or hatreds. The Sri Lankan government blamed viral Facebook rumors for stirring up the hatred that led to a brutal assault on the country’s Muslim minority this March. In June, false reports circulated among India’s 200 million WhatsApp users spurred a spate of lynchings. Meanwhile, racist messages and rumors shared on Facebook continue to fuel the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar.

Mounting evidence suggests that these online tug of wars may not just start fights and mass killings but also make conflicts harder to end. Criminologists who study the spike of murders in cities such as Chicago note how an increasing share of gang violence is attributable to social media trash-talking. Sometimes, the spark is a disrespectful emoji; other times, it’s a long-forgotten post, dug up in a moment of escalating tensions. Unlike the interaction in the street (or by diplomats in a traditional negotiation), it doesn’t matter if the original insult was made a year ago or hundreds of miles away. All that matters is that the world is watching and the internet never forgets. It’s easy to see how a similar dynamic will haunt future cease-fire negotiations, whether the end of an insurgency or the conclusion of a major interstate war. There’s always some people intent on keeping the violence going. And online, they never lose their voice.

Daunting as all this may seem, however, social media has only just begun to shape the future of war. Only half the world is online, while the tools of “like wars” today are like the biplanes of air war. Indeed, new machine intelligence is making it ever harder for humans to discern truth from lies and is possibly reshaping our conception of reality itself. Over the last year, the techniques needed to create “deep fakes”—hyper-realistic digital forgeries generated by advanced artificial intelligence neural networks—have become increasingly accessible. This technology, currently used mostly by cutting-edge computer scientists and inventive pornographers, will soon flood the internet with pitch-perfect voice imitations, photo-realistic video fabrications, and vast networks of chattering bots indistinguishable from their human counterparts. And like everything else, deep fakes are also likely to be weaponized, both in elections and even battles. We’ve already had a taste of it; in its run to seize Mosul, the Islamic State was able to use a mix of real and fake news to help spur retreat by Iraqi Army units. Even U.S. information war units now train at sowing false digital trails to misdirect their foes. We may one day even face the prospect of a digital Gulf of Tonkin, where the very case for a real war is built wholly on AI-constructed lies.

These changes reshape the speed, experience, and even the reach of conflict. In the social media age, every election, every conflict, and every battle is simultaneously global and local. Even as the physical experience of war grows more alien to the average Westerner with each generation, it has also become more personal than ever. Our choices of what to “like” and share (or not) shape not only the outcomes of elections and battles but also what our friends, family, and the wider world treat as real. You may not be interested in like wars, but the future of war and politics is very much interested in you—and your clicks.

Peter W. Singer is a strategist and senior fellow at New America. He is a co-author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Twitter: @peterwsinger

Emerson Brooking is a former research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a co-author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Twitter: @etbrooking

[cyber-front-blog]

How social media became a weapon of war

What Taylor Swift and ISIS can teach us about cyberwar.

By Sean Illing

We live in a world of bots and trolls and curated news feeds, in which reality is basically up for grabs.

A new book titled LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media explores how this is transforming our culture and upending the old rules of politics and even war. In it, authors Peter W. Singer and Emerson Brooking argue that the distinctions between entertainment and politics, war and peace, and even civilian and soldier are gradually disappearing.

Social media, the authors claim, is now the site of a globe-spanning information conflict being waged by millions of people in dozens of countries across a variety of platforms. It’s changing how we think, how we acquire information, and how we make sense of the world around us. And it has created what they call a global “battle space” in which pop stars like Taylor Swift and terror groups like ISIS use the same tactics to fight for your attention online.

I spoke with Singer, a leading expert on 21st-century security issues, about the implications of these changes, and why tech companies have so far failed to take responsibility for the platforms they’ve created.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

What is social media doing to us?

Peter W. Singer

Social media has simultaneously connected us and disconnected us. Whether we’re talking about our personal lives or politics or wars, there are no longer any gatekeepers; we can all collect information and share it. And so we’re empowered in a way we couldn’t be previously.

But it’s also meant that we’re constantly being pulled in a thousand different directions, usually away from what’s most important, and that we can be manipulated, because all of this information is being dumped onto a few massive platforms that are designed to make money above all else. What it’s created is really akin to a battle space for attention and manipulation.

Sean Illing

You use the phrase “battle space” very deliberately, and much of your book is about how social media has become a weapon of war. Is it now the cheapest and most effective weapon?

Peter W. Singer

The internet began as a place for scientists to share computer time, then it quickly got repurposed into a social medium. But by creating this tool of mass connection, it became the nervous system of everything from commerce to news, and like everything else, it’s weaponized.

Very soon, it’s being used by everything from terrorist groups to online fans of Kanye West and Taylor Swift, all of whom see it as a way to achieve their goals. Whether it’s to recruit or change the conversation or narrative to their benefit, or to gather intelligence that can be used to guide physical operations, the internet is this incredibly cheap and diverse tool. And regardless of who’s using it, it basically follows the same rules.

Is the internet the most effective or powerful weapon? In some cases, it clearly has been. Some nations have used it to achieve the traditional goals of war without ever having to fire a bullet. And some nations, like Russia, get it in ways other nations, like America, don’t. And that’s why Russia has been so successful at advancing their interests in the last couple of years.

Sean Illing

Is Russia the best at this cyber game?

Peter W. Singer

They’re definitely top of the class right now, but it’s not just Russia. ISIS is another big winner in this space. Their mastery of social media was essential to their rise to the top of the terrorism game, surpassing al-Qaeda and the like. People look at ISIS and they wonder how a group with a seventh-century worldview could become so popular today, and the answer is that they’re really good at using 21st-century technology.

So when ISIS decided to invade Mosul in June 2014, what do they do? They announce it with a hashtag. Like Russia, they understand the rules of the game: that the world is watching, that you can’t keep things a secret, so you should embrace it and use social media to turn your own message into a viral campaign.

Sean Illing

I don’t think our society can adapt quickly enough to these technological changes — they’re running so far ahead of our laws and culture and institutions that we’re essentially hostage to them.

Peter W. Singer

I don’t know if I’d use the word “hostage,” but we definitely have a problem. All of this has happened in the last 10 years or so, and you have this new battle space that’s very hard for people to wrap their heads around.

In the book, we interview one of the leading political campaign experts about the 2016 election, and he talks about how, by all the known rules, Trump should not have won. There were too many competitors, he had no newspaper endorsements, hardly any campaign offices, fewer TV ads, etc. But those were the old rules, and in the age of the internet, they don’t apply anymore.

So we need new rules, and that also applies to each of us as individuals. Because if you don’t understand all the ways you’re being distracted and manipulated by social media and the internet, you’re going to be a mark. If you’re online, you’re constantly under assault by people looking to monetize your attention or your outrage or whatever the case may be.

Our entire country was caught off guard in 2016, and that’s why Russia was able to cause such chaos in our society. If we don’t recognize how much the world has changed, we won’t be able to protect ourselves. Because the world has changed, and it will keep changing at a faster and faster rate.

Sean Illing

You use the phrase “unreality machine” in the book to describe social media’s essential function. Is that the political utility of social media now — to manufacture reality?

Peter W. Singer

You can use social media to achieve your goals, whatever those goals might be. And for many groups, it is literally to create a new reality, because the target audience derives its understanding of the world — not just the news, but the way it frames the world — from what it views through social media.

So in many ways, it’s a flip on the old adage that you can’t have your own facts. Actually, you can have your own facts now, and what’s scary is that all the factors driving social media, including the algorithms and the marketplace, reward this kind of thinking. So everyone who uses social media, whether it’s individual self-promoters or companies or terrorist groups or partisan news outlets, is leveraging it for their own goals.

Sean Illing

The odd thing about social media is that, on the one hand, it has reduced everything to theater, where it’s all about performance and branding, and yet, on the other hand, it has raised the stakes and made it easier to spread actual violence and chaos across the globe. I don’t think we’re close to figuring out how to navigate this tension.

Peter W. Singer

One of the challenges of this book was trying to deal with the duality you’re pointing to. We tried to pepper it with scenes and characters that are genuinely scary, like the failed rapper who is radicalized online and becomes one of ISIS’s top recruiters; but we also show the good side of online life, like a Muslim American woman who created what she jokingly calls Dumbledore’s Army, which is this group of teens who go after extremists online using their own tactics and language — and frankly, they’re doing a better job than the State Department.

The second part of what you said really cuts to the heart of why the technology companies have had such a difficult time. In many ways, it’s like they’re going through the stages of grief over what happened to their babies. They’ve created these platforms that they effectively lost control of, and now they’re coming to grips with the consequences. But the contradictions persist, and I’m not sure they’re truly facing up to the realities.

Sean Illing

Can you give me an example of what you mean there?

Peter W. Singer

Take Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Right after the 2016 election, he kept insisting that disinformation couldn’t have swayed the election — and he was making comments like this while at the same time telling political campaigns that Facebook is the best place for you to spend your money to influence people’s votes. So there is still a kind of denialism at these tech companies.

So we’re in this bizarre situation in which a handful of tech geeks are some of the most powerful actors in war and politics, because they control the platforms that literally set the rules of the new game. And they never set out to be in this role and aren’t particularly interested in war and politics, and yet they’re the deciders in a way that was previously unthinkable.

Sean Illing

I recently interviewed Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and a managing director of Peter Thiel’s investment firm. He made the case that technology, the child of capitalism, might ultimately be its destroyer. Do you think the same could be said about the internet and liberal democracy?

Peter W. Singer

That’s a great question. We live in a system of government that is a child of the Enlightenment, which was made possible by the printing press. Today, we’re finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the changes not just in our politics but in our broader information ecosystem.

But we have to remember that the argument can go both ways. For all the bad examples of how social media has been weaponized and used to weaken democracies, there are also examples of how it’s allowed a level of citizen involvement that hasn’t been possible since the time of ancient Athens.

Local governments are using it to engage citizens in new and creative ways, and national governments like Switzerland and Australia are incorporating it in interesting ways as well. And it wasn’t that long ago that social media was credited with inspiring the Arab Spring.

The bottom line is that these technologies are here to stay, so we have to adapt and learn to live with them. We have to develop 21st-century approaches to everything from voting to commerce to citizenship, and we have to defend ourselves against external attacks. We simply don’t have a choice.

Sean Illing

You end the book with a plea to tech giants like Twitter and Facebook, asking them to do a better job of policing their platforms. But that seems unrealistic to me, since their entire business model rests on turning users into products for advertisers, and that will always trump any commitment they have to democratic norms or civil discourse.

Do you really believe they have the will to make these changes, even if doing so means sacrificing the bottom line?

Peter W. Singer

Well, that last part is the caveat, because I think these companies are starting to ask themselves if allowing their customers to be targeted is actually good for the bottom line. In the end, these companies cannot avoid being drawn into issues of politics and war and propaganda, because that’s what their platforms are being used for. It’s not in their DNA to get involved in this way, but this is where they are, and they know that governments will eventually intervene if they don’t deal with these problems.

What they can’t do, and what they’ve done in the past, is assume that technology is somehow going to solve our political problems. This is a cycle they’ve been caught in for years, and it’s obviously not working. They have to recognize that these platforms are not merely for-profit enterprises; they’re also the nervous system for our personal and professional and political lives, and they have a responsibility to treat them accordingly.

So what we ask for in the book is totally reasonable. It’s fine to beta-test a product like a restaurant-rating app by pushing it out in the world and just seeing what happens, but that’s not fine when it’s a product that the world depends on and is likely to be used in crime and violence and war. They need to do what the military often does, which is war-game a scenario ahead of time and anticipate all the bad things that can happen, and develop responses to them.

This is their civic responsibility, and they can’t bury their heads in the sand any longer.