CASE ANALYSIS ON INFORMATION WARFARE
Posted by santw001 on Apr 21, 2022 in Uncategorized | 0 comments
Information Warfare
Alexis C. Madrigal, in his article “What Facebook Did to American Democracy,” explored the role disinformation and misinformation played in the 2016 United States general election. The author argued that the informational foundations of democracy in the United States have eroded, but no individual has elucidated precisely how. He further noted that people knew that Facebook was a non-neutral force since 2012. Despite this, it was believed that Facebook was responsible for increasing youth voters, implying it favored Democrats. However, in 2015 many people recognized that Facebook had a potential to influence an election. Madrigal cited an essay by Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law scholar, which revealed there was a potential for Facebook to depress voter turnout selectively (2020). Zittrain argued that Facebook should be perceived as the information fiduciary with special responsibilities and roles since it controlled vast amounts of personal data (Madrigal, 2020). Furthermore, Madrigal cited a case study by The Daily Dot that revealed that 17% of individuals who saw Facebook messages could vote in accordance with the message (2020). In addition, Madrigal highlighted how Facebook facilitated the spread of fake news. He noted that the pro-Donald Trump online sites could create fake news about Trump and post them on Facebook to boost his candidature. In this Case Analysis, I will argue that Confucianism shows us that Facebook did engage in information warfare because they failed to protect the community from fake news, and further that they were partly responsible for the election outcome because their news feed influenced some voters.
One of the central concepts from Prier (2020) is the use of commanding a trend to spread propaganda. The author highlighted that cyber operations nowadays target society members by influencing their behaviors and beliefs and weakening their trust in their government. The United States’ enemies are now exploiting social media to damage the United States’ interests, sow domestic conflict and discredit the private and public institutions. Pier termed this an increasingly dangerous method of persuading within social media. He further opined that the US adversaries are accessing social media platforms to influence the networked groups in the US. The US adversaries could insert propaganda into social media platforms like Facebook and create a trend. They will then use the platform to spread the message cheaper and faster than any other means. Pier (2020) also pointed out that the cyber team may collude with the true supporters to create memes, fake news, or videos and use a bot network to control the trend. In addition, the adversary may use social media to impact a larger population. The main methods employed by adversaries to control trends on social media are trend hijacking, trend creation, and trend distribution.
The other central concept from Pier (2020) is the propaganda primer. According to Pier, for centuries, messages created to influence human behavior have existed. However, the increase in mass media has made propagation easier. Social media allows the propagandist to spread the propaganda via the established network. As per Pier (2020), an individual will believe the information on social media since the individuals he follows shares things which fit their existing beliefs. The individual will also share this information with others in their network. Therefore, with many shares, the propaganda news will be accepted as a fact.
Another central concept Pier (2020) discussed is people’s reliance on social media as a news source. The author noted that 72% of Americans use mobile devices to receive digital news. Therefore, the individuals within a social group are highly likely to trust the news shared among the members, even if it is fake. Pier gave the example of the 2016 United States presidential election when a story highlighting that the pope had endorsed Trump for the presidency received more than 1 million shares on Facebook. Pier (2020) observed that people shared more fake news than they shared the conventional mainstream news sources. So, the fake news sources were perceived as trusted sources. In addition, many people rely on social media for breaking news. This trend made even the conventional media journalists start depending on Twitter to gather information, making fake news legitimate.
The three concepts presented by Pier (2020) apply to the information warfare case. Because of the powerful nature of Facebook, the United States adversaries employed it to spread fake news about the 2016 US presidential election. By commanding the trend on Facebook, the actors could insert fake news into Facebook, create the trend, and quickly spread their messages. They could even create videos and memes and use bots to ensure they were trending in news feeds. Consequently, these actors could influence the American voters using Facebook as a warfare tool. Facebook allowed the propagandists to disseminate propaganda. Because Facebook users are inclined to believe information shared by people within their social acquaintance, the users can easily believe fake news and even share it with others. Equally essential is that since many Americans rely on Facebook to receive breaking news, it was easy to feed them with fake news about the 2016 presidential candidates. So, Facebook engaged in information warfare since it was used as a conduit to speak news and was responsible for the 2016 election outcome since it facilitated the propagation of fake news.
I believe the right thing Facebook should have done was to ensure malicious actors were not using their platform to spread fake news that could influence the voters during the 2016 US presidential election. Confucianism stresses correct behavior and the significance of respecting the community together with its values. By failing to protect the online community from receiving fake news, Facebook acted unethically. At the heart of Confucianism is moral excellence since it is one of the pillars for realizing achievement. Regrettably, Facebook was unable to filter fake news from accurate news, which influenced the decisions the electorate made during the 2016 US presidential election. Also, Facebook could have thoroughly probed the advertisements on its platform to separate the genuine ones from the dark ones to protect the Facebook users. Examining the advertisements could have made Facebook act as a virtuous company that seeks to impact society positively.
Similarly, in his paper “A Second Amendment for Cyber?-Possession, Prohibition and Personal Liberty for the Information Age” Keith Scott identified pertinent concepts that apply to the information warfare case. The first essential concept Scott discussed is the problem of connectivity. This author highlighted that technology affects our social and political experiences (Scott, 2018). He further argued that technology has created a world that is always connected, and this poses apparently insolvable problems of social and technical insecurity. Consequently, Scott forecasted that bullying, cyberstalking, and politics would become crueler and darker. Scott buttressed his prediction by citing that the technological innovations will create a global village that will be a hotbed of vicious hostility, gossip, and backbiting.
The second important concept Scott discussed is the effect of social media on politics. He cited Tufecki (2017) study that pinpointed that online communication has acted as the force multiplier for spreading information. Moreover, this researcher observed that technology could change human interaction by altering how people preserve and disseminate stories and ideas. Additionally, Scott (2018) stated that any person with the smartphone could produce and consume messages and be able broadcast them. However, due to freedom, many people make unacceptable and objectionable opinions. Moreover, Scott (2018) stated that the government might use online communication tools to spread propaganda and disinformation. He cited the example of the Trump administration that created fake news to undermine the media. Also, Scott claimed that the same technology that protesters use to air their grievances could be employed to soil online politics. Therefore, the proliferation of online communication channels will change the political narratives and disrupt the institutional and electoral capacities of the movements (Scott, 2018).
The two concepts from Scott’s paper apply to the information warfare case. The concept of the problem of connectivity is evident in the case. The world has become a global village because of the increased connectivity brought about by the proliferation of online communication tools like Facebook. Unfortunately, as noted by Scott (2018), this global village has become a hotbed of gossip. This argument can be evidenced in the case. Madrigal (2017) highlighted that Facebook was used as a platform to disseminate disinformation and misinformation that ended up shaping the election. This shows an example of a problem that can result from connectivity. Despite Facebook enabling people during the 2016 US presidential election to receive information, it gave them misleading information. Some of the misleading Facebook adverts can be construed as gossip that swayed the voters. Since Facebook allows anybody to be both a producer and consumer of the online content, anybody could post information and get it shared by many users. The effect of this is that some people took advantage of this to spread fake news. Some people trusted the misinformation circulating widely since Facebook users could share the fake news without anyone recognizing it.
Based on Confucianism, Facebook acted immorally by letting malicious actors use its platform to disseminate fake news about the 2016 US presidential candidates. One of the tenets of Confucianism is avoiding conflict. Considering that Facebook allowed advertisers to use its social media platform to propagate political messages, it contradicted this principle. The right thing Facebook could have done was to evaluate the authenticity of the advertisements before letting advertisers post them on its platform. Had Facebook done this, it would have avoided the negative criticism it received after the election. The other tenet of Confucianism that Facebook breached is correct behavior. Just like the people, organizations must exhibit good or correct behavior. Facebook’s failure to notice that some actors were using its platform to influence the electorates showed dishonesty in its business operations. The company only focused on amassing more wealth from the advertisers without checking the harm they were causing to the voters. In other words, Facebook was disloyal to the Americans because it failed to do its best in safeguarding the electorates.
Considering that the malicious actors used Facebook to spread fake news during the 2016 United States presidential election, it is apparent that this social media platform engaged in information warfare. As Madrigal (2017) and Prier (2020) posited, some actors took advantage of the powerful nature of Facebook to spread misinformation that influenced the voters. Through political advertisements and sharing of political news, Facebook acted as a conduit to propagate fake news. Therefore, to some extent, Facebook was responsible for the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Although some people may contend that Facebook, like any media, offered a platform to spread news, it must be acknowledged that it failed to prevent the spreading of fake news. Facebook owed the voters a duty of feeding them only accurate information about the presidential candidates. Nevertheless, it was compromised by the United States adversities to spread disinformation and misinformation. In the future social media sites like Facebook should play an active role in protecting the public from fake news. Also, social media sites should invest in technologies that should be able to filter inaccurate information and prevent it from spreading. This will make social media sites such as Facebook act morally and show good behavior.
References
Madrigal, A. C. (2017, November 16). What Facebook did to American democracy. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/
Prier, J. (2020). Commanding the trend: Social media as information warfare. In Information warfare in the age of cyber conflict (pp. 88-113). Routledge.
Scott, K. (2018, June). A Second Amendment for Cyber?-Possession, Prohibition and Personal Liberty for the Information Age. In Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security, Oslo (pp. 464-470).