19 October 2019 | New Scientist | 41of liberal democracies have been bigger, better
funded and more powerful than the military
of any country that wishes to do them harm.
The dangers, however, are no longer physical.
Now, coordinated groups can step right into
the middle of the politics of any country with
an online presence. And this poses a problem
that no state can answer alone.
While new treaties, laws and sanctions
are long overdue to turn the cheap, easy and
risk-free practice of information warfare into
something more hazardous and difficult forits perpetrators, the platforms will also need
to change. In their search for frictionless online
spaces accessible to anyone, the tech giants
have created places where it is far easier to
create information than to tell if it is true,
and easier to create a fake identity than it is to
expose one. To fix this, platform engineering
will need to change, whether through forcing
more identity checks, slowing down how
information circulates, introducing cooling off
periods or challenging far more of the accounts
that are behaving suspiciously. For the societies
that use these platforms, growth can no longer
be the priority. Authenticity should be.
In the meantime, states will continue to
slug it out in the theatre of information. The
77th Brigade will continue to grow, and every
military around the world will build its own
equivalent to try to meet the threat. Yet the
real challenge isn’t to join the arms race but to
avoid it altogether. If information is a theatre
of war, what does de-escalation in it look like?
Ultimately, that comes down to you. You
may be the target of all this activity, but you are
also its off switch. By guarding against outrage,
pushing against the desire to believe what is
convenient and simply becoming less angry
about what you see online, you may lose some
battles, but you can help end the war. ❚have tried to stay on top of how social media
activities are being used to manipulate politics.
Chloe Colliver, a researcher at the institute, told
me that in the run-up to May’s elections for the
European Parliament, the ISD and colleagues
at the community organisation Avaaz were
finding active networks of influence across a
range of platforms in Germany, France, Poland,
Spain and the UK that dwarfed what Facebook
had found in March. “This is a long-term
investment geared towards changing what
entire populations are seeing and thinking,”
she told me. “The culture of a continent
is threatened by something it has no idea
it’s supposed to be defending itself from.”
The team estimates that far-right
disinformation networks across France, the
UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland produced
content that was viewed an astonishing
750 million times in three months. In Poland,
pro-government accounts posed as pensioners
in order to attack striking teachers, all drawing
on the same archive of infographics and
linking to anti-Semitic youth-oriented sites.
A network of 60 pages on Facebook also
amplified anti-Semitic and pro-Kremlin
content in the country. In Germany,
200,000 fake social media accounts were
spreading electoral content supportive of
the far-right political party Alternative für
Deutschland. In Italy, a network with more
than 2.6 million followers spread anti-
migration, anti-Semitic and anti-vaccine
information. An estimated 9.6 million Spanish
voters had seen disinformation on WhatsApp.
Five of the top 10 accounts mentioning the
UK’s Brexit party on Twitter were showing
“bot-like” activity.Real-world consequences
The creation of fake realities online can lead
to violence. In 2018, false information shared
on social media in Nigeria caused rioting and
people to be hacked to death by machetes.
In 2019, rumours of child abductions in France
caused violence against the Roma community.
In Myanmar, hundreds of soldiers posed as
celebrities and national heroes on social media
to flood it with incendiary comments about
the Rohingya minority, again leading to
violence and conflict.
This type of information warfare is on the
rise. In 2017, researchers at the University of
Oxford found it happening in 28 countries.
In 2018, it was 48. The nature of battle has
changed. Information is no longer being used
in war. War is being waged within information.
Since the end of the cold war, the militariesCarl Miller is research director
for Demos. He is the author
of The Death of the Gods:
The new global power grab- Actively look for the
information you want, don’t
let it find you. The information
that wants to find you isn’t
necessarily the information
you want to find. - Beware the passive scroll.
This is when you are prey to
processes that can be gamed
and virals that can be shaped. - Guard against outrage.
Outrage is easy to hijack,
and makes you particularly
vulnerable to being manipulated
online. What’s more, your
outrage can induce outrage in
others, making it a particularly
potent tool. - Slow down online.
Pause before sharing. Give
time for your rational thought
processes to engage with
what you are reading. - Lean away from the
metrics that can be spoofed.
Don’t trust something because
it is popular, trending or visible. - Never rely only on
information sourced from
social media. This is particularly
the case for key pieces of
information, such as where
polling booths are or whether
you can vote. - Spend your attention
wisely: it is both your most
precious and coveted asset.
Seven rules to
keep yourself
safe online
“ Information is no
longer being used
in war. War is being
waged within
information”