If the first wars were fought with sticks and stones, modern warfare is a high-tech battlefield where social media has emerged as a surprising — and effective — weapon. From Russian hacking to influence the American election to online recruitment for terror groups such as ISIS, an array of players are using false news and bogus accounts to stoke fear, incite violence and manipulate outcomes.
Authors Peter W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking describe this as “likewar,” a term that plays on the Facebook “like” feature. In their new book, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, they explain how these platforms have become persuasive tools of propaganda. The recently joined the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on Sirius XM to discuss their work.
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: It is incredible how social media has developed and expanded rapidly in the last 20 years, and the impact it has had on politics.
Peter Singer: It’s absolutely fascinating. One of the people we interviewed for the book was the literal godfather of the internet itself, Vint Cerf. He talked about how it was once this military network for scientists, and then there was this moment when the scientists began to email back and forth about science fiction. That’s when he realized, “Hold it. It’s become this social thing.”
You move forward, and now [there’s] Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it. They’re not just the nervous system of the modern world, they’re where we do business. They’re where we set up dates. But they’ve also become this space of battle, and battle over everything from political campaigns to use in military operations, marketing wars, you name it.
One of the things that the book is about is essentially how, if cyberwar was the hacking of networks that both governments and businesses have had to deal with, we now have this phenomenon of what we call “likewar,” which is the hacking of the people on the networks by this mix of “likes,” but also lies.
Knowledge@Wharton: You think about the stories we’ve heard about ISIS and other organizations using social media to recruit people. Can you talk about that?
Emerson Brooking: This issue came on our radar and the radar of a lot of folks across the country back in the summer of 2014, when the Islamic State invaded northern Iraq. They only had about 1,500 militants. They had pickup trucks and secondhand weapons from a lot of militant groups past.
But they did something new, and that was instead of keep their invasion a secret, they actually tweeted about it. They had a hashtag campaign, #AllEyesOnISIS, which they used to consolidate and broadcast their propaganda. And they had a huge network of both passionate supporters but also Twitter bots, which they used to lock down the trending hashtags on Twitter for the Arabic-speaking users.
“Over a very short period of time, a handful of tech geeks have become among the most powerful figures in all of politics and war.”
As a result of that, even though they only had a small invading force, they were effectively able to spread fear [and seem to become] much greater than they were, and pushed these demoralized defenders of a city like Mosul — with 1.5 million residents — to drop their weapons and flee. In the process, ISIS started scoring these propaganda videos and weaving them back into their online messaging. It became a source of great inspiration for people following along at home.
It was a direct result of these online tactics that they were able to recruit some 30,000 fighters from the Middle East, but also the wider world — more than 100 countries where people would leave their homes to journey to Syria and Iraq to join them. Or if that wasn’t possible, they felt inspired to commit acts of violence at home.
