Social Media: A Mode of Warfare- Impacting Global Security and Safety
In the present digital age, nearly every person uses social media, irrespective of their age and income levels. It is not wrong to say that social media is deeply rooted in the daily lives of people. Even though social media provides access to people, opportunities and business across the globe, it does bring certain concerns with it. These are no longer restricted to privacy concerns, in terms of a person’s data being misused or manipulated, or getting access to the account of another person. Rather, it is grown big so as to result in global safety and security concerns that even translate to warfare. This is the reason why one could see #AllEyesOnISIS becoming a trending hashtag on Twitter (Singer & Brooking, 2018).
Warfare, in the basic sense, denotes undertaking such activities that can be translated as taking part in conflict or war. When social media is used as a weapon of causing lasting damage to another nation, it becomes social media warfare. The present discussion is aimed at showing that social media is now being used as a mode of promoting and spreading warfare by different nations. In order to do so, reference will be made to the articles discussed by Singer and Brooking (2018) titled LikeWar and the one by Helmus and others (2018) titled Russian Social Media Influence.
In the early internet days, even the biggest fans of the internet could not have fathomed the modern-day warfare tactics being deployed by different nations. The majority of the military systems of different nations and their governments did not consider some connected online bulletin boards to wreak the havoc that the present-day systems do. This is the reason why the warfare was focused on precision-guided munitions, robots, and drones. Only the late 1990s saw online information being weaponized. Today’s warfare is no longer stuff science fiction and the world has now resorted to global information warfare (Singer & Brooking, 2018).
Earlier, social media was used as a mode of connecting people and showing that individuals were doing a certain kind of thing or were being indulged in some leisure activities. However, in a world filled with growing uncertainties, one can see that social media is now being used by varied nations in order to indulge in cyber warfare activities. One of the prime examples of this is Russia, as it has moved on from promoting its agenda from TV sets to social media. As stated by Helmus and others (2018) Russia has coordinated its secret info activities like cyber warfare through social media bots and trolls. And a leading example of this was seen during the 2016 US elections. It is deemed that social media is a major part of its campaign and has even grown sophisticated in terms of using social media post the 2011 anti-government protests. The scholars have noted that Russia uses social media as a hybrid warfare campaign where the Russian soldiers as not only depicted as freedom fighters but covers campaigns like hostile Twitter bots, encourage protests and campaign of fake news (Helmus et al, 2018).
The Russian propaganda is to use social media for conducting information warfare at an unparalleled scale, and also has a high complexity level. Such info operations bring reminiscence of the Soviet era where the block used to take active measures on similar grounds. There appears to be a high priority for the Kremlin where the world witnessed Russia spending of US$1.1 billion in 2014 on mass media, which was increased in the next year on foreign-focused media. This included the money being spent on RT, media outlets, and Rossiya Segodnya, which is an agency that heads Sputnik News. What is done in a unique manner by Russia is that it is also putting its traditional news on social media, which essentially allows it to put forth its ideology by using information operations. Putin’s government was widely criticized for rigging the Russian elections and this was deemed as the present-day incarnation of information warfare by Putin. Again the blame was put on the West, which is another tactic used by Russia, to fulfil its propaganda (Helmus et al, 2018).
The use of social media as a warfare technique does present a number of challenges for the defence of any nation. When the governments of big nations like Russia start taking part in cyber warfare, particularly by using social media, it becomes difficult to understand and curb the menace that it leaves behind. One can deem social media as a new battlefield where the nations are now recruiting hackers and cybercriminals to bring another nation to a standstill. One needs to understand that cyber warfare or social media warfare acts are ultimately acts of war and the nations have reached a situation that they will go to any lengths to win this war. And this ideology is reflected in what is being done by Russia. At times, the perpetrators are easily identified, while at other times, this becomes a difficult thing to do (Helmus et al, 2018).
There have been cases where social media experts become the centre-stage controversy in cyber warfare acts. Cambridge Analytica, which had been formed by Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon and Breitbart chairman, a UK based firm, in 2013, were earlier indulged in undertaking information warfare efforts that involved siding people to vote on the Leave side of Brexit. Later on, it was also revealed that the Trump campaign was able to get around five thousand points on 220 million Americans. Thus, social media acts as a gold mine for the nations, to further their cause, and this could be in furthering their specific goals or to change the political environment of another nation (Singer & Brooking, 2018).
Russia is not the only nation that has been blamed to have taken part in social media warfare. The Great Firewall of China has socially engineered its online armies to target three warfares. The first one relates to manipulation of belief and perception of people in sense of psychological warfare; the next is the manipulation of international law and treaties, in sense of legal warfare; and the last is manipulating the foreign and Chinese population in sense of public opinion warfare. The strategy of China is simple. Where it is weak, it amplifies its strengths in eyes of the public and where it is weak, it diverts the attention to other things. Hence, it promotes an image where it is deemed as a peaceful nation and is regularly bullied by powerful adversaries (Singer & Brooking, 2018).
Such acts are the reason why even the biggies like the United States, where essentially the modern-day internet was born, have accepted NetWare as a matter requiring policy measures. This is the reason why a Social Media Strategic Communications program was launched in 2011 by the research division of DARPA (the creator of the internet) for studying the manner in which manipulation on social media takes place. Similar efforts were made by Britain in 2015 where the goal was to bring in an agent of change and to do so, the targeted Information Activity and Outreach were brought forth. There is a special focus on social media weaponization in the Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence of NATO. Then there is the patriotic troll army of Turkey, the Israeli Defense Forces’ digital arm, and the other nation’s cyber propaganda initiatives. This is followed by the more sophisticated revolutions like Ronfeldt and Arquilla that have a focus on fighting the global information conflict. Efforts have also been made in the past by Jewish organizations to rewrite Wikipedia articles to put them in a better light. The information tactics while dealing with online social media threats are similar for both peaceful campaigns and violent conflicts, which essentially means that the realm of politics and war is merging (Singer & Brooking, 2018).
Social media is famous for indulging people by using measures like memes. Memes are a fun way of representing something, which can often cover a satire or a direction to form a certain viewpoint. There have been several cases where famous personalities like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and even Adolf Hitler have been made a meme. And it’s not just that they are targeted as memes, rather they do share them as and when they have to state anything. This was seen in the example of Trump tweeting a picture of him being represented as anthropomorphized Pepe. The UK embassy in Russia had made use of a smug Pepe for taunting the government of Britain during a diplomatic spat. A representation of Pepe as a frog was more a product of an evolutionary cycle that spread like fire on social media. This representation did not stop there and evolved for a long time. Upon Trump winning the elections, this Pepe was transformed. The goal here was clear; to use and manipulate the power of the internet to put someone in a bad light, while ensuring that the other person won the political battle (Singer & Brooking, 2018).
Till now, what has been discussed is the use of social media in an indirect manner to undertake acts of warfare. Yet, there have been cases where these acts of warfare or at least their aftermaths are put on social media. An example of this is the case of Jabari, who was in the middle of war and warfare tactics. The social media witnessed Israel going to war with Hamas, where live tweets of his assassination were presented, along with the YouTube posts covering proofs of the incident. The Israel Defence Forces even tweeted an infographic that read “Eliminated”. To this, Hamas responded by putting pictures of a wounded baby showing that Israel was targeting children. Such war and warfare tactics have not become a commonality on social media, with hashtags like #GazaUnderAttack and #IsraelUnderFire just being examples of it (Singer & Brooking, 2018).
Conclusion
To conclude the above discussion, it becomes clear that social media is indeed being used by the different entities across the globe as a mode of spreading hate, promoting self-agenda and even for acts like warfare. This has been possible due to the number of people that are on social media, which provides the entities with a golden plate to feed off from. In order to put forth the arguments proving that social media causing a threat to global security and safety, and that social media has changed the manner in which warfare takes place, reference was made to the two articles of LikeWar and Russian social Media Influence. Both the articles covered several examples that we’re able to strengthen the key argument of this discussion. The example of how, at several instances, nations like the USA, Russia and China have used social media to put themselves in good light, while making certain that others were portrayed negatively are evidence to the made argument. The example of the war between Israel and Hamas was another such example. This is the reason why nations across the globe are working on enhancing their social media policies, so as to ensure that this mode of warfare can be controlled, and the negative impact of it can be avoided.
References
Helmus, T. C., Bodine-Baron, E., Radin, A., Magnuson, M., Mendelsohn, J., Marcellino, W., … & Winkelman, Z. (2018). Russian social media influence: Understanding Russian propaganda in Eastern Europe. Rand Corporation.
Singer, P. W., & Brooking, E. T. (2018). LikeWar: The weaponization of social media. Eamon Dolan Books.
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