Social Media and Information Warfare: The New Warfront
By Tiffany Pham for the ASA Institute for Risk and Innovation
American citizens in the Vietnam war era first witnessed–via journalism and televised news–the realities of war, much to their horror. But in the context of modern warfare, social media now competes with these “filtered” mediums. Rather than being used solely to relay news and updates and “realities,” social media has become an information weapon that is just as influential as infantry on the ground, presenting the world with new ways to spread propaganda, new tactically offensive uses, and new ways to share humanitarian developments. Altogether they form a new warfront on which all nations must now engage in warfare – a new space where opposing entities engage in combat.
While propaganda is not a new phenomenon, the advent of social media has crafted a new medium that allows its intended message to reach a far wider audience and with greater ease. The use cases of social media as a propaganda tool can be further divided into several categories to reflect the purposes of its engagement in military operations or during times of war. While most of those categories align to the traditional World War‐esque notions and purposes of propaganda, social media allows two tactics to be executed well in comparison to its pre‐technology predecessors. The first type, misinformation or disinformation, has perhaps become well known as of the United State’s contentious 2016 election, but presents itself differently in the context of war. Pro‐Russian disinformation, amid the ongoing Ukrainian‐Russian war, demonstrates that disinformation in times of an election appear to be with the purpose of attaining a specific outcome, such as electing a desired candidate, whereas disinformation in times of war appear to justify or sustain military operations and active conflicts. Recently, Meta, formerly Facebook, “separately removed a network of about 40 fake accounts, groups and pages across Facebook and Instagram that operated from Russia and Ukraine targeting people in Ukraine…” 1 by launching cyberattacks and posting alleged videos of Ukrainian soldiers surrendering with a white flag, along with claims that Ukraine is a “failed” or unlawful state: all deemed “coordinated inauthentic behavior” by Meta. While an argument can be made for several intended purposes, this type of disinformation overall attempts to sustain a military conflict by raising the morale of those already in favor of conflict (the surrender video), and justifies the war to the skeptics (the claims of Ukraine being a failed or illegitimate or “Nazified” state). Its spread on social media, however, allows it to reach an audience in allied nations such as India, where Russia has enjoyed historically friendly relations and “tacit support” for the ongoing conflict.2 It should be noted that the intention of this research is not to create political implications, and in fact there are several verifiable reasons that many Indian citizens support Russia, but the intention is to observe the similarity in language from Russia disinformation channels to growing popular opinion from certain Indians online. Twitter user Tarun Raju, featured in a Quartz overview of how Indians on the internet view the situation uses near identical phrasing as known disinformation channels when he writes:
“Do NOT trust the Ukrainians. Ukraine is now stateless, and run by neo‐Nazi warlords.
Ukrainian political leadership is probably tucked in safe behind NATO lines. The
Ukrainian govt is only involved in active hostilities with Russia, it’s not running the
country…”
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