“Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electronic informational media--under cold conditions, and constantly.”
From: “Dissuasion, Disinformation, Dissonance: Complexity and Autocritique as Tools of Information Warfare.” in The Journal of Information Warfare
Update December 2022: This article was published originally in February 2022 immediately after the start of the Russian SMO and subsequent escalation of NATO’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Recent events including the Twitter files have shown the continued relevance of this article.
There is a preposterous amount of disinformation being spread about the current events in Ukraine. The information is not just incorrect, it is weaponized (mis)information for the purposes of waging war: a hybrid war. This article expands on the this concept, however, it is *not* about Ukraine.
Hybrid Warfare
Let’s start with a definition of Hybrid Warfare coming directly from our enemies, US Military theorists:
Conventional Western concepts of war are incompatible and fundamentally misaligned with the realities of conflict in the twenty-first century.
This change now requires the U.S. and its allies to adopt a new legal, psychological, and strategic understanding of warfare and use of force… The term “hybrid war” connotes the use of conventional military force supported by irregular and cyber warfare tactics.
Linear conflicts are defined by a sequential progression of a planned strategy by opposing sides, whereas Nonlinear Conflict is the simultaneous deployment of multiple, complementary military and non-military warfare tactics.
A nonlinear war is fought when a state employs conventional and irregular military forces in conjunction with psychological, economic, political, and cyber assaults. Confusion and disorder ensue when weaponized information exacerbates the perception of insecurity in the populace as political, social, and cultural identities are pitted against one another.
The empire wages this hybrid war against peoples around the planet. It is weaponized against the populations of amerika’s “enemies”, its “allies”, and against “its own people” inside the core. As a tactic of hybrid war, non-linear information warfare’s primary function is to keep any real opposition amongst the population confused and pacified. Our enemy (and their narratives and propaganda that defend empire) doesn't hold one line but instead many, sometimes contradictory, lines. They will spew falsehoods, then tell everyone they lied, then continue to repeat that falsehood after admission. It is this endless shape-shifting that both obfuscates and assimilates anti-imperialist analysis depending on the need.
In the words of information warfare specialists: “non-linear warfare offers the idea of uncertainty as a tool of influence. To dissuade [people] from adopting extremist beliefs, our central aim is … to create dissonance in the mind of the listener and get them to question their support for insurgents”. Extremist beliefs here means anything that truly challenges imperialist systems, and Insurgents means anyone who opposes imperialist domination.
The primary goal of non-linear warfare is to maintain the status quo (imperialism, global kapitalism, and neo-colonialism) and to create a cover for wealth/land transfer.
COVID-19
COVID-19 serves as a prime example of this tactic. The information warfare around covid-19 has served to obfuscate Black/Native genocide (Table 1). It has also obfuscated the largest wealth transfer in history to the super-wealthy (Table 2).
amerika has hundreds of conflicting narratives about “do masks work?” “are vaccines safe?” and “Why are CDC guidelines so inconsistent?”
Liberals who condemn anti-vax amerikans are repeating the exact same anti-vax points as those they condemn. They are waging disinformation campaigns against biotechnology and vaccines coming out of Cuba, China, Russia, and anywhere that is not in the united states security envelope. So, their solution to vaccine apartheid is to Open Up the Markets for amerikan pharmaceutical companies.
One potential internationalist solution to vaccine apartheid would be to force the end of amerikan sanctions so that Cuba could produce more free vaccines for the 3rd world.
Imperialist media presents anti-maskers as the “real reason” for the ongoing epidemic. Meanwhile, cities are ending mask mandates and the US government is forcing working class Black people to work in high-risk covid environments. All of this in spite of new vaccine resistant strains such as Omicron.
Petit bourgeois amerikans, whose class interests align with imperialism, tell us that we need to trust Fauci and trust the state and trust the pharmaceutical industry. Anyone who pushes back against any of this is grouped together into being “anti-vax” and “right wing”. In this way the imperialists define the terms of opposition and reinforce the necessity/importance of pharmaceutical monopoly capital.
The mainstream position is “how can we promote public trust and ‘combat disinformation’?” This feeds right back into the libertarian strasserism of chapter 1 of PSL is a CIA Operation that says “the truth will set you free”. The truth, of-course, coming from “whistleblowers” in the activist-liberal NGO complex and ultimately the CIA and ruling-class itself.
amerikan virologists writing dozens of absurd articles about a “possible pandemic” in China due to their Zero-Covid Policy. (The author of this particular article is Ezekiel J. Emanuel who was on Biden’s COVID Advisory Board and also wrote an article advocating the mass death of disabled and elderly.)
At the same time, over 2,000 people were dying a day in the US due to the very real ongoing pandemic of covid-19.
Liberals defended lock downs in amerika in 2020 and mocked “anti-lock down protests”. Shortly afterwards in 2021, they supported an end to lock downs repeating Biden’s language of “back to work” because COVID is “the new normal”. Meanwhile, imperialist media has crafted a barrage of disinformation about so-called “Chinese totalitarianism” regarding PRC enforcement of dynamic Zero-Covid strategies.
All the while, the US government has used COVID-19 “emergency regulations” as justification to expand their fascist deportation regime: “About two-thirds of those sent back to Haiti have been expelled under Title 42, the Trump administration policy that, on doubtful grounds, uses pandemic risks as a pretext to send migrants away as quickly as possible, even when they ask for asylum or protection from harm. The Biden administration has kept Title 42 in place, unaltered, and used it to swiftly expel migrants more than 1.1 million times.”
The imperialist media is drumming up support for war against “the Russian threat”—any disagreement with this line is considered a “Russian conspiracy”. At the same time, CIA organizations Codepink, ANSWER, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and their affiliates are the only groups on the amerikan left organizing any action against this warmongering while NATO is arming literal Nazis.)
Meanwhile the US government is using coronavirus to wage biological warfare on its own people and people around the planet. For example, increased sanctions against Iran to stop them from getting much-needed medical supplies.
Moreover, NATO has already been at war with the Ukrainian people since they funded the fascist Euromaidan coup in 2013.
Unconventional Warfare
“Information warfare, unlike the kinetic variety, is concerned with with belief, value and above all meaning.”1
The reason why social media is such an effective propaganda tool is because of how we, the users, derive meaning on the platforms. Propaganda can disseminate much quicker though social media than through other avenues. And, the inter-connected nature of social media means that “narrative” and “belonging” replace “ideology” as the primary motivation for action and engagement.2 Linear narratives which rely on cause and effect are replaced by non-linear narratives that rely on a host of sociological and psychological phenomena.
Its the difference between forming meaning about a political event through reading a book vs forming meaning about that same event through watching 10 tik tok videos, scrolling through 100 quote tweets, while also sharing dozens of politically tinged cat memes. Both are subject to propaganda and disinformation, but there’s a qualitative difference in how that propaganda works.
While librarians and pundits bemoan the problem of “information literacy” as “destroying democracy”, the US military is using social media as a “psychological warfare force multiplier”.3 4 It’s a whole lot bigger than just weaponizing memes, although they do that too: the united states military even proposed NATO create a “meme-warfare center”.
To really understand the scope of non-linear information warfare, we must return to US military doctrine to see what they are planning. In 2012, an article written by the The U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Psychological Warfare Center urges the military to begin using Social Media itself as a battlefield:
At its essence, Unconventional Warfare (UW) is a method of psychological warfare. The merger of social media and UW is a natural progression.
…
A UW campaign could be sequenced with psychological and social lines of effort as the principle “means” of delivery. Tactical actions would be planned and executed based on anticipating, shaping and exploiting social and psychological conditions. For example, the digital lines of operation could be monitoring (understanding), posting (shaping), denying (blocking), spreading (pushing coverage), swarming (mass) and messaging (tactical or digital actions designed for psychological effect).
…
Across our education and training domains, the Special Ops Forces community must recognize that social media and its rapid and effective proliferation of narrative have expanded the boundaries of the UW battleground.
All military strategies are eventually turned inwards towards counterinsurgency efforts to maintain the settler colony. The thing about social media monitoring is that the government can wage unconventional warfare on all fronts simultaneously. It took only a few years for the Obama regime begin implementing the military recommendations with a law the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act”. Its purpose:
“to develop, plan, and synchronize inter-agency activities to expose and counter foreign information operations directed against United States national security interests and advance narratives that support United States allies and interests.”
Its function:
(1) Integrating interagency efforts to track and evaluate counterfactual narratives abroad that threaten the national security interests of the United States and United States allies, subject to appropriate regulations governing the dissemination of classified information and programs.
(2) Analyzing relevant information from United States Government agencies, allied nations, think-tanks, academic institutions, civil society groups, and other nongovernmental organizations.
(3) Developing and disseminating thematic narratives and analysis to counter propaganda and disinformation directed at United States allies and partners in order to safeguard United States allies and interests.
(4) Identifying current and emerging trends in foreign propaganda and disinformation, including the use of print, broadcast, online and social media, support for third-party outlets such as think tanks, political parties, and nongovernmental organizations, in order to coordinate and shape the development of tactics, techniques, and procedures to expose and refute foreign misinformation and disinformation and proactively promote fact-based narratives and policies to audiences outside the United States.
This bill sets aside 250 Million dollars annually for 15 years—3.75 billion dollars in total. The United States does not care about “disinformation” and we are not naive enough to believe that they care about facts. This bill is an expansion of global propaganda campaigns. Their primary battlefield is, of course, social media.
Twitter partners with “independent think-tanks” to fight “fake-news” (see image above) but these groups are literal arms of the military.
Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) “is an independent, non-partisan think tank that produces expert and timely advice for Australia’s strategic and defense leaders”. ASPI is funded by Defense contractors Raytheon, Northropp Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. The bulk of their funding, however, comes directly from amerikan and australian DoDs (See table below).
Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) works directly with the DHS and is run by an ex-Facebook executive.
These are only two of dozens and dozens of such organizations. If you know where to look it is not hard to locate the connections between the military and every one of the think tanks associated with “fake news” and social media. This long-form article has excellent analysis about how the manufactured 2016 “Russia-Gate” scandal was the moment when the state department became completely enmeshed in social media platforms. (Russo-phobia is doing double duty today, justifying surveillance “at home” and sanctions "abroad", however that is beyond the scope of this article.)
There is nothing “organic” about a user’s interaction on these popular social media platforms. Every click is mediated through multiple different algorithms designed for profit (targetted advertising and content engagement) and state-sanctioned information warfare.
Glen Ford was right when he said “Facebook is indispensable to maintaining the global corporate monopoly on truth -- as is Google” after Facebook banned Cop Block in 2018 for being “fake news”.
The United States Department of Defense recognizes the key benefits associated with open-source development and trusts Linux as its operating system. In fact, the US Army is the single largest installed base for Red Hat Linux and the U.S. Navy nuclear submarine fleet runs on Linux, including their sonar systems. Moreover, the Department of Defense just recently enlisted Red Hat the world's largest provider of open-source solutions, to help improve squadron operations and flight training.
Linux has now already been certified to meet the three different security certifications required by the United States Department of Defense.
-US military loves Linux-
Social Media — a willing collaborator in fascist terror
CW: Islamophobic Violence
While social media is an integral weapon in non-linear information warfare, it also has other roles in the larger Hybrid War strategy. Remember that Hybrid War also involves mobilizing “irregular military forces” and escalating inter-group physical violence. The Modi regime and the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in India has weaponized facebook to do both.
Islamophobia in India is not a new phenomenon. It is, however, a staple of the fascist BJP ruling party under Narendra Modi. In 2020 Hindutva fascists carried out a massive pogrom against Muslims in Delhi. The violence against Muslim women of Karnataka Hijab Row is the most recent example; it was organized via social media.
Social media, specifically Facebook, has become foundational to modern BJP fascist vigilante gangs who hunt down Muslims. Mohammad Ali, an Indian Muslim, wrote an in-depth article on the topic. He says: "India, the world's largest democracy, has also become the world's largest experiment in social-media-fueled terror."
The BJP has used memes as a way to spread conspiracies about Muslims:
In recent months, the BJP had become more brazen in talking about its own vast apparatus for generating memes. In September 2018, Amit Shah had given a speech to the party’s social media volunteers and talked about a WhatsApp group that the BJP ran for 3.2 million supporters in Uttar Pradesh. “We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public,” he said, “whether sweet or sour, truth or a lie.”
However, it is not just the memes that are dangerous. One might think that Facebook’s algorithms would shut down such ‘hate speech’ and ‘fake news’ but that is not how things work. Hindutva fascists use facebook and whatsapp to organize vigilante death squads that hunt down Muslims.
According to Human Rights Watch, at least 44 people were killed in “cow-related violence” across 12 Indian states between May 2015 and December 2018. Thirty-six of them were Muslims… The Bajrang Dal was involved in a large number of these attacks—either administering the blows directly, coordinating them through its private social media channels, or simply inspiring them by example and propaganda.
‘Land Jihad’ is “a supposed conspiracy among Muslims to take over land and property in Hindu areas, make Hindus leave, and gradually take over whole neighborhoods. In practice, this amounted to a campaign to keep Muslims in their ghettos, at times by forcibly revoking undesirable real estate sales through intimidation.”
…
[E]ven if social media platforms hadn’t created the mass delusions of Hindu extremism, they had provided a shockingly efficient infrastructure for their spread. India has 400 million WhatsApp users and 260 million users of Facebook, and it is the largest global market for both platforms. Facebook has come under heavy fire in India for uneven enforcement of its community standards against hate speech and misinformation. A 2019 report by the NGO Equality Labs found that Islamophobic posts often stayed up on the platform. In a particularly chilling example, Equality Labs found a huge number of Indian Facebook posts targeting Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, who had already been the victims of one social-media-fueled ethnic cleansing in their home country.
The reality here is that Facebook has no interest in stopping hate speech, hate crimes, or “fake news”. Facebook and Twitter both collaborated with Modi in 2021 to remove content critical of his regime. Indeed, Facebook has hired BJP party members to be executives within the company. This collaboration between social media and the BJP has proven to be extremely profitable for Facebook while also an incredibly effective tool of the Hindutva fascists.
Meanwhile Modi maintains close relationships with Isn’treal and is otherwise deeply connected to the empire. “Washington sees in New Delhi a regional ally it hopes will help contain Beijing’s rising military and economic power.”
Facebook’s policy of enabling Islamophobic terror while proclaiming that it bans hate speech is exactly the same in the United States. Facebook has a documented history of banning Black users for no reason while simultaneously protecting white supremacists who call for their genocide.
Conclusion
As of the time of writing this article, the imperialist non-linear information warfare around Ukraine has reached absurd levels. A comrade described it as “nuclear weapon levels of information warfare”. A new normal has emerged in the battlefield and there is no return to the days before. In order for us to build a defense against this weapon, we must first see it and understand how it works.
We can no longer ignore the fact that all western social media functions as an intelligence and propaganda arm of fascist governments. Social media platforms are, in fact, primary weapons of imperialist hybrid warfare.
We must treat them as tools of the enemy. The information war cannot be won on social media because they hold all the cards and they make all the rules.
Evacuate.
Its not enough, but its a good start.
Scott, J. (2015). Dissuasion, Disinformation, Dissonance: Complexity and Autocritique as Tools of Information Warfare. Journal of Information Warfare, 14(4), 25–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26487504
Social Media and UW ; U.S. Army Special Operations Center of Excellence (2012). https://www.soc.mil/SWCS/SWmag/archive/SW2502/SW2502SocialMediaAndUW.html
Prier, J. (2017). Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare. Strategic Studies Quarterly, 11(4), 50–85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26271634
Social Media as a Force Multiplier; Australian Army Research Center; https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/library/occasional-papers/social-media-force-multiplier