How social media is being weaponized across the world

Singer and Brooking have presented findings from their book, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, to leaders in the American military, intelligence agencies, and the U.S. Congress. Ahead of the book’s release today, I spoke to Singer about what these changes in warfare, politics, culture, and communication mean for the rest of us, who are all unwitting participants in this new reality. The interview that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Gabby Deutch: Your article in The Atlantic was published a few weeks before Donald Trump was elected and several months before we started to learn more about the role that Russian propaganda and misinformation played in our election. How does this fit into the war that you write about, and what is the next step in the information wars that are being fought online?

P. W. Singer: You can’t say we didn’t warn you! The project started several years ago, looking at how social media was being used in war zones around the world. Very quickly, we saw how not just the definition of those war zones was expanding, but also how the very same tactics, the very same players, were popping up in other realms, from politics to news. What about ISIS using [technology] in battlefield operations, and using it to recruit in the United States and Europe, to spur attacks, to establish its branding? Then you get the example of the players: The same Russian networks that are going after Ukraine are pivoting to Brexit, to the U.S. election. You see the same tactics being repeated. We realized this was not a story of just war. It was not a story of just politics. It was a story of a larger change.

Deutch: In these new online battlefields, as you discuss, one of the main goals is to command people’s attention, to go viral, to convince people that what you’re saying is not necessarily right but the most interesting. Is this something that’s entirely new? Propaganda has existed for a long time. How is this any different?

Singer: We live in a world where attention is power, and not just online power, but real-world power. If you don’t believe that, then you must not know who the president of the United States is; you must not know what a group like ISIS is; you must not know about who the most influential and profitable companies in the world are, who the celebrities in the world are. What’s important is it’s not just the power to affect the outcome of a battle on the ground, the power to affect an election, or the power to shape which product wins out or not—but literally the power to determine truth, or at least what people believe to be true.

There has always been propaganda. But one of the other aspects of this shake-up in power is that we all have power now. Unlike [with] the telegraph, TV, or the newspaper, we individually can be collectors of information, sharers of information, and combatants in the information battle space. Our own individual decisions determine the overall trends that then determine what goes viral or not—what wins.