Review: Social Media, Weaponized

L. Gordon Crovitz, Wall Street Journal

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False narratives are now reaching unprecedented numbers of people, stoking resentment, feeding conflict and aiding the enemies of the West. L. Gordon Crovitz reviews ‘War in 140 Characters’ by David Patrikarakos.

“Our information environment is sick,” warns David Patrikarakos. “We live in a world where facts are less important than narratives, where people emote rather than debate, and where algorithms shape our view of the world.” Even in war.

Mr. Patrikarakos’s “War in 140 Characters” details a new kind of conflict that puts traditional military dominance at risk by weaponizing social media in ways that Silicon Valley’s digital optimists never imagined. The author, a London-based journalist, realized a few years ago that the wars he was covering in the Middle East and Ukraine were fought through social media as much as through physical warfare.

The book offers vivid profiles of individuals on both sides of the online battlefield. One of them is a young Russian journalist who was out of work after Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 and occupied Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine following the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Russian president. Vitaly Bespalov was offered a high-paying job at a digital publisher. He was suspicious but joined the staff of the website worldukraine.com.ua anyway. He discovered that his job was to outrage Russian speakers in Ukraine and keep them on Mr. Putin’s side.

The “.ua” web address falsely suggested that the site was based in Ukraine and staffed locally when it was, in fact, based in St. Petersburg and staffed by Russians. Mr. Bespalov found himself working in a troll factory operated by a Putin crony. On the first floor of the offices, a dozen news websites peddled disinformation. A team on the second floor created propaganda posts on Facebook, Twitter and the Russia-based messaging service VKontakte. Bloggers on the third floor wrote fake items pretending to be persecuted Russian speakers in Ukraine or pro-Putin Americans. 

Mr. Bespalov ultimately wearied of his deceitful job and wrote an exposé on his life as a troll. He tells the author that his parents, no doubt like many others, now assume that news and social-media posts are “probably almost all fake. Now no one believes anything anymore.” Twitter recently upped its character count to 280 from 140, which could make some fake-news tweets doubly effective.

The Kremlin’s “dezinformatsiya” campaign—whether carried out against Ukraine, Estonia, Germany or the U.S.—involves “a bewildering array of narratives designed to distort truth and confuse its enemies,” Mr. Patrikarakos writes. And of course it isn’t just the Kremlin that operates in such a way. “Obfuscation has found its perfect platforms” in the realm of social media, he notes, reaching “audiences to a degree unprecedented in modern history.” The conditions are ripe: “In the postmodern Western world, where academics decry the notion of an ‘objective truth,’ where the lack of trust in institutions is lower than at any other time in living memory, this type of information finds a receptive audience.” 

Mr. Patrikarakos profiles a teenager in Gaza, Farah Baker, whose use of Twitter made her famous in 2014 during Israeli attacks on Hamas following the terror group’s murder of three Israeli teenagers and rocket attacks on southern Israel. Everyone from Al Jazeera to NBC reported Ms. Baker’s tweets, in which she expressed her fears of Israel’s military response and promoted a narrative of persecution. “Social media platforms empowered individuals like Farah to become citizen journalists,” Mr. Patrikarakos writes, “uncensored by editorial guidelines, institutional policy, or even a need to remain impartial and unbiased.”

The social-media unit of the Israeli Defense Forces stressed that Hamas caused the conflict, but less-informed popular opinion turned against Israel. Mr. Patrikarakos concludes that Israel’s approach of “dealing with facts—to give context to destruction, to combat images of suffering with images of causation,” amounted to fighting “sentiment with logic, which is an almost impossible task.”

Another figure in Mr. Patrikarakos’s portrait gallery is Alberto Fernandez, who in 2012 was appointed head of the State Department’s recently created Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications. Under his guidance, the center produced a powerful video in Arabic titled “Welcome to ISIS Land,” showing jihadists committing terrible acts against fellow Muslims and, in its sardonic narration, urging Muslims to come to ISIS Land and learn “useful things,” such as “Blowing up mosques! Crucifying and executing Muslims!” It concluded: “Travel is inexpensive because you won’t need a return ticket!”

But Mr. Fernandez ran into political correctness when his team tried to counter ISIS propaganda in English. “Once you start working in English, everyone’s a critic,” Mr. Fernandez tells the author. “Then it becomes about whether it passes the Washington Post test: Is it acceptable to polite society in Georgetown? It becomes a problem of propriety, good taste, and people don’t want the State Department logo on this.” The Obama administration closed the center in 2016.

Mr. Patrikarakos’s profile of a British gamer turned online sleuth, Eliot Higgins, shows that private actors can be effective. Mr. Higgins adeptly used open-source data, including online videos of Russian convoys, to prove that Mr. Putin’s military provided pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine with the missile that, in July 2014, shot down Malaysia Airlines 17, killing almost 300 people.

Mr. Patrikarakos doubts that Western governments alone can counter the disinformation on social media and proposes a network of hundreds of digital activists, on the model of Mr. Higgins, charged with rebutting propaganda and fake news. This method, he says, “is far more likely to succeed than a centralized bureaucracy.”

The Silicon Valley billionaires who created the digital tools enabling this new form of warfare might also devote some of their philanthropy to funding a digital defense of the West. Without an equal and opposite deployment of social media, Mr. Patrikarakos warns, the West “will continue to lose the narrative war.”

Mr. Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is co-founder of NewsGuard, a new company that will rate news brands online based on their journalistic legitimacy.