Why You Should Become An Information Warrior

By E.J. Walker

Information about politics in other countries, and the relationship between those countries and our own, was, before the rise of social media, distributed solely by large media institutions, particularly in the US with corporate media like CBS or ABC. (Chomsky and Herman, 1988) Now, the public in Western countries has unrestricted access to information from all over the planet through the Internet. One might think that this would be the ultimate fantasy for the anti-war left of the Cold War era. Rather, modern technology has brought a wave of misinformation, often with a right-wing bent – though not always, on a scale which renders the public either misinformed or untrusting of even reliable information. (Fallon, 2019) Alternative media has the capability of being more honest, at the cost of being unaccountable when it chooses not to be; whereas, institutions of news media are held accountable – the most recent major example being the $787M Dominion lawsuit against Fox News. (2021 Dominion V Fox) The subversive control of public opinion in the favour of US-allied interests in former times has been replaced by subversive control of public opinion by the enemies of said interests. It might seem therefore that the unethical practice of liberal governments has been replaced by far graver practices of authoritarian governments — in particular, Russia. 

Russia operates an extensive misinformation campaign across the world, to which vast resources are dedicated with the goal of sowing discontent in the West, pushing non-aligned countries towards Russia, and supporting their strategic objectives. (Kelley 2024) As an example, consider Russian bots swarming social media like Facebook and X. (Prier 2017) Many of them do not spread misinformation, but merely serve to interact with misinformative posts which may be produced by a real person. In this way, the bots cause bad information to appear more reliable through popularity, and evade notice themselves. This is similar to the Russian support for “useful idiots” in the media of the West. Through social media bots, Russia can dependably fuel their ideological allies with misinformation, without any formal link established between a Russian actor and a US media company.  In the most extreme case discovered thus far, several prominent right-wing alternative media personalities were being given money hugely disproportionate to their actual reach by Tenet Media, a company created by Russia Today, the state media of the Russian Government, to spread pro-Russian propaganda. (2024 United States District Court Southern District of New York)  Similar enterprises, such as that of Yala News in the UK, point at global efforts of mass misinformation. (Gelbart 2023)

It is clear that we can never go back. Censorship of any more than the most overt misinformation has had mixed success. The 1st Amendment makes every move to censor online content in the US a difficult legal issue, and large social media companies have proven ill-equipped or unwilling to counter misinformation themselves, most notably Elon Musk’s X. (O’Carroll 2023) To censor misinformation entirely only aggravates the increasing sentiment of a media hostile to the interests of the public at large. Without this nuclear option, each of us must enlist as soldiers on the digital battlefield, and fight a conventional-ballistics war against misinformation. Not everyone has to be an expert on everything, but the sooner we ask ourselves where the information we consume comes from, who has an interest in spreading it and why, the sooner we start on the road to restoring integrity to our political conversations. Misinformation is a crucial part of the Russian war machine. Western countries are unable to mimic Russia’s defence against misinformation because it would come at the cost of our civil liberties. It falls to us therefore to use those liberties in the pursuit of truth. The information war is one without civilians: if we use the internet we must think of ourselves as moving through the territory of the enemy. Politics, international and domestic, should be about how we want to progress, rather than what version of reality we subscribe to.

Bibliography

Chomsky, N. and Herman, E.S. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York, Pantheon Books.

Fallon, J. 2019. Undoing the Demos. Spectra, [online] 7(1), 156–180. Available at:https://doi.org/10.21061/spectra.v7i1.128 (Accessed: 11 October 2024).

US Dominion, Inc. v Fox News Network, LLC, 2021 Superior Court of Delaware [Online] Available at: https://casetext.com/case/us-dominion-inc-v-fox-news-network-llc-1 (Accessed: 11 October 2024).

Kelley, M.J. 2024, Understanding Russian Disinformation and How the Joint Force Can Address It, US Army War College - Publications. [Online] Available at: https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/News/Display/Article/3789933/understanding-russian-disinformation-and-how-the-joint-force-can-address-it/#end1 (Accessed: 11 October 2024).

Prier, J. 2017. ‘Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare’, Quarterly, 11(4), pp. 50–85. [Online] Available at: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/portals/10/ssq/documents/volume-11_issue-4/prier.pdf. (Accessed: 11 October 2024).

Sealed Indictment 24 Cr. 2024 United States District Court Southern District of New York.  [Online] Available at: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366266/dl (Accessed: 11 October 2024).

Gelbart, H. 2023, The UK company spreading Russian fake news to millions. BBC News.  [Online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-65150030. (Accessed: 11 October 2024).

O’Carroll, L. 2023, EU warns Elon Musk after Twitter found to have highest rate of disinformation. The Guardian. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/26/eu-warns-elon-musk-that-twitter-x-must-comply-with-fake-news-laws (Accessed: 26 September 2023).