Since November 2016, a national battle has raged about the role of social media in politics. People bemoaned the viciousness of trolls, the impact of incendiary fake news, the frog memes and Twitter bots and YouTube conspiracy videos. All the stories of manipulation and unintended consequences began igniting angry debates and prompted a long overdue conversation: what is the proper role of social networks in public discourse?

This important question stems from a new paradigm that started roughly a decade ago. That’s when social media turned everyone into a content creator, giving them the tools to not only say their piece but to amplify it, to grow an audience with little to no budget. Citizen journalists, bloggers, and grassroots activists bypassed the editorial old guard, gaining so much influence that they were elevated to an estate of the realm: The Fifth Estate.

Renee DiResta (@noUpside) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, writing about discourse and the internet. She studies narrative manipulation as the director of research at New Knowledge, is a Mozilla fellow on media, misinformation and trust, and is affiliated with the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. In past lives she has been on the founding team of supply chain logistics startup Haven, a venture capitalist at OATV, and a trader at Jane Street.

The social networks facilitated and enabled this new guard, simultaneously providing a captive user base, a virality engine infrastructure, no editorial oversight, and fairly limited rules. Not unexpectedly, the emergence of a relatively lawless federated system for reaching mass audiences attracted the attention of a bad actor.

Not Russia. ISIS.

The online battle against ISIS was the first skirmish in the Information War, and the earliest indication that the tools for growing and reaching an audience could be gamed to manufacture a crowd. Starting in 2014, ISIS systematically leveraged technology, operating much like a top-tier digital marketing team. Vanity Fair called them “The World’s Deadliest Tech Startup,” cataloging the way that they used almost every social app imaginable to communicate and share propaganda: large social networks such as Facebook; encrypted chat apps such as Telegram; messaging platforms including Kik and WhatsApp. They posted videos of beheadings on YouTube, and spoke to their followers on Internet radio stations. Perhaps most visibly, they were on Twitter, which they used for recruiting and for reach. Each time ISIS successfully executed an attack, they used Twitter to claim responsibility and tens of thousands of followers were ready to cheer them on with favorites and retweets. And in one of the pioneering instances of automated, manufactured crowds, thousands of bots were used for amplification and share-of-voice.

ISIS built a brand on social media. They had recognizable iconography—the flag, the colors, the high-production video openers—and by deftly using social media platforms, they built a virtual caliphate. They did it boldly and transparently, using the platforms in the way that they were meant to be used: to build an audience and connect with followers.

Social networks are designed to profit from enabling advertisers to grow, reach, or corral an audience. Growing an audience typically involves producing compelling content, aiming for social engagement and amplification, paying for boosted posts or ads (most of which are labeled in some way). Companies do it, grassroots organizers do it, and politicians do it. ISIS did it. And what they couldn’t achieve through organic growth, they simply manufactured.

Manufacturing a crowd is a bit different from growing an audience. Purchasing likes, ratings, followers, or bots; relying on automation to artificially amplify a message; gaming algorithms to get something trending or highly rated by a recommender system; using sockpuppets to leave comments and shape narratives. It’s mass deception: hard to detect, and societally corrosive.

Even in the presence of a overt terrorist organization manipulating their products, the platforms were slow to react. Twitter in particular was initially paralyzed by its commitment to being “the free speech wing of the free speech party”, and struggled to address the growing problem. As ISIS’ presence grew, articles were written throughout 2014 and 2015 about the “tough choice” the platforms faced as ISIS exploited them. Whither free speech? One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Etcetera, etcetera. And as the government began to plead with the platforms to take action, the EFF weighed in with a January 2016 statement titled “Companies Should Resist Government Pressure and Stand Up for Free Speech” arguing that “tech companies are not created to investigate terrorism.”

There was no systemic solution available for mitigating systemic manipulation. Twitter made half-hearted whack-a-mole attempts to shut down ISIS accounts. YouTube and Facebook tried to stay on top of taking down the videos. But it didn’t matter much; ISIS’ prolific content production and cross-platform visibility made it highly like that mainstream media would see their content and amplify it even as they condemned it.

The first major skirmish of the information war demonstrated to anyone watching that no one was in charge, either in government or in the private sector.