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Unidad 4 - Singer
Unidad 4 - Singer
Edel Rodriguez
Story by Emerson T. Brooking and P. W. Singe
L IKE MOST EVERYTHING TODAY , the campaign was launched with a hashtag. But instead of promoting a new
album or a movie release, #AllEyesOnISIS announced the 2014 invasion of northern Iraq —a bloody
takeover that still haunts global politics two years later.
Revealing a military operation via Twitter would seem a strange strategy, but it should not be surprising
given the source. The self-styled Islamic State owes its existence to what the internet has become with the
rise of social media—a vast chamber of online sharing and conversation and argumentation and
indoctrination, echoing with billions of voices.
Social media has empowered ISIS recruiting, helping the group draw at least 30,000 foreign fighters, from
some 100 countries, to the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. It has aided the seeding of new franchises in
places ranging from Libya and Afghanistan to Nigeria and Bangladesh. It was the vehicle ISIS used to declare
war on the United States: The execution of the American journalist James Foley was deliberately
choreographed for viral distribution. And it is how the group has inspired acts of terror on five continents.
So intertwined are the Islamic State’s online propaganda and real -life operations that one can hardly be
separated from the other. As ISIS invaders swept across northern Iraq two years ago, they spammed
Twitter with triumphal announcements of freshly conquered towns and horrific images of what had
happened to those who fought back. A smartphone app that the group had created allowed fans to follow
along easily at home and link their social-media accounts in solidarity, permitting ISIS to post automatically
on their behalf. J. M. Berger, a fellow with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism,
counted as many as 40,000 tweets originating from the app in a single day as black -clad militants bore
down on the city of Mosul.
Media reports from the region were saturated with news of the latest ISIS victory or atrocity, helping to
fuel a sense of the Islamic State’s momentum. There was no time to distinguish false stories from real
ones. Instead, each new post contributed to the sense that northern Iraq had simply collapsed in the face
of the ISIS onslaught.
And then it did. Terror engulfed Mosul, a city of 1.8 million people. The 25,000 -strong Iraqi garrison may
have been equipped with an arsenal of American-made Abrams tanks and Black Hawk helicopters, but it
was disoriented by reports of the enemy’s speed and ferocity. Already beset by low morale and long-
festering corruption, it crumpled under the advance of a mere 1,500 ISIS fighters, equipped mostly with
small arms. The Islamic State was left to occupy the city virtually uncontested, seizing vast quantities of
weapons and supplies, including some 2,300 Humvees.
In the abrupt surrender of Mosul and collapse of defending Iraqi forces, one could find echoes of the
similarly shocking fall of France to the 1940 German blitzkrieg. The Germans relied upon the close
coordination of tanks and planes, linked together by radio. Radio gave their forces speed—and also the
ability to sow fear beyond the front lines.
ISISspread a similar panic online. Immaculately staged photos, filtered through Instagram, transformed a
ragtag force riding in dusty pickup trucks into something larger than life. Armies of Twitter bots twisted
small, one-sided skirmishes into significant battlefield victories. Hashtags were created and pushed (and
others hijacked) to shape and hype the story. Through this fusion of activities, ISIS stumbled upon
something new. It became, in the words of Jared Cohen, a former State Department staffer and now the
director of Jigsaw (Google’s internal think tank), “the first terrorist group to hold both physical and digital
territory.”
It will not be the last. The fate of the self-declared caliphate, now under the assault of nearly two dozen national
militaries, is uncertain. Yet the group has already proved something that should concern any observer of war
and peace, law and anarchy. While the Islamic State has
shown savvy in its use of social media, it is the technology
itself—not any unique genius on the part of the
jihadists—that lies at the heart of the group’s disruptive
power and outsize success. Other groups will follow.
And not just terrorist groups. This is only the beginning of
a larger revolution, one that is already starting to reshape
the operations of small-time gangs on one end of the
spectrum, and the political and military strategies of
heavily armed superpowers on the other.
More than a year ago, we set out to understand the use
of social media as both a tool in conflict and a shaper of
it, tracking how online chatter has begun to intersect with
real-life violence in dozens of armed confrontations
around the globe. In doing so, we sought to untangle a
seeming contradiction. The internet has long been
celebrated for its power to bring people together. Yet as
it turns out, this same technology is easily weaponized.
Smartphones and social apps have clearly altered the nuts
and bolts of violent conflict, from recruiting to battlefield
reporting. But the greatest effects may be more
fundamental, expanding the causes and possibly the incidence of war, and extending its reach. Social-media
platforms reinforce “us versus them” narratives, expose vulnerable people to virulent ideologies, and inflame
even long-dormant hatreds. They create massive groundswells of popular opinion that are nearly impossible to
predict or control.
Social media has already revolutionized everything from dating to business to politics. Now it is reshaping war
itself.
Such global connectivity has long stood as Silicon Valley’s holy grail, in the pursuit not just of profits but also of
peace. It is why Google seeks to release giant balloons into the stratosphere, beaming internet access down to
people who lack it, and why Facebook is building solar-powered drones to do the same.
In 2005, when “The Facebook” was still a Palo Alto start-up, a college-age Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed by
camcorder in the office lounge, red Solo cup in hand. “The goal wasn’t to make an online community,” he
explained of his new platform, but “a mirror of what existed in real life.”
Social media is indeed a mirror, one that reflects all manner of human interests and ideas, invariably extending
into the realm of politics and violence. Last year, the most-talked-about event on Twitter was not a silly meme
or a feel-good story: It was the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, in which 130 people were killed by a
coordinated team of ISIS gunmen. Millions watched as images and snippets of video captured the chaotic scenes.
The most-powerful updates came from the victims trapped in the Bataclan theater, who naturally turned to
social media to plead for help, even as jihadist murderers stalked the halls.
The duality of human nature is readily apparent when social media fixates on conflict. Thanks to the internet,
war crimes have been laid bare by citizen reporters examining evidence from thousands of miles away, and a
voice has been given to suffering civilians who previously had none. Strangers can be moved to tears by the
image of a drowned Syrian toddler washing up on the shores of Turkey, and the world has never seemed so
small. But social media has also opened new avenues for extraordinary cruelty. In January, Syrian-regime
loyalists, learning of a rebel-held town that was starving under siege, taunted the residents by posting pictures
of what they were eating for dinner.
Indeed, the more we’ve learned about behavior on social media, the more apparent it has become that the
mirror is distorted—or rather, that it distorts us. For all the hope that comes from connecting with new people
and new ideas, researchers have found that online behavior is dominated by “homophily”: a tendency to listen
to and associate with people like yourself, and to exclude outsiders. Social networks are bad at helping you
empathize with people unlike you, but good at surrounding you with those who share your outlook. The new
information ecosystem does not challenge biases; it reinforces them.
A review by the analytics firm Gnip (since acquired by Twitter) of 11.5 million tweets during and about the
November 2012 Israeli-Palestinian clash, for instance, found that only 10 percent of this conversation occurred
between supporters of the opposing sides. A similar examination of online activity during the 2014 race-related
protests in Ferguson, Missouri, found that liberals and conservatives in the U.S. cited or put forth completely
different facts and arguments and seemed hardly to acknowledge each other’s existence. Since May of this
year, The Wall Street Journal has run a project called “Blue Feed, Red Feed,” showing side-by-side Facebook
streams of news sources popular with, respectively, liberal and conservative audiences. The resulting social-
media feeds look like they’re from two parallel universes.
Within a circle of friends or like-minded acquaintances, social media certainly fosters connection. But the further
one zooms out—to whole societies or the course of global affairs—the more this connection is marred by
tribalism and mutual mistrust.
This problem is particularly disturbing because of another feature of social media: Its users are not passive
consumers, like TV viewers or radio listeners or even early internet users. Via platforms that range from
Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Weibo, we are all now information creators, collectors, and distributors.
Civilians in conflict areas can take and publish inflammatory photos of collateral damage; suburban teens in
Marseille or Seattle can follow the lives and losses of individual combatants and interact with them directly. And
of course, messages that resonate can be endorsed, adapted, and instantly amplified.
Both ends of the communications process have been democratized in a way that no prior technology has
accomplished. Social media has made a great many of us participants in, as well as observers of, conflict. The
implications of this wide-scale participation extend far beyond the virtual realm.
NETWAR IS HERE
More than a quarter century ago, two defense analysts with the Rand Corporation began to think seriously
about how conflict might be shaped by the nascent internet. In their groundbreaking article “Cyberwar Is
Coming!,” published in 1993, scarcely two years after the first website had been created, John Arquilla
and David Ronfeldt predicted a future of military operations in which software code would be used as a
means of attack.
They also went a step further. Just as militaries might clash in
cyberspace, they argued, entire societies would collide in a phenomenon
they called “netwar.” In this sort of conflict, reality itself would be up for
grabs. Netwar, they wrote, “means trying to disrupt, damage, or modify
what a target population ‘knows’ or thinks it knows.” Information could
be fashioned into a dangerous weapon.
Today, netwar is a daily reality. After lingering in the shadows of Russian
military planning for decades, Soviet-style “information warfare”
entered a period of renaissance in the past decade. Russian officials felt
increasing pressure from the forces of Western liberalization and
internet technology as they watched “color revolutions” engulf many
nations of the former Soviet bloc. So they set out to harness the power
of the internet to their own ends, controlling it at home and using it to
divide foes abroad. An association of nearly 75 education and research
institutions was devoted to studying the finer details of how the internet
works, coordinated by the Russian Federal Security Service—the successor to the KGB.
The flagship of the Russian propaganda machine is Russia Today—or just RT, as it is emblazoned on New York
City buses and street signs lining Fifth Avenue—which promises the time-honored service (and perceived truth)
of “the second opinion.” A glitzy and contrarian news service that received roughly $250 million in government
subsidies for 2016, RT injects Russian state opinion into international reporting; it broadcasts in English, Arabic,
and Spanish, and posts additional items online in Russian, French, and German. It has become the most popular
television news network on YouTube.
Yet Russian information operations are like icebergs: RT and other branded propaganda outlets are just the small
part that is visible. Beneath the surface, Russia maintains a vast digital network of bloggers and paid social-media
commenters, many of whom do not advertise themselves as Russians at all. It is surprisingly easy to draw their
ire. Just post something unfriendly toward the Russian position on Crimea or the 2014 shooting-down of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine and you will soon find yourself receiving insulting messages from people
you’ve never met and friend requests from mysterious lingerie models eager to change your mind (and keep a
closer watch on you besides).
Many of the real people behind these fake accounts are young and chic—aspiring writers who show up each day
to work in “troll factories,” darkened office buildings nestled in the suburbs of Moscow and St. Petersburg. They
manufacture dozens of online personae, working 12-hour shifts. From cramped cubicles, they vent fog into
discussions about geopolitics, NATO, Ukraine, American elections, and everything in between. As a European
Union official who studies Russia’s propaganda put it, “The aim is not to make you love Putin. The aim is to make
you disbelieve anything. A disbelieving, fragile, unconscious audience is much easier to manipulate.”
In the past, information-warfare campaigns have typically come at great cost and had little prospect of success.
Even if the propaganda reached its intended audience and found a sympathetic ear, what then? How could
dissidents locate one another, much less coordinate enough to have a meaningful political effect?
Not so today. Thanks to social media, this same sort of propaganda effort can be conducted cheaply and
almost invisibly. Even the most trivial sign of a political fissure —a few hundred angry users in an internet
forum—represents a potential opportunity to sow discord and chaos in a rival nation.
Sometimes, the goal is simply to stack tinder, throw matches, and see what happens. Far -right political
parties (nationalist and isolationist) in countries such as Hungary, Greece, and France have been bolstered
by Russian cash, accorded disproportionate coverage by Russian media, and then spun up with social-
media support. In the United Kingdom, the unsuccessful 2014 Scottish -independence referendum was
loudly condemned as “rigged” by Russian observers seeking to delegitimize democratic processes and stir
the pot of resentment. The 2016 “Brexit” campaign calling for Great Britain to leave the European Union
was similarly lavished with attention by the Russian press and backed by an army of trolls and Twitter bots.
Other times, the misinformation campaign works toward narrower policy purposes. This summer, a small,
peaceful anti-U.S. protest outside Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base was transformed, in characterizations by
Russian media and internet trolls, into a much larger mob riot—portrayals that filtered into U.S. media
and online discussion. Soon after, patently false rumors spread via social media that American nuclear
weapons kept in Incirlik would be relocated to a military base in Romania —the same base where, in fact,
a U.S. antimissile system had just been activated, over angry Russian objection. The aim of these
falsehoods was to exaggerate the “disintegration” of U.S.-Turkish relations and to incite Romanian
resentment against the NATO missile shield, in order to weaken acceptance of the U.S. military presence in
Europe.
Information warfare can also serve more-chilling ends. Russia’s infiltration and invasion of Crimea and eastern
Ukraine was preceded by a relentless online campaign to stoke pro-Russian protests and cast the new (Western-
friendly) Ukrainian government as, quite literally, a bunch of Nazis. What appear to be Kremlin planning
documents, later leaked online, describe the campaign as playing on the “centrifugal aspirations” of Ukrainian
minorities in order to initiate a “pro-Russian drift.” Similar smoke-and-mirrors efforts appear to be under way
against Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, each of which has a large ethnic-Russian population—and each of which
is a member of NATO.
Few targets loom larger than the United States. This election cycle, Russian hackers targeted the U.S. political
system, digging up embarrassing information and spreading it as widely as possible. Russian trolls posed as angry
U.S. supporters of one or another political campaign while outlets like RT leapt to enlarge the divisions that other
parts of the propaganda machine had helped create. What felt new and strange to many Americans followed a
familiar script: provoking restive minorities, strengthening the hand of potentially friendly politicians and
political movements, undermining trust in democratic processes, and generally raising the volume of anger and
dissent.
The ultimate intent is not so much victory for a certain side, but a loss for everybody: sapping the credibility of
U.S. institutions and tearing open as many wounds as possible. After Election Day, we should not be surprised
to find a vocal group of internet users with mysterious IP addresses decrying the result as a fraud and driving
talk of conspiracy—and even of resistance or secession. In time, we may see a multiplying number of
homegrown violent extremists (along the lines of the infamous Oregon militiamen), encouraged by the subtle
manipulation of a certain rival government.
ALTHOUGH RUSSIA has pioneered this modern version of information warfare, it is hardly alone. Following a
series of anticorruption protests in Turkey and a spate of critical international media coverage, for
instance, the Turkish government hired thousands of professional trolls in a bid to build a social -media
army. In Venezuela, authorities have used pro-government Twitter bots to manipulate one of the few news
sources not already controlled by the state; the fake Twitter followers of Venezuelan President Nicolás
Maduro were so loyal that he became the third-most-
retweeted public figure in the world, behind only the king
of Saudi Arabia and the pope.
All of these efforts share the same two broad objectives.
The first is to overwhelm the state’s adversaries, be they
foreign or domestic, with misinformation: to challenge the
very basis of their reality. But the second is just as
important: to mobilize their own citizens and supporters
and bind them to the state. The power of social media is
used to intensify nationalism and demonize the enemy. In
this strategy, homophily is not something to be feared or
avoided. It is the goal.
The combination of untruth and homophily—set against a
global battle of competing narratives—hints at a dark
future. A world without facts, cleanly segregated by
ideology and national allegiance, will be a more dangerous
one. Such cynical use of the internet not only threatens to
keep people in a perpetual state of mistrust; it may also
increase the likelihood of conflict itself.
When it comes to social-media mobilization, China stands
in a league all its own. The Chinese Communist Party has long stoked the fires of nationalism among the
700 million Chinese internet users in order to bolster the state against the perceived threats of outside
information. The strategy is equal parts censorship and manipulation. China employs as many as 2 million
internet censors and trolls, who, far from operating in the shadows, have their own system of professional
certification. In the words of Chinese President Xi Jinping, the ultimate goal of online e xpression must be
“condensing public opinion into consensus.”
This apparatus will hit its next stage with the planned implementation of a national “social credit” system,
in which the government will score citizens for trustworthiness and civic “goodness.” Akin to an Orwellian
Klout score, the measure will draw from a combination of factors ranging from an individual’s employment
history to her online behavior to even that of her friends and family, creating a self -policing system. In
turn, the score will be used to determine real-world benefits and punishments.
Such programs offer the lure of control, which is growing ever more attractive as China enters a period of
economic and political uncertainty. Their danger is that the regime will instead find itself in a position of
“騎虎難下,” a proverb dating back to the Jin dynasty ( A.D. 265–420) meaning, literally, “Riding a tiger and
it being hard to get off.” China’s cybernationalists have been shaped into a potent force, but they are also
a hive that erupts angrily at the slightest perceived provocation from the United States, Taiwan , or Japan—
and not always at their masters’ bidding.
During this year’s Taiwanese elections, one of the most popular phrases on the Chinese social -media
service Weibo translated as “Use force to unify Taiwan.” And while China was in discussions with its
neighbors over disputed islands, Chinese networks commonly featured messages such as “Even if China is
a graveyard, still need to kill all Japanese. Even if no grass grows in China, still need to recover Diaoyu
Islands.” Following a July ruling by the International Court of Justice, which rejected many of China’s
sweeping territorial claims to the South China Sea, Chinese social media exploded with hundreds of
thousands of furious comments, many calling for war. The anger spooked senior party officials; censors
and state media worked overtime to restrain the very forces they had once helped unleash.
Notably, the hive no longer roils at foreigners alone, but also at any Chinese -government actions that fall
short of the most stridently patriotic standards. Following the October 2015 transit of a U.S. destroyer
through contested waters, the fury of Chinese social -media users was directed not merely toward the
United States, but also toward their country’s own military—once an unassailable institution. “Stop
boasting and fight!” became a common refrain.
Such loud and abrasive internet users will not cause a war on their own, but they will complicate diplomats’
future efforts to avoid one. For the Chinese government, dependent above all else upon the illusion of
consensus, the spontaneous political movements enabled by the internet represent a potentially
existential threat. When the crowd cries for violence, its desires cannot be satisfied —but neither can they
be wholly ignored. “Domestic voices calling for a more muscular Chinese foreign policy have creat ed a
heated political environment,” Thomas Christensen, a Princeton professor and former State Department
official for China policy, has written in Foreign Affairs. “Gone are the days when Chinese elites could ignore
these voices.”
It has become a cliché among international-relations scholars to draw parallels to 1914 Europe, but the
potential challenges posed by social media make the comparison apt. Then, as now, regimes toyed with
the power of nationalism, amplified by new communications mediums, in order to maintain stability at
home. They discovered too late that the popular forces they sought to manipulate were beyond their
control.
When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914, few thought that global
conflict was at hand. But over the next several weeks, diplomats and monarchs were left feeling helpless
as their nations barreled toward World War I. For some, the prospect of disappointing their own nationalist
citizens scared them more than the war itself. German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann -Hollweg
lamented how the public clamor for blood constrained his choices, while Russian Tsar Nicholas II feared
the very loss of his throne if he chose any other option than a march to war. He chose war, and the people
eventually toppled him all the same.
Reading the frantic diplomatic missives that traversed the telegraph lines in the final days before hostilities
commenced, one is struck by how the threat of conflict quickly adopted its own terrible logic and
momentum. Impassioned populations and real-time reports of mobilizations and countermobilizations
helped fuel a sense that, far from a conscious choice, war had become inevitable.
Notably, this was the prevailing mood in an age when all the European royal families were related, when
diplomats hailed from the same genial institutions, when governments exercised vastly more power over
the popular press than they do now. Lines of communication were largely controlled by the state, and
formal correspondence usually unfolded over days, not hours or minutes.
Today, national leaders engage in Twitter spats, and rapid-fire hashtags draw international attention.
Public sentiment can be readily manipulated or even manufactured. And events, filtered through social
media, can quickly go viral—the very definition of spinning out of control.
Perhaps the greatest danger in this dynamic is that, although information that goes viral holds
unquestionable power, it bears no special claim to truth or accuracy. Homophily all but ensures that. A
multi-university study of five years of Facebook activity, titled “The Spreading of Misinformation Online,”
was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its authors found that the
likelihood of someone believing and sharing a story was determined by its coherence with their prior
beliefs and the number of their friends who had already shared it —not any inherent quality of the story
itself. Stories didn’t start new conversations so much as echo preexisting beliefs.
This extreme ideological segregation, the authors concluded, “comes at the expense of the quality of the
information and leads to proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust,
and paranoia.” As smartphone cameras and streaming video turn every bystander into a reporter (and
everyone with an internet connection into an analyst), “truth” becomes a matter of emotional resonance.
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EMERSON T. BROOKING is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
P. W. SINGER is a strategist at New America and the author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What
Everyone Needs to Know and Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War.