Prompt: Read this and write a journal entry summarizing your response to the article on social cybersecurity.
I found this article’s perspective on social cybersecurity insightful. Prior to reading it, I thought of social cybersecurity as more about exploiting human weaknesses to gain access to information systems and carry out further attacks. However, this article widened my view of social cybersecurity by introducing the idea that using technology to exploit people’s tendencies and change their actions in the real world is a powerful and imminent threat that is also an essential element of social cybersecurity. Another idea I found valuable from this article is shifting a war’s focus to the human domain. Focusing on the destabilization of the society of an enemy state makes sense because doing so can weaken that state socially and militarily without sacrificing lives. Since a nation is made of its people, it will be significantly weakened if it lacks people to stand up for it due to citizens’ apathy and lack of patriotism. By creating apathy through social cyberattacks, a nation could prepare an adversary for an easy defeat without sacrificing many of its own citizens.
It is also an interesting conundrum that an affinity for freedom of speech puts nations at a greater risk of being manipulated by information warfare from foreign adversaries. It seems paradoxical that countries that lack robust freedom of speech protections, such as Russia, use this as a foundational tool for winning wars against those that do, such as the US. For countries that value and guarantee freedom of speech, this is a difficult threat to counter ethically. For instance, if the US government chose to censor misinformation and disinformation from its citizens, it would likely be overstepping First Amendment protections. The complexity of upholding the people’s freedoms while protecting them from information warfare shows why investing in social cybersecurity research is valuable. Conducting such research is likely essential to discover ways to protect citizens from foreign cybersecurity threats while still defending the rights and liberties they hold dear.