Introduction
You live in a world where physical warfare has completely merged with digital communication. Every time you open a social media app, you step onto a battlefield where information is weaponized to alter real-world conflicts. The problem you face is that digital platforms designed to connect people are now exploited by malicious actors to manipulate opinions, spread state disinformation, and destabilize democracies without firing a single bullet.
P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking explore this alarming reality in LikeWar, demonstrating how online networks have become arenas of relentless conflict.
The book maps out the history of communication and conflict, examines the mechanics of the attention economy, and exposes how empires and non-state actors strike back using automated trolls and floods of falsehoods.
- How do memes and viral videos become weapons of war?
- Why are terrorists and politicians using the same digital playbooks?
- Can you protect yourself against automated manipulation and deepfakes?
- What must free societies do to survive the weaponization of connectivity?
1. The Birth of the Digital Battlefield
Modern combatants and political actors operate simultaneously with physical weaponry and digital communication tools.
Modern combatants operate simultaneously with physical weaponry and digital communication tools.
Doan Trang collaborated with the authors to design the LikeWarrior character, depicted heading to battle with a rocket-propelled grenade and a smartphone.
The LikeWarrior Concept
You encounter this dual nature of modern fighters navigating both physical battlefields and digital networks. Carl von Clausewitz argued in his 1831 ten-volume treatise On War, edited by his wife Marie, that war is the continuation of political intercourse by other means. The most important element in war is the moral component, which involves shattering the spirit and will of an adversary rather than necessarily destroying their physical army. Historical attempts to break an enemy's spirit through massive bombing campaigns, such as the British Blitz or the U.S. Rolling Thunder campaign that dropped 6.5 million tons of bombs in North Vietnam, largely failed compared to the efficiency of modern social media.
Trump and Social Media Warfare
Donald Trump successfully used early social media platforms not only for personal branding and political positioning, but as a pioneering tool of modern information warfare. Trump shifted his initial corporate Twitter strategy into an aggressive, combative communication style that weaponized outrage and provided him with instant focus-testing, ultimately leading to his presidency.
Donald Trump's first tweet on May 4, 2009, invited people to watch him on Late Night with David Letterman. His account eventually grew to announce his victory as the 45th President of the United States after authoring some 15,000 tweets in the three years following his initial adoption. Twitter had approximately 18 million users when Trump joined and expanded to 300 million active users by the time he announced his presidency.
The ISIS Viral Blitzkrieg
The Islamic State successfully executed a military offensive using viral marketing principles and social media intimidation rather than traditional cyberwar hacking capabilities. By launching a coordinated social media campaign driven by a specific hashtag, automated bots, smartphone apps, and graphic videos of executions, ISIS sowed widespread panic, disunion, and mass desertions among defending forces.
During the fall of Mosul in 2014, 1,500 ISIS militants advanced behind the viral hashtag #AllEyesOnISIS. This offensive caused four Iraqi army divisions trained by the United States to evaporate and led to the capture of massive arsenals and vehicles. A prior sectarian war had caused 200,000 Iraqi civilians and 4,500 U.S. soldiers casualties, while the population of Mosul stood at 1.8 million. The nominal size of the Mosul Iraqi army garrison was a 25,000-strong garrison, but only 10,000 soldiers were actually present. The invading force that took Mosul consisted of just 1,500 ISIS fighters, and the group ultimately gained 30,000 foreign recruits from nearly a hundred countries.
2. History of Communications and Conflict
Every major revolution in communication technology has dismantled information scarcity and triggered massive political and military upheavals.
New ways to share information consistently disrupt political power.
Before the printing press, hand-copying made books extremely rare, limiting information flow. Johannes Gutenberg's movable type allowed mass production, which existing powers attempted to ban.
Martin Luther used the printing press to reproduce his 95 complaints in 30 different pamphlets, selling 300,000 copies and sparking the Protestant Reformation. Within a century of the press's invention, 200 million books were circulating widely in Europe. Traditional Mandarin Chinese contained 80,000 symbols, making movable type too cumbersome to reproduce at scale. Johannes Gutenberg began experimenting with movable type in Europe around 1438. By 1450, Gutenberg was peddling mass-produced Bibles across Germany and France.
The telegraph eliminated distance limitations in communication through electricity, immediately becoming a vital instrument for military command, geopolitical control, and public sensationalism. Samuel Morse secured congressional funding for the first telegraph line.
During the American Civil War, Union and Confederate forces laid roughly 15,000 miles of telegraph wire to gain tactical advantages. Samuel Morse successfully tested his telegraph in 1844, lobbying the U.S. Congress for $30,000 to build the 38-mile wire test between Washington, DC, and Baltimore. By 1850, the U.S. contained 12,000 miles of telegraph wire and 20 telegraph companies. By 1880, the world operated with 650,000 miles of wire worldwide and 30,000 miles under the ocean.
Radio, Television, and the Web
Radio transformed communication by eliminating wires, allowing a single speaker to reach millions simultaneously, which politicians and authoritarian regimes rapidly weaponized for mass entertainment and propaganda. Guglielmo Marconi developed wireless telegraphy, which enabled audio broadcasts.
Nazi Germany's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels distributed special radios marked with swastikas that could only receive Nazi-broadcasted frequencies to enforce obedience. Marconi built his first working wireless telegraphy system in 1894 and sold it to the British navy in 1901. The first radio broadcast of a violin performance occurred in 1906. By 1924, the U.S. counted 3 million radio sets and 20 million listeners. During World War II, short wave broadcasts reached 2,000 words per minute in 40-45 different languages globally.
Television introduced compelling visual imagery into global communication, fundamentally altering how the public perceived military conflicts and political debates through direct emotional resonance. Moving images transmitted directly into domestic living rooms made official government war narratives difficult to maintain when contradicted by graphic visual footage.
During the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, although the attack was a battlefield failure for the Vietcong, broadcast footage of U.S. Marines in disarray and the U.S. embassy under siege shocked 50 million viewers and led anchor Walter Cronkite to declare the war unwinnable. The first working television displaying a dummy's face appeared in 1925. By 1960, 9 out of 10 American homes had television sets.
The creation of TCP/IP protocols unified isolated computer networks into a global internet, which unexpectedly evolved from file-sharing infrastructure into an interactive social medium driven by email and mailing lists. Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn designed transmission-control protocol/internet protocol to connect disparate networks.
In 1979, Vint Cerf discovered an email thread named SF-lovers where researchers across the U.S. debated science fiction authors, proving the network functioned as a powerful social medium. Claude Shannon proposed the binary information digit or bit in 1948. Following the 1957 Sputnik space satellite launch, ARPA was established in 1958. J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor wrote The Computer as a Communication Device in 1968. On October 29, 1969, ARPANET came to life, linking a computer at UCLA to one at Stanford across 350 miles of leased telephone wire, intending to spell LOGIN before the system crashed after transmitting the letters LO. The network made its first international connection to Norway in 1973. Scott Fahlman proposed the first emoticons on September 19, 1982, at 11:44 A.M. EST. NSFNET connected 160,000 internet users in 1989.
Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web, combined with the 1990s commercialization and privatization of the internet, transformed the digital network into a massive commercial gold rush and global information highway. By inventing HTML, HTTP, and URLs, Berners-Lee made the internet user-friendly through visual browsers.
When Netscape Navigator went public in 1995, the company reached a value of $3 billion on its first day despite having never turned a profit. The World Wide Web and 3 million connected computers emerged in 1990. By 1995, 16 million computers were connected. The turn of the millennium brought 360 million internet users.
The emergence of Web 2.0 and social media platforms shifted the internet from static pages to dynamic, user-generated environments curated by powerful algorithmic news feeds and massive corporate enterprises. Mark Zuckerberg and other founders built interactive social networks centered on personal profiles, constant sharing, and engagement loops.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, which expanded past college campuses to reach 2 billion users and process millions of stories daily through opaque algorithms. In 2004, the world contained 820 million internet users. Facebook claimed 58 million users by the end of 2007 and later paid $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp in 2014.
3. Information Ecosystem and Radical Transparency
The proliferation of digital sensors and social media platforms has created an attention economy that monetizes outrage and empowers citizen investigators.
The Attention Economy
Modern platforms monetize human attention by prioritizing emotionally charged content. You scroll through feeds designed to generate dopamine-driven feedback loops that reward engagement above all else.
Social media business models monetize human attention by prioritizing emotionally charged content, which directly encourages outrage, anger, and radicalization.
Because platforms profit from engagement, algorithms naturally reward content that triggers strong negative emotions like anger and fear. This design accelerates the spread of extremist ideologies and societal friction.
Academic studies on massive social network data demonstrated that expressions of anger spread faster and exert more emotional contagion among users than positive sentiments. Researchers tracked 70 million messages in studies analyzing anger versus joy in social sentiment. Users have 2,617 daily touches or interactions with their smartphones.
Open Source Intelligence
Digital sensors and ubiquitous internet access empower citizen investigators to uncover major secrets and conduct independent intelligence analysis. You live in a reality of permanent surveillance where everything is recorded and nothing is secret. Billions of internet-enabled devices equipped with cameras, GPS, and multiple sensors generate vast amounts of metadata for every online action.
More than 65 different elements of metadata are carried by each tweet. This sensor-based economy linked 9 billion digital devices online since Sidarth's 2006 camera, and projects 50 billion online devices by 2020.
Virginia Senator George Allen lost his reelection campaign and his political career after a volunteer filmed him using a racial slur at a rural park. The unedited video went viral on YouTube, showing how presentism and present shock ruin public figures instantly.
Open-source intelligence allows online collectives of amateur analysts using digital tools to rival or outperform traditional state intelligence agencies. Using publicly available data, satellite imagery, and geolocated social media posts, decentralized networks of analysts track military movements and debunk government lies in real time.
Eliot Higgins founded Bellingcat, an online investigative group that used social media forensics and Google Maps to trace the specific Russian military unit and missile launcher responsible for shooting down flight MH17. Bellingcat successfully used public imagery and metadata to trace the movement of the BUK missile launcher 2,000 miles away from the crash site, analyzing 7,600 pieces of digital evidence regarding the 298 passengers and crew who were victims aboard flight MH17.
4. Empires Strike Back and State Disinformation
Authoritarian states have weaponized digital networks through infrastructure control, state-sponsored trolls, and floods of contradictory falsehoods.
The early belief that the internet would inevitably destroy authoritarianism by empowering grassroots dissidents proved to be a delusion. Repressive governments quickly adapted to monitor and weaponize digital networks. While democratic activists initially used social media to organize without traditional organizations, autocrats caught up by replacing tech-illiterate bureaucrats with enforcers who used the same digital channels to track dissidents and spread propaganda.
During the Arab Spring, events in Tunisia and Egypt led tech evangelists to hail social media as an unstoppable force for democracy, but regimes soon retaliated and revolutions fizzled out or devolved into civil wars. During the 2009 Iranian election protests, 98 percent of the links posted on Twitter about Iran were about Iran, and 85,000 people pledged online to march with Wael Ghonim in Cairo.
The Great Firewall and Social Credit
Governments can control the internet by leveraging the physical concentration of internet service providers to execute national blackouts, targeted shutdowns, or connection throttling. Because the global internet relies on a relatively small number of state-sanctioned monopolies and ISPs controlling the backbone pipes, regimes can easily restrict access during political unrest to disrupt mass coordination without destroying physical infrastructure.
During a 2016 high school exam leak, the Algerian government shut down national internet access for three days, causing economic losses of at least $20 million. Saudi Arabia lost $465 million from an internet shutdown in May 2016, and the Indian economy lost $190 million when mobile connections were cut in Rohtak.
China successfully engineered a closed, heavily monitored national internet that suppresses unsanctioned grassroots mobilization and enforces ideological harmony through keyword filtering and surveillance. Through projects like the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield, China restricts international connections, implements real-time keyword censorship to erase politically sensitive events, and holds internet platforms legally responsible for hosting subversive content.
When the Panama Papers revealed offshore wealth linked to the families of senior Chinese Communist Party leaders, the central State Council Internet Information Office issued an urgent delete order to scrub all related reports. China manages 800 million active internet users while dealing with the 2.6 terabytes of data contained in the Panama Papers leak. Authoritarian states combine legal threats and physical punishment for online speech with the psychological phenomenon of the spiral of silence to induce widespread self-censorship among citizens. When governments arrest citizens for social media posts, retweets, or negative comments, they create an atmosphere of fear where people quietly moderate their views to align with perceived majority opinion, forcing dissent into encrypted channels.
Wall Street Journal reporter Dion Nissenbaum was detained in a Turkish isolation cell for three days after retweeting an OSINT report about a propaganda video. Within three days, 45,000 people suspected of coup links were pushed out of public service in Turkey, alongside 135,000 civil servants purged and 1,058 schools and universities shut down.
Web Brigades and Sockpuppets
Modern Russian information warfare weaponizes falsehoods and disinformation campaigns, building upon classic Soviet active measures to accelerate the spread of fake news globally through digital platforms. Russia evolved from Cold War operations like Operation INFEKTION into a digital strategy utilizing state media empires and coordinated networks to dismiss critics, distort facts, distract from main issues, and dismay audiences.
During the Cold War, the KGB planted a fake story in an Indian newspaper claiming the U.S. military invented AIDS, an operation that took four years to reach fruition compared to hours on the modern internet. The KGB and allied agencies conducted 10,000 disinformation operations, and RT operated with a $400 million annual budget by 2015.
Russian troll factories deploy armies of paid commenters using fake accounts across social media platforms to hijack conversations, amplify political extremes, and sow civil unrest among foreign adversaries. Operatives at organizations like the Internet Research Agency manage multiple sockpuppet profiles—posing as news sources, grassroots activists, or ordinary citizens—to post hundreds of divisive messages daily and manipulate online groups.
During the 2016 U.S. election, fake accounts such as @Ten_GOP and @tpartynews masqueraded as American political groups and were widely shared and retweeted by prominent political figures. Russian philosophy majors working as trolls were paid $1,500 per month, while the fake @Ten_GOP Twitter account amassed 136,000 followers and Facebook posts by the fake account Blacktivist were shared 103.8 million times.
Navigating online information requires lateral thinking rather than vertical analysis to avoid falling victim to digital manipulation.
Studies show that intelligent individuals like undergraduates and PhDs often evaluate online information vertically by staying within a single source and getting easily manipulated. Professional fact-checkers succeed by thinking laterally, leaping across multiple websites to seek context, perspective, and hidden traps. Stanford University researchers evaluated three groups of undergraduates, history PhDs, and professional fact-checkers, finding that fact-checkers detected online manipulation much more rapidly by networking out across the web.
You can apply this defense directly:
- Recognize that the intent of most online content is to subtly influence and manipulate.
- Seek a second opinion when in doubt, then a third, and a fourth.
- Leap across multiple other websites to seek context and perspective instead of relying on a single source.
10 Key Ideas
- Physical warfare and digital communication have completely merged, creating a modern battlefield where information is weaponized to alter real-world conflicts.
- Carl von Clausewitz argued that the most important element in war is the moral component involving shattering the spirit of an adversary, a feat now achieved efficiently through social media.
- Every major revolution in communication technology, from Gutenberg's printing press to the internet, has dismantled information scarcity and triggered massive political upheavals.
- Social media business models monetize human attention by prioritizing emotionally charged content, which directly encourages outrage, anger, and radicalization.
- Digital sensors and ubiquitous internet access empower citizen investigators and open-source intelligence groups like Bellingcat to uncover major secrets and conduct independent analysis.
- Authoritarian regimes quickly adapted to monitor and weaponize digital networks by replacing tech-illiterate bureaucrats with enforcers who track dissidents and spread propaganda.
- Governments can control the internet by leveraging the physical concentration of internet service providers to execute national blackouts, targeted shutdowns, or connection throttling.
- China successfully engineered a closed, heavily monitored national internet that suppresses unsanctioned grassroots mobilization and enforces ideological harmony through keyword filtering and surveillance.
- Russian troll factories deploy armies of paid commenters using fake accounts across social media platforms to hijack conversations, amplify political extremes, and sow civil unrest among foreign adversaries.
- Professional fact-checkers succeed against online manipulation by thinking laterally, leaping across multiple websites to seek context, perspective, and hidden traps.