<nettime> Anatomy of information warfare in the social media age

dear nettime,

I've been struggling with my general distrust in what is happening, your reasonable voices may ease my feeling of doom.

cheers,

The Ukraine conflict has many theaters of war, of which – at least for us in countries seemingly at peace – Ukraine is maybe the least important. While Russian bodies and hardware are pouring into Ukraine, the West has gone to war with other tools: providing military intelligence, show of political and popular support, airspaces closures, hackers, denial of territory in sport and culture, and the scorched earth tactic of economic, financial sanctions.

We have no reason to think that the information warfare around this conflict is less intense. It is our responsibility to give a serious thought to how the war is raging in this theater of war.

It is blindingly clear that media messages play a crucial role in the war: without the highly effective performances of the Ukrainian president both televised and apparently unscripted, without the social media outrage, without the images of the mass protests around the world none of the political, financial, logistical support we see as the Western response would be politically feasible, or I would say desirable - against all geopolitical considerations.

In the following I’d like to outline a number of questions, concerns, theses on how the war takes place in the social media. This comes from a perspective of an Eastern European living in a Western European country, looking at mainstream, mostly English language social media and journalisms sources.

1. Can social media see through the fog of war?

The fog of war in the social media age is a very strange phenomenon. On the one hand, smartphone penetration was 66% in 2021 in Ukraine. This means that two out of three persons are walking with a camera in their pockets. If they have network coverage – and that is a big if, since internet infrastructure is under attack -, they must also have the means to move those recordings online via various peer-to-peer messaging apps, as well as social media. But despite that, there is no flood of media from Ukraine. In the first couple of days mainstream news media has been recycling the same images of destruction. I admit, I have a very limited perspective on this through the windows of English language mainstream and speaking social media. It is entirely possible that even though this war is not televised, there is a plethora of independent, Russian and Ukrainian language sources, telegram channels, whatsapp groups which provide a richer account of what is happening there, but that is exactly the point: even if such information exists, only a very limited selection circulates in the Western, English speaking mainstream and social media landscape.

There are many possible filters which may stand between the war in Ukraine and its media representation in mainstream/social media. Some filters are very visible. Russian state propaganda is the most obvious one. The outright western ban on Russian media outlets from cable and satellite as well as from youtube is another. (After all that talk about balanced social media algorithms, it seems that we are OK with such a nuclear option, how unsettling) Other filters are less tangible, and they can only be identified through circumstantial evidence. Internet access may be limited. Social media companies may block – supposedly erroneously – some accounts, and their algorithms certainly sort and select content by considerations mostly unknown, and probably block gruesome media. Copyright and licensing issues may limit the mainstream circulation of user generated content. Mainstream media organizations have their professional codes of conducts, even if they have no agenda to push.

In any case, the information landscape is structured by interests, forces, events and parties partly unknown. And this is the landscape upon which outrage and corresponding action grows.

2. Monetizing war outrage

Our experiences with the social media and the last two years of the pandemic made it tangible for each and everyone of us what researchers and critiques have been saying for long: the social media information environment is a strange and unpredictable beast, and one should not accept anything circulating there without critique. We have seen friends and family turning into vaccine sceptics, mask deniers, extremists, trumpists, flat-earthers, climate sceptics in the last few years. Maybe some of them arrived with a mistrust towards mainstream narratives, but what converted them into true believers was the existence of powerful, convincing stories that supported their own predispositions, beliefs, desires in various niches and corners of social media.

Now, within the context of the war in Ukraine, we have a similar setup: strong anti-war, anti-Putin predispositions, and a corresponding, reassuring, reinforcing media environment. Should we ask ourselves: are we falling for the same weakness in our human condition? Should we uncritically subscribe, without reservations to the idea, that in this theater of war, our predispositions so comfortably and innocently align with the images and stories we are shown?

The Ukraine war, paradoxical it may be – is a very compelling war, because it collapses an unbelievably complex world (with pandemic, global warming, geopolitical tensions, mass migration, multiple wars, failing states, terrorism, pollution) into a simple and familiar narrative of good and bad. Finally, we have again, a comic-grade villain with bizarre tables and nukes, and a lovable resistance fighter; evil weapons (apparently the term ‘lethal weapon’ only applies to lethal weapons which were designed to kill in an unusually cruel way, rather than with the normalized level of pain and bloodshed) and innocent dead children; Ukraine’s aspiration to be member of the European big happy family, and the czarist-soviet 19^th -20^th century militant Russian imperialism.

Emotional identification was never so easy and uncontroversial. It also makes it easier to suspend any disbelief or critical distance from the actual content which seems to fully support this narrative, and ask difficult questions of how that perfect alignment came to be. I – maybe naively – expect a media environment to provide information, facts, critical discussion, reflection, debate, arguments and counter-arguments, but what I seem to get is a global emotional support group which makes it incredibly easy for everyone to pick the right side.

We also know that the business model of social media companies is to monetize anxiety, outrage, frustration, the feeling of helplessness (hello Geert!). They thrive on negative emotions – we know that from personal experience as much as from research. The war, and its black-and white, evil/hero setup is the perfect environment: endless doom-scrolling, opportunity to gather likes, shares, emojis on expressions of fear, frustration, anger as much as for virtue signaling. It is easy for the social media business logic to sink into the background, because the occasion is so perfect. This war may not be the first occasion where social media outrage is coupled with a good cause (think of the #BLM, or the #meetoo movements), but – at least from a white, western perspective - it is unique in its level of clarity and universality, its independence from skin color or gender. In addition, this social media event takes place in Europe. Unlike previous conflicts which mainly took place in the US, or in the Middle East, or in North Africa, and - for European audiences - mostly affected Someone Else – yes, that is a thing in Europe as well – here and now we all have friends, neighbors, colleagues who are either from Russia, or from the Ukraine, or Belarus, or Poland, or the Baltic states. On this occasion there is little social, cultural, not to mention economic, geographic, or religious distance between the war and everyday Europeans.

Emotions truly run high.

3. The turn of politics under social media pressure

And it seems that the political, military, economic, and institutional response to the conflict is very much driven by the outrage on social media. Let me be very clear: the Russian – Ukrainian conflict is a geopolitical one. It is measured in decades and million square kilometers, trillions of euros and rubels, and millions of lives. Its stake is the security of the EU, of Russia, the relationship with one of the biggest hydrocarbon and natural resources exporters of the world, the global balance of military, economic and political power between the US, the EU, and China.

Yet, this long term, high-stakes, slow and complex geopolitical conflict is currently being handled by elected officials, heads of governments, members of the European Parliament, who need to answer to their voters, who are all raging on social media. They are painfully aware that whatever they do or do not do now will be relevant in the elections they’ll all face sooner – as in the case of Macron, Johnson or Orban -, or later.

The outrage, frustration, momentum of social media users may not last longer than the life-, or even the attention span of a goldfish. The social media crowd is also uninformed and – let’s admit – incredibly shortsighted – just see how everyone is now a SWIFT, and military expert. Yet, this crowd is immense and can easily turn against the politicians whom they perceive as lacking compassion or not willing to act in face of such horrors. Which politician wants to face the accusations of their virtuous opponents that they remained passive in face of such a clearly black-and-white, hideous invasion?

This situation begs the question: what drives the rapidly escalating war Western countries are waging in the Ukrainian – Russian conflict? What drives the quick and devastating decisions in the economic, military, social, cultural theaters of war? Social media pressure? Long-term geopolitical considerations? What are the chances of making strategic mistakes by caving into the demands of virtuous social media outrage?

In short: I believe that western audiences are increasingly locked into a media environment that is rapidly re-structured under the conditions of a total information warfare. Information that circulates in this environment is at best incomplete, at worst is the result of an unknown selection process. The news that is saturating this environment may be inaccurate or incomplete, but nevertheless is extremely engaging. The – deliberate or accidental – product of this engagement is the total emotional mobilization of western audiences in support of Ukraine. Highly consequential political decisions are apparently taken in response to the outrage of online population. In my opinion, this is a new development in information warfare. So far, consent was manufactured to support geopolitical strategies. This time it seems to be the other way around: the next step in the geopolitical grand game is decided by the popular vote of badly informed outrage.

What are the alternative courses of action in this situation?

First, let’s not forget, for a single moment while this war lasts, and beyond, that this is a war, and we are living in one of its theaters.

Second, we should not assume that anything we see in the social media sphere – the main source of information also for mainstream news outlets – is an even approximate representation of the ground truth. The Ukraine has no less interest in controlling the narrative than Russia. Just because one is an easily identifiable propaganda broadcasted on state TV, and the other is called excellent OpSec, the interest in controlling the narrative, the information flows is the same.

Third, we should always remember that the business model of our main information source is monetizing outrage and prioritizing emotional engagement over rational discourse. What is worse, we emotionally respond to an incomplete, and most probably inaccurate set of information. The political response to this conflict should not be driven by this mass emotional response. Political action needs to be less responsive to the short lived online outrage and instead, it should be driven by long term considerations about how we can peacefully coexists and collaborate with a turbulent, large, complex, strange and often incomprehensible Russia in a rapidly degrading global ecological environment.