LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

In his prescient 1970 book Culture is Our Business, Canadian philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted the future of global conflict as a continuous “guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”[1] The fact that McLuhan saw this revolutionary transformation before the development of the tools that would usher in its advent is a stunning testament to a global visionary. Over the past decade, McLuhan's forecast has come alive. The democratization of the tools of disinformation and manipulation of news and opinion online to advance an ideological campaign has called into question shared understandings of truth, competition, and combat. This disorienting shift in the character of warfare is the subject of a book by strategists and national security writers P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking.

“Humanity is teetering at the edge of a cliff,” caution Singer and Brooking in LikeWar, which describes the challenges of the current competition for influence and the role of technology and information in defining the modern battlefield.[2] Further, the authors predict the manner in which technological advancements may aggravate current online trends in the future. Finally, they describe what can be done to defend democratic institutions. The book serves as a 273-page warning to public officials, corporate leaders, and national security specialists offering clear-eyed recommendations from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley.[3]

The authors describe a kind of conflict in which influence over social media users and news consumers is more important than offensive operations, where credibility replaces bombs and bullets, and where disorientation serves to advance strategic objectives. In 2012, for example, during Operation Pillar of Defense, a military operation by the Isareli Defense Forces against Hamas in the Gaza strip, the two sides contended for influence and control of the narrative on Twitter that would help shape global opinion of the conflict.[4] In 2014, Russian forces gained the initiative during the initial stages of the invasion of Ukraine by sowing confusion and discord through social media.

…much of the world operates in an information competition that is just below the level of war, a level at which social media influence has become more important than seizing and holding physical terrain.

LikeWar tells an important story, vividly and descriptively, and serves as a reliable accounting of the application of the informational tools in conflicts around the world. Singer and Brooking describe how networked armies of bots, programs that interact online autonomously, and neural networks capable of quickly recognizing thousands of face and speech patterns have weaponized online discussions. As a result, much of the world operates in an information competition that is just below the level of war, a level at which social media influence has become more important than seizing and holding physical terrain. The internet, according to the authors, has redefined war itself.

While the book has considerable strengths and there are abundant helpful footnotes and citations, there is little new information here. Two other recent books, Richard Clarke and Robert Knake’s The Fifth Domain and David Sanger’s The Perfect Weapon, offer greater insight into the present and future of online manipulation and its implications for national security, for example.

The first half of Like War quickly covers a history of disinformation as a weapon that is better covered elsewhere. The use of social media by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to recruit and spread terror, for example, is detailed more thoroughly in ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger. Joshua Green's insightful Devil's Bargain offers better analysis of the rise of alt-right social media outlets and websites as an antidote to conventional news sources. Likewise, Richard Stengel's phenomenal Information Wars covers the Russian state's effort to sow chaos during the 2016 election with more significant analysis and nuance.

Started in 2011, LikeWar was revised to include emerging events such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The sections on the Trump campaign’s use of social media and conspiracy theories and the Russian bots that sought to delegitimize the election feel rushed. Singer and Brooking miss how the traditional media and established punditry played into the conspiracies by constantly dismissing candidate Trump’s supporters as unlearned and intolerable, an observation analyzed in enlightening detail in Tim Alberta’s American Carnage.

The second half of Like War reveals the chief influencers of war’s new landscape: the mostly white, mostly male, mostly millennial titans of Silicon Valley who have garnered outsized power over the past decade. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and, to a lesser extent, YouTube and Reddit have grown into global institutions more potent in some ways than sovereign states. Twitter was integral to the rise and recruiting of ISIS.[5] President Rodrigo Duterte uses Facebook and Twitter to violate human rights, silence aggressive reporters, and frighten political opponents.[6] As described in the book and at greater length in The Mueller Report, and as Mark Zuckerberg has admitted, almost one third of the American population may have seen propaganda pushed through counterfeit Facebook accounts by Russian government agents to influence an American presidential election.[7] The largest social media platforms now have the power to mobilize terror networks, foment civil war, and spread conspiracies.

The individuals behind these ubiquitous platforms have the power to control attention. They also have the power to save us from a dystopian future in which man bows to machine and reality is pliable, described in chilling detail in the book’s penultimate chapter. The world is years, not decades, away from networks of millions of bots driven by artificial intelligence that sound and react just like real people online, never repeating themselves. Provide these networks with a targeted population and they will steer societies toward a political agenda.[8] Algorithms will soon be able to replicate and program voices to engage in full (fake) conversations, alter video content to distort reality, and determine the identity of online freedom fighters. Singer and Emerson’s book concludes with suggested roles for governments, private citizens, and elected officials in avoiding this fate. Ultimately, however, the authors point out that social media companies have unwittingly unleashed this warfare and must be held responsible for containing it.

…social media companies have unwittingly unleashed this warfare and must be held responsible for containing it.

A reader might wish the authors invested a chapter or two in identifying the role of the Pentagon in this new aspect of war. If power struggles shift from the kind of war associated with bombs, tanks, and armed troops to a contest for influence, the U.S. military must presumably make budgetary offsets and force structure changes to account for these trends. Through more than a dozen examples, the authors make clear that war, or something approximating it, is engaged primarily online. Yet, any analysis of the Pentagon’s relationship to online influence is missing from Like War.

Despite its shortcomings, this captivating book has far-reaching implications for our future and an urgent message for national security leaders and elected officials. America in 2019 is a place where the value of agreed-upon truth holds fading relevance. Claims on Twitter that have long been conclusively defeated by objective research are often met with the respect generally accustomed to scientific principles. Spending a few hours poking around social media, one may find the Orwellian idea that two plus two can be made to equal five if enough people believe it. This embrace of deceit serves as a present danger for not only the United States but for the world.

Joe Buccino is a U.S. Army officer. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.

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Header Image: A woman speaks on a mobile phone as she walks past a graffiti-covered wall with a giant hashtag sign near Moscow's Kursky railway station. (AFP/Getty)

Notes:

[1] MacLuhan, Marshall. Culture Is Our Business. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1970. 41.

[2] Singer, P. W., and Emerson T. Brooking. LikeWar: the Weaponization of Social Media. Boston: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. 256.

[3] Ibid., 243.

[4] Ibid., 9

[5] Ibid., 136.

[6] Ibid., 15.

[7] Ibid., 173.

[8] Ibid., 255.