Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

"There is a war... for your Mind!"That's the slogan of InfoWars, the incendiary conspiracy news network and nutritional supplement marketing firm. And while Alex Jones is wrong about almost everything, he's right about that. In LikeWar Singer and Brooking ably synthesize a sophisticated picture of information warfare in 2018, drawing from sources as diverse as Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, and ISIS, to argue that the internet has lead to a blurring of lines between consumer, citizen, journalist, activist, and warrior which threatens the foundations of liberal democracy. The tech companies which built these platforms and profited from them must grapple with the politics of their technologies, before we all reap the whirlwind.Computer networks and smart phones connect billions of people, allowing ideas to flow faster than ever before in history. Sometimes, the results can be impressive. The Chiapas Zapatista movement in 1994 was a dial-up and fax version of a network insurgency that managed to bring enough international opprobrium on Mexico that the government blinked, and reached some kind of political accord (Chiapas is complicated). More recently, Eliot Higgins and a team of open source analysts at Bellingcat managed to track down the exact BUK missile system and Russian soldiers responsible for shooting down MH 17 in 2014.But there are a lot of dark sides. When people connect, the emotion that spreads most rapidly is anger. Lies spread five times faster than truth. Musicians can use social networks to directly connect with their fans, and ISIS uses it to connect with alienated Muslim youths worldwide. Social networks sort diverse citizens into filter bubbles of people who think alike. Eliot Higgin's careful open source intelligence has a paranoid fun-house mirror version in the QAnon conspiracy, where Qultist decoders find hidden messages from an alleged 'senior white house source'.And then there is the matter of information war, an area that even now, after years of offensive cyber operations, liberal democracies still don't understand. Hostile propaganda slips into Western news networks and major platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are infested with bots. LikeWar can even take a personal toll. Over the course of writing this book, General Michael Flynn went from forward looking full-spectrum commander to head Trumpist conspiracy cheerleader to indicted and plead out felon. Flynn's fall is complex, but it can't be separated from the internet. If the trolls got him, what chance does your idiot cousin stand? The counters, 'citizen truth teams' and senior emissaries to groups vulnerable to recruitment, seem like thin reeds against the coming maelstrom of noise.LikeWar starts with Clausewitz's dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means, and there are clear links between cyberspace and physical space. Intensity of hashtags impacted the subsequent intensity of Israeli airstrikes during attacks on the Gaza strip. ISIS used propaganda to create an aura of invincibility that outflanked the defenders of Mosul, while Russia denied that its 'little green men' were even in Ukraine. But the difference is that cyberspace is constructed space rather than natural space. The networks are built, maintained, and owned by real corporations and real people. The internet grew from an anarchic specialized scientific network to a major engine of commerce and communicate with little deliberate government oversight. Section 230 absolved American companies of responsibility for policing content, with major carve outs for copyrighted IP and pornography. Yet as concerns over cyberbullying and counter-terrorism rose, major networks adopted digital constitutions that were permissive towards speech and censorious towards erotica. Policing content is and was possible, but always took a back seat to growth and engagement, the guide stars of Silicon Valley.The future is if anything, darker. Advances in machine learning and AI allow ever more realistic bots, computer generated DeepFakes where a politician can be programmed to say anything, and personalized targeting of people with exactly the propaganda they'll believe. There are defensive counters, but if I might draw military analogies, what we saw in 2016 was armored warfare circa 1918: clearly the future, but not yet a mature system. Given the pace of technology, we only have a few years before digital blitzkrieg.I'm extremely online, and I've been following this space for years. I've presented at multiple conferences on this topic, including Governance of Emerging Technologies and Association of Internet Researchers. LikeWar is the book I wish I'd written. Cognizant, forward looking, and deeply researched, it is vital reading for anyone interested in technology or politics.My only reservation is that I wish the sources were better linked in the text, instead of being buried in static endnotes. Maybe the next edition will push an update.

I think this is one of the most important books I've read in years. We are being reprogrammed by the big social media companies. Some of it for marketing but far more of it for control. What should be enlightening us is instead dividing us and dumbing us down. This isn't a book of conspiracy theories. It is well-written and exceptionally well-documented. The vastness of how cyberspace is affecting all of us is mindboggling.Read this book and you will never look at the internet, governments, or social media the same again.

I found the book very interesting! The authors did a great job of discussing the benefits of different social media sites. While the sites were intended for good use, there is always a downside. Each of the sites were exploited over time for a use other than intended. While this is by no means a surprise, it is amazing how others were quick to use the sites for illegal purposes. The history of how some of the sites were developed was interesting too. Of additional interest was the amount of notes included in the book. A third of the book is devoted to this alone. It shows the level of thoroughness the authors took to allow readers to delve deeper into topics discussed in each chapter. The most pressing question for social media: What is the next level of advancement?

This timely book begins in 2009 with Donald Trump’s first tweet, promoting his appearance on David Letterman that evening. It then weaves various threads such as political operatives use of social media in the 2016 campaign, to celebrities who use Social Media to increase their fan base, and to social media’s reach onto the battlefield. Social media was used to ignite the “Arab Spring.” There were many who felt it held a promise to bring more democratic processes into autocratic countries. But the dictators who survived learned and soon, social media was being used by those on both sides, such as in Syria. Isis also learned to effectively use social media, not only to recruit followers but to terrorize the countries in which they operated. Isis captured the city of Mosul with much smaller army and one poorer equipped because the Iraqi forces were so scared of Isis’ inhumane acts toward their enemies which were splashed across social media. By the time Isis arrived in the backs of pickup trucks, the Iraqi garrison had fled. Today’s battlefield involves not just military tactics, but social media strategies. In some cases, enemy fighters taunt those on the other side on social media, making them feel more vulnerable. Not only is social media changing the way war is fought, it is changing the meaning of war.Social media has quickly been adopted as a way for us to remain connected with friends and family, but it is also the place most Americans get their news. The authors spend significant time discussing the development of the internet and then the evolution of social media. As the various menus of media grows, so do those who attempt to use such media to sway our opinions. While Singer and Brooks extensively covers the Russia use of social media as a way for them to influence politics around the world, from the British Brexit vote to the American elections, they have also looked at how other countries have used social media for their own purposes. Truth and fact checking that used to be expected by the established news media is now out of the window. And because everything is based on algorithms that few understand, social media can be used to make the outlandish seems true (why else, would so many people like something is it wasn’t true).Of course, it’s not all about “fake news.” Some countries want to limit the news their citizens receive. China, in a way to only let its people know what the party wants them to know have created a firewall to control unwanted information which has led to humorous stories. When a study published under the title of “the Panama Papers,” which documented how many in the upper echelon of the party were stashing money overseas, Chinese firewall quickly blocked anyone from seeing anything that mentioned Panama. For a while, an entire country ceased to exist, at least according to the Chinese internet, under the internet police changed their blockage from anything Panama to “Panama” and other key words.At the end of the book, the authors argue that social media companies (most of whom are U. S. based companies, need to be more responsible for how their technology is used.In a perfect world, I would recommend this book, or something similar, to be read by every voter. But then, a perfect world wouldn’t have such issues with social media!

This book is an excellent analysis of the social media and virtual landscape and provides some challenges to long-standing geopolitical assumptions. The authors provide some excellent historical context, and masterfully lay out how, for good or ill, social media is here to see and has a profound effect on the world off the Internet. Tying in neuroscience, psychology, information technology, history, and political science, this book is especially timely in the era of COVID-19 and a looming American presidential election. I highly recommend giving this a read--it is past time we started taking the powers and dangers of social media seriously, and learn how to use it responsibly.

Lo recomiendo a todos los que les interese la politica y el mundo actual. Una lectura agradable, intrigante y de mucho interes!

A brilliant book, worth every minute. Couldn't resist reading through the night when I got it.

This like the #metoo movement. We were all kind of aware that bad stuff went on, then the lights went on and we threw up our hands in horror.This well written, evidence based book - it has a good wadge of citations at the back - turns the floodlamps on on the murky world of Russian bots, troll farms and information manipulation.Buy this book to read yourself, but also with which to whack your friends when they share toxic memes and fake news.

If you have ANY social media presence, you need to read this book.