21st Century Propaganda a Guide to Interpreting and Confronting the Dark Arts of Persuasion

Hicham Tiflati

Separating truth from false news is more difficult today than ever. When it comes to conflict, both domestically on the political front and internationally with terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State (IS), social media is at present the handy weapon of pick. Information technology provides a theater of political espionage and outright war, driving everything from sabotaged elections to flash lynch mobs, every bit in India, and a component of existent wars and existent genocide, as with IS and the Rohingya massacres. While celebrities can employ Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to connect with their fans, terrorist groups such equally IS and al-Qaeda employ it to spread their propaganda and recruit disenfranchised Muslims from all corners of the world.

Although the internet beginning served equally a revolutionary medium in support of individual freedoms, information technology took a dark plough when totalitarian regimes started blocking it and, somewhen, (mis)using its ability for their own evil agendas. It also took a nastier part still when terrorists started employing it to impale.

Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media, written past the defense experts P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, is a thorough and well-written volume on how social media is being employed in war and politics. It is an admittedly essential volume read to understand the nature of today'southward reality. The authors bring a strong historical accept on the internet and social media also every bit many insights into our present-day situation. They have produced an up to date book that lays out but how social media is being used for terrorism and manipulated for political and armed services gains.

The book starts off with the current conflicts and events that bulldoze the web and the globe so moves on to the history of the net. Later information technology discusses how current events are played out on the cyberspace, with the focus on how online activities affect and challenge the real world and vice versa.

It covers a broad range of phenomena, including Donald J. Trump and the 2022 election, Russian government trolls, the Alt-Right, IS, and the IDF's tactics, in a comprehensive thesis near the changing face up of war and the dangers of social media. The authors' warning is serious – they start arguing their example by emphasizing Clausewitz's motto that "war is a continuation of politics by other means" and likening the virtual spaces of the internet to the physical spaces of war. In fact, they make the case that, from now on, the fate of elections and wars is dependent on what happens on social media.

With four billion individuals on social media, computers, tablets, and smart phones are connecting people and allowing the menses of ideas at a step never seen earlier in human being history. In fact, the internet has evolved from being a complex all the same promising world engaged in the every solar day instantaneous distribution of information to an entity that, if misused, threatens the foundations of liberal republic. Hostile propaganda is slipping into Western social platforms in the form of bots and agents and distracting people, or, equally some would put it, "social media is war propaganda on steroids". [1] It is and then formidable that it succeeded in winning elections and casting countries into chaos (i.e. the Arab spring). War on social media is what the authors telephone call the "war in the open", "the state of war you lot cannot see", and the "state of war between everyone". In these "new wars for attention and power," winning the online boxing will pb to gains in the offline battle.

Furthermore, the book presents a swell analysis of how the cyberspace has and is affecting countries' behaviours and strategies in defending their interests and governing their citizens. They argue that social media ought to be understood through the analytic lenses we have applied to information warfare over the centuries, beginning with Vvon Clausewitz and continuing through all the onetime warhorses of the strategic studies catechism. This is a novel approach, especially in the pop literature, and, as the book demonstrates, an insightful i.

As the 'enemy' is conquering our minds, impacting our emotions, and redirecting out perspectives about all sorts of life, and equally we don't know what the time to come holds or how this new 'war' will cease, nations are investing more in cyber security and increasingly struggling to protect their citizens and elections from foreign subversion and interference. The challenge for democracy and the state of war to defend it volition be fought in the borderless space of the virtual earth. For instance, fright mongering, conspiracy theories, racist attitudes, and fake news are the norm in today'south world. One example the authors give is a Tea Party Twitter account focused on anti-immigrant and pro-Trump propaganda that succeeded in feeding its message to 22k subscribers in a short period of time. Not to mention that fake news spreads faster and 100 times further than true news. [two]

Nosotros are losing control of our lives in unprecedented forms. [3] According to Yuval Noah Harari [four], the future is, if anything, darker. With the advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and biotechnology and the combination between the two, the danger in the coming years is non hacking of our bank accounts and or e-mails, but hacking of our brains. Harari inserts that we are entering the era of condign hackable animals. Advances in motorcar learning and AI allow ever for more realistic bots, calculator generated Deep Fakes where lawmakers and politicians can exist programmed and manipulated to target people with exactly "the propaganda that they volition believe" and defend.

To prepare for this unknown and frightening future, states need to get serious and put more than funds into the governance and protection of emerging technologies. This book is a guide for the new warfare in this century. It is a peachy reference for scholars, journalists, and engaged citizens who are concerned about the dangers surrounding their lives by the Weaponization of AI and social media.

[i] Gideon Lichfield (2017). 21st-century propaganda: A guide to interpreting and confronting the dark arts of persuasion. https://qz.com/978548/introducing-our-obsession-with-propaganda/.

[2] Steve Lohr. (2018). Information technology'due south Truthful: False News Spreads Faster and Wider. And Humans Are to Arraign.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/engineering science/twitter-fake-news-research.html.

[3] Frank Bruni (2018). The Internet Will exist the Death of us. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/stance/net-violence-hate-prejudice.html

[4] Aljazeera (2018). Hackable humans and digital dictators: Q&A with Yuval Noah Harari
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/hackable-humans-digital-dictators-qa-yuval-noah-harari-180824095306982.html.

welshaporder1971.blogspot.com

Source: https://eeradicalization.com/like-war-the-weaponization-of-social-media/

Share this post