19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 39to anyone who has spent time on social media.
The one key difference was that none of it
was real. Neither the nationalists nor the
anti-racism campaigners existed. Both were
online masks worn by a single coordinated
and hidden group.
This ecosystem of fake identities, false
voices and deceptive groups was attempting
to provoke broad social change. Its members
pumped polarised messages to both ends of
the political spectrum not to change anyone’s
mind, but to confirm the beliefs their viewers
already held. The aim was outrage: to make
people angrier and angrier about the injustices
they were already convinced were happening.
To alter the way that people behaved and
thought, they had lured them into a fake
society that only existed online.
This was the first time that Facebook had
found a network specifically targeting the
UK. And while it didn’t say who was behind
it, the culprit could have been almost anyone.
Military groups, intelligence operatives,
party political campaigns, extremist political
factions or even just technically savvy
individuals have all joined the rush for
influence and attention that has broken
out in cyberspace, forming a background
hum to many of our experiences online.
Same old stories
To David Omand, none of this is new. Omand
has spent most of his career inside the UK’s
Ministry of Defence, before serving as the
director of GCHQ , the country’s technical
spy agency based near Cheltenham. “You
always had two different levels of battlefield,”
he told me. “You have the intelligence
battlefield where the adversary’s intelligence
agencies would be slugging it out with us.
And you have the campaign for influence
through propaganda.”
The manipulation of information during
warfare is as old as warfare itself. But it really
took off during the cold war, when both sides
systematically developed tools to influence
the public watching at home and abroad. Fake
companies, front organisations, leaked letters,
bogus journalism, planted conspiracy theories
and manufactured protests were all part of the
ideological struggle.
For the practitioners of these tactics,
the arrival of the internet and social media
was a spectacular opportunity. Here was an
environment far more open than newspapers
and television. Here were global forums for
debate and discussion that were very easy
to join and post in, and which were curated >