The digital “Trojan horse”

This idea of the “information war” has become a very common metaphor through which we try to understand what’s going on in our new, digitally-driven information landscape. But I believe that the most dangerous part of “information war” is the very idea of information war. Let me explain what I mean.

There’s always been a tradition of militaries and secret services doing “psy-ops” – psychological operations – in order to confuse, dismay, undermine the opponent. That’s a long and glorious tradition. I think maybe the earliest example of this is the Trojan horse. The Trojan horse is one of the finest information operations ever launched in the history of warfare and a metaphor that we still use all the time when talking about the information space. And, obviously, with these new digital tools, someone in the military or in the secret service can do a lot more to perturb the other side. There are now bots, trolls, closed online spaces that can be used to destabilise an enemy, and we urgently need to adapt to that. Countries probably need a new military and security doctrine to make sense of these technological attacks that are not exactly military aggression.

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For example, NATO hinges on the premise that all the member states of NATO will defend each other in case of a military attack. So, if tanks were to ever enter Estonia, the other member states would respond accordingly to defend their military ally; that’s quite straightforward. Now, say they suffer a cyber attack instead, a hit on their digital infrastructure, how does a military organisation include something like this kind of information attack? It’s not as straightforward because information is not actually warfare. There are a lot of problems in just defining this legally, let alone in trying to counteract this. This is part of an old story that has a new iteration. The other great difference with conventional warfare is that information attacks are not just launched by governments now. The barrier to entry is very low: anyone can do one of these operations. So that’s something serious that needs to be dealt with, and this is a legitimate way of thinking about “information war” and information war doctrine. It’s an important debate that is led by experts in the field.

From Russia...

But there is another way that we’ve come to talk about information war, which is a lot more damaging. It’s worth actually visiting Russia for a moment, because that’s where I have observed just how corrosive this idea can be, through my many years of living and working in Russia. Already in the 1990s and early 2000s, a group of Russian academics who were connected to the security services started seeing the whole of politics and history through the prism of information war. Their idea is that everything that we talk about – our ideas, values, etc. – are just forms of subversion and warfare. Their main argument is that the Soviet Union fell not because it had terrible political ideas and a terrible economic system and human rights violations but because of information warfare from the West. In their deeply cynical world view, freedom of speech is just a weapon that was used to undermine the Soviets and the idea of economic reform was just another weapon planted by the Western secret services to undermine them. It’s a world where there is no concept of history, no concept of progress, no concept of good and bad: everything is manipulation.

For a lot of the 2000s and even early 2010s, these academics were seen as eccentrics. Then something happened: the Arab Spring and huge protests in Moscow. Suddenly, a wave of protests erupts across the world and makes the Kremlin very scared. As the leadership reaches out for a language to explain away this wave of emancipation that’s coming at them, they find these academics’ language of information warfare. So, the Kremlin spokespeople and Kremlin propaganda start saying that these movements, the Arab Spring, for example, are just information warfare. They try to argue that these aren’t genuine people with genuine demands, that they are just manipulated by the information warriors in the West, and build a whole conspiracy theory. They describe the situation in Russia in the same way: the people out in the streets in Russia, demanding genuine elections and that Putin not be president again, these aren’t people with real demands, they are all just pawns in information warfare. And quite quickly, we see this language of information warfare becoming a kind of quasi-ideology and being used very actively in Ukraine: the Kremlin starts saying everything you see in Ukraine, the uprising against kleptocracy, that’s just information warfare. Every time a report comes out in the West about Putin’s corruption, that's just information warfare.

© Photo by MidoSemsem

To the world

It’s a very corrosive world view, because this world view is a priori incompatible with democracy. For democracy to exist and survive, information has to be information. We need it to be evidence. We need to be able to have a debate about values, and somebody wins and another loses. In a way, that’s the intellectual, or epistemological, premise that democracy needs to survive. What is worrisome is this specific metaphor of information is used increasingly frequently in the West. This metaphor was always around on the fringes of society, there was Infowars, for example, this crazy website in America which saw everything through the prism of mass conspiracies. But that sort of conspiracy thinking has become much more mainstream, to the point where there is a president who seems to think this way. President Trump sees everything as operations against him, not justified criticism but legitimate operations, and seems to have no idea of democratic values. Instead, he is a relativist. He thinks that Russia has one system, and the United States has another, and they’re both good in their own ways. And if you start to see all information as manipulation, then you’re really erasing the difference between a healthy democracy and a dictatorship.

The vicious circle of information war

There’s another paradox. The more we research the real information war waged by the Kremlin, the more we’re bolstering this framework of looking at the world. I’ve seen people start to research the Russian information warfare and end up seeing the whole world as non-stop information warfare. There are many reasons why this kind of metaphor is useful and it can explain why many people feel like they live in a confusing environment. If it were true that everything was information war, that behind everything there is a plan, a campaign, then it is easier to understand why everything is so confused. But it’s a very dangerous way to explain the world around us. Those of us who work in this field, like the research initiative that I run at the London School of Economics and at the University of Johns Hopkins, are very aware of this. We are very aware that every time we issue reports about Russia’s information war we might actually be also doing them a favour. But this is the great paradox that we live in. We have this experience all the time. How do we write about Donald Trump without feeding into his attention machine? How do we write about ISIS without feeding into their fearsome reputation?

So what do we do? How do we negotiate this new reality where there really are campaigns everywhere to influence us that we can’t even see because the internet doesn’t let us see them? And at the same time, where there’s this huge danger of becoming so paranoid, so obsessed with information warfare, that we would lose the ability to interact in a genuine way with people. In a way, I think it’s very unfair to put it on the individual. These are systemic issues. What we really need is a different type of internet, an internet with public oversight, that’s transparent, where we could see who’s influencing us and how. We would need a space on the internet where the rules of Facebook and Twitter don’t apply, where the logic is not driven by commercial or state interests of public space, where we can interact with each other in safety and transparency, where there are no like and share buttons. We have to have that vision. But what do we do today? If you’re just the person online today, what do you do?

Learning to take a step back

I think we all have a lot of responsibility. That’s a great change. In Propaganda studies, we always used to talk about a propagandist and a propagandee, between someone who is powerful, who is beaming out the propaganda (in the most general sense of the term, just as a means of public communication) and a propagandee, a passive audience sitting at home, watching television, listening to the radio. If once there was a strict division, it is not like that anymore. Firstly, anyone can create a campaign and actually, literally, every time you share, retweet, like something, you are becoming a little propagandist. So, above all, we have to start understanding that we’re actually active participants, which does come with a lot of responsibility. How are we liking? What are we sharing? We can start by being conscious of our own behaviours, but it is also crucial that one balances the reality that one gets through the internet with an offline reality as well.

© Illustration by Arthimedes, Shutterstock.com

In a time of COVID-19, our reality is becoming even more online, which creates a very warped metaphor for reality. I’m still on Twitter, I’m still on Facebook, even though I know it’s really bad for me. But I have also been going out and buying newspapers. It’s amazing. I get to see a different world and I stop panicking. It’s almost like self-therapy because when you feel like things are really emotional and really fraught, a therapist might say: 'Take a few steps back. Put this in context.' Constantly putting things in context, taking a step back, understanding that what seems to be a Twitter storm at this moment, what is enraging you on Facebook, is actually just a tiny drop in a huge discourse. Taking a step back and calming down before approaching it again with some calm is probably the only spiritual discipline that can really apply here, because the problems are systemic and it really is unfair to demand people have more media literacy.

A black box

You cannot be literate towards a text which is closed, and the internet is closed. We don’t understand how algorithms work. We don’t understand who’s behind an ad that we see online. We don’t understand which of our own data is used to target us. You can’t critique something which is a black box. It’s a huge lie. You could be media-literate towards the old media system, which was corrupt and full of biases, but you at least knew who owned the newspapers and you could critique it from that point of view. With the internet, you have no idea.

We are like Caliban, on Prospero’s island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, surrounded by noises and moods and music and lights, not understanding how any of them were created. The only thing a person can do is understand that there is a system embedded in social media that uses our emotions. It’s trying to get you to like and share. It’s a mini Narcissa machine. It wants you to be over-emotional. The battle becomes not letting yourself be over-emotional that way, it becomes trying to take a step back.

Facebook is a wonderful thing for staying in touch with your friends, for talking to your family, for posting about dogs and cats and puppies. It’s a terrible place for political discussion. The way it’s been designed is atrocious for any kind of ideals of deliberative democracy, so just be aware of that. Whenever you feel yourself getting enraged, just remind yourself that’s being done on purpose.

Discover more about

information warfare

Pomerantsev, P. (2019). This Is Not Propaganda. Adventures in the War Against Reality. PublicAffairs.

Pomerantsev, P. (2015). Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. PublicAffairs.

Stroud, N., & Ashley, M. (2013, September). Social Media Buttons in Comment Sections (Rep.). Centre for Media Engagement.

Democracy and the politics of identity