Authors P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, coming together to work on a book can only signify the birth of a ruthless political thriller. Singer is a political scientist, scholar, and editor specializing in International Relations and the varied forms of warfare in the 21st century. Brooking is the author of a popular op-ed examining the Russian intervention in the 2016 US Presidential elections. With this knowledge of the authors, one can already imagine experiencing a world of interesting content on Trump alone. However, it is safe to say that the authors beautifully unleash the potential of this co-authorship and go way beyond the reader’s expectations. The fusion of their specializations can be expected to create a text that unsparingly levels heavy scrutiny on various regimes and ‘Like War’ seems to have delivered exactly that.
‘Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media’ is an exploration of a new form of weapon the age of crippling social media dependency has brought along. Coffee can brag all it wants about how people today cannot function without an early morning shot, but it is not even up for debate that a nice scroll session on social media comes first. We rely on social media not only for connectivity but for keeping up with current affairs as well. It is a world where virality and veracity are synonymous. Imagine if the popular and the powerful were to take advantage of this folly; we would be living in a nightmarish world of fabrication, losing the ability to distinguish between the truth and the lies. This new weapon of information operates so seamlessly that it is unknown when this nightmare became a reality. Today what we know to be facts are simply narratives that were effective enough to spread like wildfire. It is difficult to be conscious of that when most of us are still unaware that social media, the CPU of our daily lives, is being used by countries, regimes, and even powerful individuals, to manipulate and control the common folk. We are unknowingly part of various schemes, ploys, and wars. It is as though the invention of the internet has created yet another territory to be captured and marked: the virtual land and by extension the minds of those that inhabit it. The authors explain this phenomenon through innumerable examples, some of which this book review delves into as well.
This book begins its foray into the complicated and utterly transformed world of social media with a brief history of the amusing and unfortunately far-reaching tweets of the 45th American President, Donald J. Trump. In today’s political climate, there are only a few hooks as effective as Trump himself. Before he even ran for office, Trump has had an interesting run between new ventures, bankruptcy, more new ventures, and more bankruptcy. Twitter can be credited, in part, for rescuing him from this cycle. This real estate magnate turned celebrity host turned right-wing politician has dramatically risen above the band of celebrity Twitterati that he was once a subdued member of. Trump’s Twitter game seems to have evolved from tweets garnering life support for the deteriorating health of his many ventures to “flame-wars” and unsophisticated yet attention-grabbing political attacks. It can also be said that with the help of Twitter--his trusty sidekick and its addictive engineering--Trump managed to reach a brighter spotlight that eventually facilitated his presidential campaign. His addiction led to a higher frequency of these ‘flame-wars’ and the addiction of the average American twitter user increased his popularity. His tweets became increasingly famous for dropping callow attacks on popular political figures. He has been citing ‘extremely credible sources’ to perpetuate rumours and sway popular opinion since way before the Clinton email controversy. This evolution of Trump’s twitter speaks to a larger contrast between two times with one where social media was a medium of checking in on your circle and the other is a host to a large-scale information conflict where ‘veracity’ is only a sporadic guest star. The authors have effectively capitalized on the popular emotions surrounding Donald J. Trump to engage readership. Moreover, they have used the drastic change in his social media content--from self-promotion to personal political biases and theories presented as facts--to highlight a larger problem. The average social media user’s consumption of information on these platforms as the whole truth, without much scrutiny, is problematic.
The authors argue that the Internet’s invention, though path-breaking in numerous ways, operated on the same principle as the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, etc. While the telecommunications revolution opened up communication to the masses and helped curb deaths of over-excited early news reporters--such as the ancient Greek warrior Pheidippides who ran 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to report Greece’s victory over Persia--these new inventions also created a new kind of power and conflict. There is no doubt that the Internet has a significant edge over the others, but it does come with a new set of gatekeepers that have the power to suppress and distort information and shape the thought process of the masses. Through the 2016 US Presidential elections, the authors demonstrate how fake political stories from the US became a business opportunity for the internet-savvy youth of other countries. Youth from Macedonia, especially, reported significant profits simply because the average American’s thirst for juicy political stories was insatiable. Anything resembling a political controversy would be gobbled up regardless of the credibility of its source. These articles simply posed as concrete evidence to rumours that the political climate had already given birth to. The key to success for these self-styled news outlets was to deliver exactly what the public desired: ‘evidence’ to the narratives already being fed to them.
Undoubtedly, most countries have absorbed this new facet of the telecommunications revolution. The authors have deliberately patched together diverse fabrics of different societies to reinforce the reality of political and non-political gatekeepers. The power is invisible and in the grasp of a handful, but the target population, blissfully unaware, is as large as it can get. While youth, miles away from the American political battleground, used the free land of VirtualVille to mint money off of scandal-craving Americans, authoritative regimes have restricted it to feed their populations their version of the truth and shape public opinion. The authors have very skilfully demonstrated the same through China’s model. On the one hand citizens in countries like the U S have the opportunity to see and absorb facts that suit their political leanings, but on the other citizens under regimes like China are being spoon-fed a defined version of the truth. For the average Chinese, one can note, there is only one set of facts; while outside the country’s impervious matrix, there are multiple sets of facts.
It is common knowledge that China’s population seems to be living in a different reality altogether. They reside in an impenetrable bubble of alternative facts that even mainstream social media has been unable to overcome. Anything going in and out of this bubble is subject to heavy screening and censorship. There have been instances where people have managed to make their voices heard outside China but only for a limited period. A Chinese lady uploaded a video that started as a makeup tutorial, long enough to get through the screening procedures and eventually revealed the inhumane conditions Uyghur Muslims were being subjected to. It was taken down shortly but only after it had successfully spread the word. Certainly, this alienation is felt more among Muslim minorities the video talked about. While the Chinese government celebrated its incorporation into the new world of the Internet in 1987, a government that prizes ‘harmony’ above everything and finds any form of dissent to be a threat could not possibly allow its citizens to roam unbounded into this new virtual land of free knowledge. Images, videos and even words are subject to scrutiny in China. Not only are all international connections supposed to pass through the vigilant eyes of authorities--to ‘guide’ public opinion--but the Muslim minority of China is forced to live with ‘virtual handcuffs’ each day. They are forced to have a Jingwang app--a web cleansing tool--installed on their phones that would allow the state to track and block their messages and calls if need be. It gives the state access to their personal and home networks, and the ability to watch over everything they do. The state also installs checkpoints where the police would check people’s phones to ascertain the presence of this app. China also has the baffling concept of State Media that does not allow independent media to thrive. It is considered the obligation of internet service providers to remove content that does not emanate from these state media sources. In such regimes, not everyone has the right to form personal opinions; one is obligated to subscribe to state opinions.
The authors emphasize how occurrences that we deemed ourselves adequately protected from, have now reached our doorstep, or rather, our smartphones. Undoubtedly, various malicious actors beyond popular politics have also exploited the internet to meet their ends. Ordinary folk are now a crucial part of various virtual wars that are simultaneously manifesting physically, miles away from their reality. Terror, war, conflict, and crime; feeding on the internet’s folly, seem to have developed powerful social media campaigns. The authors spin dramatic imagery of ISIS terrorists marching in with their hordes of weaponry and ammunition through the dusty and deserted roads of Iraq. However, ISIS’s social media campaign seemed to have created more of a shudder than any powerful imagery ever could. Instead of striking their targets under the cover of night, they made sure that not only Iraq but all of Arabic twitter and social media were well-versed with their intentions. Social media was flooded with countless selfies of ISIS cadres, clad in all black with piercing gazes, posing with weapons on a dusty desert road. Viral videos of executions and beheadings, making rounds on the interweb made sure their voices were heard loud and clear. With specific apps for other Jihadists to tune in for updates, their message was heightened by their large fan-following on social media to the extent that the news of their arrival itself found policemen and troops of the Iraqi army fleeing in fear. From Trump’s Twitter presidency to ISIS and its #AllEyesOnISIS, the ‘overt and long-anticipated’ does more damage than the ‘covert and sudden’. While extremist groups have used such platforms to propagate their fanatical ideologies and recruit additional boots on the ground, governments of various nations have used it to put up facades of success, peace, and harmony while simultaneously hacking away at the foundations of a peace-loving society and the integrity of their citizenry. Moreover, while Trump, the United States and ISIS utilized the free and accessible characteristic of social media to generate public consensus, China can be seen limiting the access of people to meet the same end. Fortunately--solely for individuals operating on vicious intents--social media does not come with the disclaimer: CAUTION: You are entering a zone of unparalleled falsification, viewer discretion advised.
Like War is not only a project aimed at blowing the cover of these gatekeepers and large-scale misinformation campaigns. It aims to understand what exactly, apart from the universality of skewed facts, allows individuals to fall prey to these manipulations. Actors, whether malicious or not, are no doubt driven by personal agendas to shape public opinion in their favour but what exactly makes their careful use of social media a weapon of mass manipulation? The authors have consulted a 1944 study to explain this lax absorption of fabrication by the superior-most species crowned the creatures of logic. This study, conducted by psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, involved the production of a short film featuring three revolving geometrical shapes that would bounce off of each other. Except for one, all the subjects that saw this film could not help but attribute emotion, motive and most importantly, a narrative to these shapes. The study reveals the inherent need of the human mind to create a narrative. This revelation brings back some personal memories, as a preschooler, of memorizing the numbers by building a story of how ‘2’ was bullied by ‘3’ while ‘4’ came to ‘her’ rescue and saved the day. This personification of the inanimate from the very beginning points to an inherent need to be surrounded by narratives. Our minds are wired to think in terms of narratives to understand the world we live in. Thus, we are easily drawn to ready-made narratives just like the average 9 to 5 office-goer is drawn to heat-and-eat microwave meals! It is this attraction towards narratives that makes us un-consenting pawns in the virtual war of manipulations.
The authors also examine what makes a narrative--ones that are used to create public consensus--effective and successful. They highlight three rules: simplicity, resonance, novelty. We are living in an age where life is whooshing by and attention spans shrinking rapidly. People do not have time for anything but the reader’s digest version of life. Any piece of information or misinformation has to be simple and easy to ingest. Therefore, a campaign to shape public opinion can be successful if the narratives it produces are short and simple. Interestingly, memes are also being used to convey these narratives. This would also make Twitter an efficient tool for such campaigns. It has been used by ISIS’s commanders such as Junaid Hussain and Trump alike. It can be noted Hussain’s use of easy vernacular language and Trump’s fifth-grader vocabulary allowed them to adhere to the rule of simplicity. The second rule of an effective narrative is resonance. A successful narrative is one which is simply a furtherance of pre-existing plotlines. The authors give the example of “the villainous foe”, “the rebel without a cause”, “the lone wolf” etc. These plotlines blend in with our real-life too as our minds take up the task to create narratives as a means of understanding life. It also reveals our desire to find ourselves in the middle of these plotlines. ISIS, promising the youth a hero’s journey of adventure and the fulfilment of a larger purpose in life, granting that hero status effectively taps into the second rule of a successful narrative. The third rule is novelty. The shrinking attention spans are even shorter for content that is predictable and common. The trick to get a narrative to stick to the target audience is to weave a plot quite out of the blue. Anyone who aims to control the narrative must aim to dictate who is the hero and who is the villain; what is true and what is false; and what is heroic and what is villainous. Trump’s tweets, China’s digital matrix, and ISIS’s information Jihad, these are all attempts to generate public consensus. It has never been easier to achieve virality and shape public opinion than in today’s age of social media. Each internet user is simultaneously a target and a weapon in this virtual war of narratives.
As a reader, one must not be fooled by this attempt at a light-hearted review as the book is thoroughly packed with information and does not flow very easily. The authors have brilliantly captured all kinds of examples to highlight the underlying concepts, but this behemoth of a text is certainly not an easy read. The language is painfully straight-forward for an audience that lacks an attention span. Unfortunately, for most, it would appear that the efforts to engage the readers ended with the Donald Trump hook. Yet, it cannot be denied that the text--an unbelievable superabundance of eye-opening knowledge--is worth spending hours staring at a single page. The authors, ultimately, have skillfully highlighted that social media and the Internet, which are now inseverable aspects of our lives, are being used as weapons to put down a competitor or an adversary in a war of perceptions. What is special about this war is that its scope stretches across a profoundly vast spectrum that could range from two envious neighbors, a government and its people, between political competitors, terrorist organizations fighting the rest of the world, or between two nations already at war or contemplating the same. Anyone and everyone with a smartphone or an internet connection can willingly or unwillingly become a pawn in this Virtual War. Dangerous, is it not?
References
Singer, P. W., and Emerson T. Brooking. Like War: the Weaponization of Social Media. Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.
NOTE: This book review was originally written as part of an internship with the Centre For Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS)
Naaz Narang
(Co-owner EPGSC)
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