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Today, a war of words unlike any previous conflict in history is playing out on social media platforms around the world. From Islamic State terrorists in Syria, to dissident Chinese Communist Party members, to Russian democrats opposing the authoritarian rule of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, social media has become a new engine of information warfare to support democratic causes, as entrenched dictators seek to harness media platforms for their own purposes, mainly to constrain freedoms and democracy, or to perpetuate authoritarian rule.
Within a decade, the social media revolution produced worldwide upheaval, beginning with Iran’s pro-reform Green Revolution in 2009, when thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest rigged elections. The protests sparked what would become the Arab Spring, which began in December 2010 with demonstrations against corruption and political repression in Tunisia, which brought down the government in Tunis after a street vendor set himself on fire to protest police confiscating his unlicensed produce cart. Within months, governments and rulers throughout North Africa and the Middle East were toppled in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen.
Protests and civil unrest spread to Bahrain, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Sudan. Perhaps the most devastating upheaval of the Arab Spring occurred in Syria, where unrest set in motion a deadly chain of events leading to the rise of an ultraviolent offshoot of al Qaeda, what became known as the Islamic State. All the Arab Spring upheavals were facilitated by social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter, which publicized the events and inspired people to take to the streets by the thousands. By 2016, Libya had been transformed into a failed state and a new safe haven for Islamist terrorists. Syria’s civil war has claimed more than 200,000 lives and spawned the Islamic State takeover of an area the size of New England, with some 6 million people living under its control. The Islamic State was the first terrorist group to emerge from the shadows of covert suicide and bombing attacks into a group declaring an expansionist goal of seizing and holding territory and seeking further gains. By mid-2016, the group was pulling down some $4 million a day through taxes imposed on people under its control and through oil sales and other financial activities.
Studies showed that social media helped trigger the Arab Spring protests by allowing participants to coordinate protests. As journalist Malcolm Gladwell noted in the New Yorker, social media made how information was communicated more important than what was communicated. Of Mao’s notion that political power grows from the barrel of a gun, today’s social media aficionados would likely note: “Whoa. Did you see what Mao just tweeted?”
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Social media warfare is not limited to events overseas. In the United States, the 2016 presidential campaign unleashed one of the most bitter and hostile political battles in recent history. Candidates took to Twitter and Facebook to attack and discredit rivals for the highest U.S. office.
Establishment political candidates for both the Democratic and Republican parties who could not master the 140-character virtual machine gun of Twitter quickly found themselves outgunned by social media warriors supporting outliers on the Republican side like Senator Ted Cruz and the eventual nominee, businessman Donald Trump, and Democratic candidate and self-declared socialist revolutionary Senator Bernie Sanders.
But it was the New York real estate mogul Trump, using a masterful strategy of provocation, exaggeration, hyperbole, and verbal assault, who will be remembered for scoring political breakthroughs at key points early in the campaign that eventually produced his Republican nomination. For the first time since Dwight D. Eisenhower, a noncareer politician captured a major party nomination. Trump used Twitter like a bulldozer, ravaging opponents or anyone else he disliked with what the New York Times called “pithy, mean, and powerful” word blasts. Analysis by the online media outlet Slate revealed his genius for social media warfare in Trump’s ability to use three Aristotelian modes of persuasion, in tweets that captured appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos—logic, credibility, and emotion. Practically, this played out by using a statement of fact, followed by criticism of opponents’ credibility and then an emotional coup de grace, most often enhanced by the use of biting humor thrown in. Perhaps one of Trump’s most devastating tweets targeted Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington, hit with this famous missive in 2012: “@ariannahuff is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man—he made a good decision.” Typical of the approach was Trump’s tweet after one presidential debate: “Wow, @CNN got caught fixing their ‘focus group’ in order to make Crooked Hillary look better. Really pathetic and totally dishonest!”
Trump’s use of social media warfare will set the tone for political campaigns for years to come. Republican rivals were picked off one by one during the primaries, leaving the moderate Republican governor from Ohio, John Kasich, who appealed to many middle-of-the-road Republicans, without a fighting chance. “Unfortunately, in the world in which we live there are concepts of truth, truthiness, reality, wikiality—wikiality being the thing most people believe, not necessarily the reality of the situation,” says Shelly Palmer, a social media and technology expert. “And what we’ve learned since the dawn of social media is, to steal a line from mathematics, the narrative that wins is not the one that can draw the line of best fit to the truth, but the one that is inside the blanket that comforts the listener,” he told me.
Social media has spawned an age when technology has allowed people to filter news and information to suit their tastes and beliefs, creating multiple realities and truths. The filtered state is so secure, one no longer needs to venture outside one’s informational comfort zone. “The concept of truth no longer exists,” Palmer says. “It’s the concept of belief systems and ideology which make you tribal in a way that is actually more tribal than ever in history and it’s electronically filtered from other tribes. That is fascinating.” Kasich provided an example of a politician who failed to grasp the power of social media to communicate his political message and tenets to potential voters. As Palmer put it: “This guy was invisible because he’s not controversial. He gets no attention because in the twenty-first century—warfare or otherwise—it’s important to be important, and he is not.”
Facebook, the largest social media outlet, boasts of its ability to connect family and friends with blogs, photos, and videos, and of allowing commercial entities to promote their business. For the news business, Facebook outpaces all other social media in its ability to reach millions of readers. Facebook has come under fire from some critics over its policies and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who so craved recognition from communist China and its market of 1.3 billion people that he asked Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping to name the child Zuckerberg and his wife were expecting (Xi declined). Internet news pioneer Matt Drudge, whose website Drudge Report dominates both old and new media in terms of reaching millions of readers, sees a different picture of Facebook, Twitter, and other corporatist social media giants. Drudge believes social media is stifling Internet freedoms by using technology controls that prevent free speech and expression, and negatively influencing world populations. The famed Internet mogul emerged from years of self-imposed obscurity in October 2015 to rail against what he termed the ghettoization of the Internet under big social media powers that exercise control through a dangerous groupthink. “This whole social media stuff is bogus,” Drudge told Alex Jones, the popular Internet radio host on the website Infowars. “Facebook has two billion users? This is garbage, this is designed to demoralize the individual.”
Facebook would also come under fire in 2016 amid accusations of censoring news articles posted on its platform by conservatives and libertarians. Facebook also prevents “friends” who connect with outlets or people on their platform from reaching outside their group, which is limited to five thousand friends; for more than that, a user must then set up a public Facebook page that controls what followers and supporters the user can reach. Additionally, if publi
c users want to reach the hundreds of thousands of supporters of their Facebook pages with news or other information, they must pay large sums to Facebook, because the social media platform strictly controls the technology and prevents free interaction with its 1.1 billion users. Like a technology prophet, Drudge offered this ominous declaration: “I’m just warning this country: Don’t get into this false sense that you are an individual when you’re on Facebook. No, you’re not; you’re a pawn in their scheme.”
Facebook was criticized for engaging in partisan politics during the 2016 presidential election campaign when someone from inside the company posted online an internal company listing of proposed questions to ask Zuckerberg during an employee meeting on March 4. One of the questions posed was “What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?” The question pointed to the company’s political outlook and how that would affect its 1.1 billion users. As a privately owned entity, Facebook has the power to allow or block any content. The posting raised questions about what happens when a social media giant operating in the United States and internationally decides to adopt a political viewpoint and act on it. Facebook hosted at least two sites promoting Trump for president, and other presidential contenders relied on it to influence voters.
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On the terrorism social media front, the Islamic State’s efficient use of social media sites for its operations created new challenges for American counterterrorism officials. Beginning in 2013, Facebook and Twitter executives struggled to deal with competing demands from U.S. intelligence agencies to allow spying on Islamic State (IS) operatives and sympathizers who were using social media in ways that were yielding valuable intelligence on operations and leaders. Others in government argued social media is assisting Islamists in advancing terrorist goals and that they should not be allowed to use the microblog and blog forums to spread propaganda, recruit members, and communicate in the field and worldwide. As a result of the shift by terrorists to using social media, U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies now devote hundreds of personnel and millions of dollars in resources to monitoring social media for key indicators of terrorists’ plans and strategies, mainly to try to determine if major attacks are being planned and what the targets are likely to be. As the number, scale, and geographic location of the major IS attacks of 2015 and 2016 demonstrated, intelligence agencies have not been able to effectively tap into social media in seeking to forestall mass killings and bombings. Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, Baghdad, and Kabul all suffered major IS-related attacks. From 2013 through July 2016, the death toll from IS attacks numbered more than 3,000 killed and more than 6,300 injured.
A review of open-source intelligence reporting reveals that Western intelligence services are struggling to balance the need to keep track of terrorist group members and their statements with actions by Twitter and Facebook to shut down the accounts for advocating violence or otherwise promoting illegal terrorist activities. Spy agencies use their access to classified intelligence—mostly electronic collection by the National Security Agency—to identify key terrorist leaders and operators and communicate to Facebook and Twitter that certain people should not be shut down. For the terrorist sympathizers—those not directly involved in terrorist activities—intelligence agencies recognize that these people are propagandists who are supporting the cause and must be countered in different ways.
Social media postings on Twitter and Facebook by key players in the terrorist underworld often provide clues to online friends’ and followers’ locations and in some cases the postings can be traced electronically. “They often come to us and say, ‘Do not take down these accounts,’ ” one social media executive told me of U.S. government spying efforts. Terrorists also use YouTube to post videos. Syrian Islamic State terrorists have utilized the technique to great effect over the course of their operations in Syria and Iraq, uploading gruesome videos showing Islamists beheading people, carrying out mass executions, burning people alive, and running over victims with tanks—all for the shock value of showing the ideological commitment to do what is needed to advance the cause of jihad against the West. Twitter and Facebook executives declined to discuss on the record their policies for dealing with online terrorists. However, spokesmen for both companies told me they try to balance concerns for security and stopping criminal activity with the need for free speech and openness. Additionally, Twitter and Facebook would not talk about interaction with governments on counterterrorism. They instead pointed to online policy statements governing the sharing of members’ data with law enforcement and implicitly with U.S. intelligence agencies. Both companies require court orders or subpoenas before granting access to user data. Search warrants are needed for access to communications. Twitter user profile data is all public, as are tweets. Facebook’s format allows private social interaction, although it remains a very open medium with few restrictions on content or users.
“At Facebook, we have rules that bar direct statements of hate, attacks on private individuals and groups, and the promotion of terrorism,” a Facebook spokesman told me. “Where hateful content is posted and reported, Facebook removes it and disables accounts of those responsible.” The problem for both Twitter and Facebook is the vast numbers of accounts and huge numbers of postings. Neither company actively monitors the millions of tweets and billions of Facebook postings placed online each day. Facebook users post an estimated 4.75 billion pieces of content every day. The company could not provide statistics for the number of reports of abuse by Islamists. Instead, the company relies exclusively on users to report abuses of Facebook’s terms of service.
Facebook has teams of specialists who respond to reports of abuse and review the cases. “When that happens, a user operations team reviews that content and sees if it violates the terms of service,” the spokesman said. “If it does, it will be taken down quickly and the user is notified.”
Like Facebook, Twitter does not actively monitor content and relies on users to report cases of abuse amid the more than 500 million tweets posted every day, in more than thirty-six languages. Twitter receives hundreds of abuse reports daily, often with requests to close accounts. Several Twitter teams operating in different time zones also review the reports. In many cases the requests are dismissed because the reports falsely identified violations of the terms of service. Twitter also seeks to promote free speech, within its rules. The company operates globally and as a result has agreed to comply with the laws of the countries where it operates. For example, Germany, because of its Nazi past, imposes stricter laws against anti-Semitism than the United States. So the company applies filters specific to content posted in Germany to block anti-Semitic tweets. Twitter teams that review objectionable content are made up of a variety of security experts, civil liberties advocates, linguists, and others who consult on reported abuses.
Social media remains a key tool in information warfare to influence publics and create what have been dubbed weapons of mass disruption. “Low-cost, easily accessible social media tools act as a force multiplier by increasing networking and organizing capabilities,” says Catherine A. Theohary, an information security specialist at the U.S. Congressional Research Service. “The ability to rapidly disseminate graphic images and ideas to shape the public narrative transforms social media into a strategic weapon in the hands of terrorists, insurgent groups, or governments engaged in conflict.”
“ISIL is the first social media–fueled terrorist group,” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said in April 2016. While its predecessor, al Qaeda, relied more on the Internet, the Islamic State has shifted to the use of social media. “These guys are able to go out and troll for people who are dissatisfied here and there,” Carter said. The defense secretary could not answer how the military was working to deal with the problem of terrorists’ use of social media for information warfare. Instead he resorted to the oft-stated claim that the group will be destroyed, first in Syria and Iraq. “So we need to destroy
that idea by defeating ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and we’re busy doing that,” Carter said, noting the group was spreading to Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world. Social media, he noted, provides the group with a new tool.
Asked how to stop the terrorist group, Carter said there are two ways. One is to destroy them physically through military and intelligence operations, what he termed “the old-fashioned way.”
“And the other,” Carter said, “is we have to get better at countering social media, and it’s partly by telling our own story, which is basically the truth, but it’s also partly by not allowing these guys to use the Internet to do command control, to dominate populations, to take money from other people, pass money around the world, and we’re doing that right now. Our cyber command, this is their first big operation in cyber, is to go into Iraq and Syria and take that tool away from these characters in Iraq and Syria, and that’s what we’re working on now.” It is not clear whether the cyber military operations are producing the desired effects.
The notion of “telling the story” has been failing for the United States and is a remnant of the twentieth century’s ideological battle against Soviet communism. Islamists’ use of social media shows no signs of being limited or countered, despite the efforts of U.S. intelligence agencies and the State Department, which created an office called the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (see Chapter 9). Terrorists are above all ideological information warriors, and efforts to defeat this enemy will require much more than is currently being done. “We are in a long war,” declared Abu Firas al-Suri on social media used by the al Qaeda–affiliated Syrian rebel group Al-Nusra Front. “This war will not end in months nor years, this war could last for decades.” In April 2016, al-Suri’s role in the long war was cut short after he was killed in a U.S. air strike in Syria.