Operations that aim to persuade an audience of a particular viewpoint, energize those who hold specific views, and/or divert target audiences are all examples of influence operations.

Propagandists are vying for users’ already-diminishing attention on social media platforms, according to the logic of distraction. Propagandists could successfully capture user attention without necessarily persuading them, if they can divert target audiences from an unfavorable narrative developing on social media by disseminating alternative theories or muddying the information environment.

Although influence operations can take many different shapes and employ a variety of techniques, there are a few common threads that connect them all. According to a recent study on political influence operations in the Middle East, these operations frequently used one of the following strategies:

• Making an effort to promote one’s own government, culture, or policies;

• Making an argument in favor of or against particular policies.

• Attempts to destabilize foreign relations or domestic situations in rival nations;

• Attempts to make allies appear good and opponents look bad to third-party countries

In a number of these instances, the accounts carrying out the operation pretended to be locals voicing their displeasure with their government or certain political personalities. This strategy of using digital agents of influence is frequently used by social media manipulation operations to conceal the genuine identity of the content source from the target audience. For instance, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) accounts of Russia sent direct messages to members of the Black American and conservative American communities while posing as activists. A misused idiom, a recurring grammatical fault, or even the use of a backtick (‘) where a real speaker would use an apostrophe (‘) are some subtle indicators that might help you spot these false reports. State-level antagonistic actors frequently deploy a variety of strategies, drawing on their own workforce or contracting out to virtual mercenaries.

Since 2016, Twitter and Meta have taken down well over 100 social media influence operations that originated in dozens of different nations. Inauthentic amplification attempts, fake news websites, and persona creation (the creation of false personas to disseminate a message) are frequently used in these operations.

However, influence operations have also greatly increased outside of Facebook and Twitter to other platforms, intimate settings, and encrypted areas. The New York Times reported on how “Iranian agents had infiltrated small [Israeli] WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels and messaging apps” to promote divisive messages. The report was done in collaboration with Israeli disinformation researchers. These influence operations occasionally show inventiveness by using platform rules in an offensive way.

For instance, a campaign in favour of the Tanzanian government that Twitter deleted in 2021 targeted Tanzanian activists’ accounts by making fake allegations of copyright reporting.

Recent studies and media coverage on influence operations have tended to concentrate on foreign campaigns, in which governments or individuals target individuals in other countries. But influence efforts can also be domestically focused, as the Tanzanian case demonstrates. Political actors frequently disseminate clandestine propaganda directed at their constituents in an effort to increase their popularity, detract from that of an adversary, or create commotion inside the political system. Facebook terminated phony accounts associated with Brazilian politicians, President Jair Bolsonaro, and his sons, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro and Senator Jair Bolsonaro, in 2020 for disseminating divisive content about Brazilian politics. In fact, a lot of critics think that internal influence operations-rather than foreign ones-are the most concerning.

Additionally, influence operations have been used to take sides in intraparty disputes and, in the case of some campaigns linked to the Chinese Communist Party, to hit expatriate groups.

Techniques Employed

China employs a variety of techniques for influence operations to shape opinions, advance its interests, and project power. These techniques can be both overt and covert, and they are often coordinated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its various government agencies. Here are several techniques that China has been known to use:

Propaganda and Media Influence: China maintains a vast propaganda apparatus that includes state-controlled media outlets such as Xinhua News Agency, CCTV, and People’s Daily. These outlets disseminate narratives aligned with the CCP’s objectives and promote positive portrayals of China. They also engage in information warfare by spreading disinformation, censorship, and manipulating online discussions through social media platforms.

Economic Leverage: China utilizes its economic power to exert influence. It may offer financial aid, investment, or loans to other countries, attaching conditions that align with its political objectives. This can create dependencies and influence decision-making processes in target nations.

Diplomatic Influence: China engages in diplomatic efforts to shape global narratives, build alliances, and influence international organizations. It actively seeks to cultivate relationships with political leaders, academic institutions, and think tanks globally. It hosts conferences, forums, and summits to promote its interests and propagate its narratives.

United Front Work: The CCP employs a strategy known as “United Front Work” to co-opt and influence individuals and groups outside of its formal political structure. This includes overseas Chinese communities, ethnic or religious groups, business leaders, and intellectuals. The goal is to create a favorable perception of China and gain support for its policies.

Cyber Espionage and Information Warfare: China has been accused of engaging in state-sponsored cyberattacks and espionage to steal intellectual property, gain access to sensitive information, and manipulate public opinion. It also employs “50 Cent Army” or “Wu Mao” internet trolls who spread pro-China propaganda and disrupt discussions critical of the regime.

Confucius Institutes: China has established Confucius Institutes in various countries, which are cultural and educational centers that promote Chinese language and culture. However, they have been criticized for engaging in censorship, promoting self-censorship, and advancing Chinese Communist Party propaganda.

Overseas Investments and Infrastructure Projects: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a large-scale infrastructure development project that seeks to enhance connectivity across Asia, Europe, Africa, and beyond. By investing in critical infrastructure projects in other countries, China can deepen its economic ties, gain influence, and extend its geopolitical reach.

United Front Work

United Front Work is a strategy employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to co-opt and influence individuals and groups outside of its formal political structure. Here are a few examples of United Front Work activities carried out by China:

Overseas Chinese Communities: China seeks to influence overseas Chinese communities by establishing various organizations and associations that promote Chinese culture and interests. These organizations often operate under the umbrella of the CCP’s United Front Work Department. They aim to maintain ties with overseas Chinese, encourage support for China’s policies, and discourage dissent or criticism of the CCP.

Ethnic and Religious Groups: China targets ethnic or religious groups within its borders and abroad through United Front Work. For example, it seeks to co-opt Tibetan and Uighur diaspora communities by promoting narratives that downplay human rights concerns and highlight economic development and cultural preservation efforts in Tibet and Xinjiang. China also uses United Front tactics to exert influence over overseas Chinese Muslim organizations.

Business and Intellectual Elites: China actively cultivates relationships with influential business leaders, academics, and intellectuals around the world. Through various means, such as funding research institutions, supporting academic exchanges, and organizing conferences, China seeks to shape narratives, gain access to cutting-edge technologies, and project soft power. These efforts aim to build networks of individuals who are sympathetic to China’s policies and willing to advocate for them.

Political Parties and Politicians: China seeks to cultivate relationships with politicians and political parties in other countries. It may offer financial support, establish friendship associations, or facilitate exchange programs to build political influence. This can involve providing financial assistance, investment opportunities, or other incentives to countries or politicians that align with China’s interests.

Media and Academic Institutions: China invests in media outlets and academic institutions worldwide to enhance its soft power and control narratives. This includes establishing partnerships with foreign media organizations, sponsoring Confucius Institutes in universities (which have been accused of promoting CCP propaganda), and funding research centers or think tanks that produce China-friendly analysis.

Operations and Impact of Influence

Influence operations may have an effect due to their particular content or focus (such as through persuasion) or by undermining public confidence in the information environment as a whole.

Resources, message quality, and operation detectability are sometimes constraints on the direct impact of content in modern influence operations. Depending on the objectives of the operator, these aspects may be more or less important. For instance, the effectiveness of each individual message is probably much less important if operators are merely trying to divert targets rather than persuade them of a particular opinion. Theoretically, language models might one day partially circumvent these limitations.

It is more important to create the impression that any given message can be false or deceptive in order to affect trust in an information environment. Even if influence operations fail to alter people’s opinions, they may cause people to doubt the veracity of information they get from even reliable sources, which could undermine trust in democratic and epistemic institutions more generally.

Content-Based Impact

If an influence operation

• Persuades someone of a specific position or supports an existing one,

• Distracts them from discovering or developing other ideas, or

• Distracts them from making any room for higher quality thought, then it may have an impact dependent on the content.

Often, the intention is to merely divert attention away from information that could be harmful to the operator. Distraction operations frequently take advantage of and worsen preexisting attention rivalries between advertisers, media sources, and platforms to crowd out crucial information with attention-grabbing, irrelevant material. Therefore, distraction operations do not require a target to be convinced by the information spread, but rather that a target not be convinced by (or even take into consideration) any other piece of information.

The impact of an influence operation can be quantified or tracked in both historical and modern cases. For instance, the Soviet Union engaged in an influence campaign to disseminate the myth that the United States government invented the virus in a lab during the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. According to a 2005 research, 27% of African Americans still held this belief. In 2016, the IRA organized rallies and counter protests outside the Islamic Da’wah Center in Houston using manipulative agents of influence on Facebook. As a result of the protests’ inability to take place without the IRA’s involvement, the impact is extremely simple to identify in this case.

While platforms assign blame and give researchers information about influence operations that were shut down, researchers still have little visibility into the impact on users or their post-engagement behavior. Additionally, not every influence operation is discovered. Due to multicausality and the obstacles associated with tracking changes in public opinion over time, even propagandists who try to gauge their own influence occasionally run into problems. Scholars have emphasized that historically, this uncertainty has helped intelligence agencies exaggerate the impact of their influence operations for administrative gain.

Despite these measuring difficulties, several characteristics, such as resources, material quality and messaging, and detectability, obviously restrict the impact of current efforts. Following a brief description of these drawbacks, we go into how generative models might be able to assist you get over them.

• Resources: Just like marketing efforts, the effectiveness of an influence operation depends on one’s ability to reach the target audience with the required material. A political actor employs how many propagandists to write material. How many social media accounts can someone open up to create a false online presence? Low-resource initiatives have a lower chance of reaching their target audience or getting media attention.

• Content’s Quality and Message: People are less likely to be persuaded by messaging if it sharply contradicts their preexisting viewpoint or if the arguments are shoddily put forth or illogically reasoned. Above all else, campaigns with messaging that contradicts targets’ beliefs, fails to successfully integrate with a target’s information environment, and presents weak arguments should be avoided.

• Detectability: Lastly, actions that are rapidly found have a lower likelihood of having an effect. Independent researchers and social media platforms aggressively look for influence operations, which the platforms then take down to reduce their reach. In fact, propagandists’ awareness that these operations can be abandoned might influence their actions, encouraging them to pursue diversion strategies rather than persona creation, which takes more time and effort but can be more persuasive to observers.

It is beneficial to keep these restrictions in mind as we think about the potential contribution of language models to influence campaigns. They could pose a serious problem for the information environment if they can get beyond the current barriers. In Section 4, we go into more detail about this.

Trust-Based Downstream Impact

The second method influence operations might have an effect is via undermining trust. Even when influence campaigns are recognized, their presence, especially at scale, may lead people to become skeptical of other, authentic sources. Degrading public trust does not necessarily require high quality initiatives. Particularly in areas where information technologies make it challenging to determine the reliability of sources, propagandists frequently seek to take advantage of weaknesses in their target’s mental shortcuts for gaining confidence. Influence operators have the ability to erode credibility beyond the narrow focus of their campaign by faking or using deceptive credentials and testimonials, as well as by altering with photographic and video evidence. Lowering societal trust might make it more difficult for a society to plan quick responses to emergencies, which could be an admirable objective for antagonistic actors in and of itself. As a result, propagandists can further their goals in an environment where there is less societal trust. Existing societal division and polarization make it harder for trustworthy actors to gain widespread respect. They can also provide influence operators a foothold to target their messaging at specific audiences, cause discord, and undermine institutional and social confidence. The norms that allow people and organizations to connect and collaborate without the need for numerous rules and processes to manage their behavior are threatened by low universal trust.

The post China’s Influence Operations appeared first on IMR.

ALSO READ: Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 1)

How did that approach work in Russia-Ukraine War?

“When people speak in vague generalities, for example, and use a lot of abstract terms like justice, morality, liberty, and so on, without really ever explaining the specifics of what they are talking about, they are almost always hiding something. This is often their own nasty but necessary actions, which they prefer to cover up under a screen of righteous verbiage. When you hear such talk, be suspicious,” Writes Robert Greene in “The 33 Strategies of War.”

From the beginning, the Ukraine war is a crusade for liberty/ free will and some kind of global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism for media. Global media is flooded with stories that Ukraine is such a model for democracy in the region that its mere existence makes Putin uncomfortable, and that is why he launched a brutal attack on civilian centers. In his remark on 26th March, US President Joe Biden said: “we emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”

Such narratives needed a great narrator too. Zelenskyy’s entertainment and media background combined with live-streamed propaganda (streaming 24/7 to every corner of the globe), and Russia’s complete isolation from the internet, provided NATO a cognitive weapon for which Putin had no counter. From press to social media to parliaments to diplomatic enclaves to Grammy to Oscar, the one-sided celebration of Ukraine’s heroic resistance and Zelenskyy’s Netflix-like leadership approach virtually declared Ukraine a winner in this war, no matter what may be the outcomes.

In the early hours of 24 February, shortly before the start of the war, Zelenskyy recorded an address to the citizens of both Ukraine and Russia, in which he said: “Who can prevent this (war)? People – are these people present among you? I am sure there are – public figures, journalists, musicians, actors, athletes, scientists, doctors, bloggers, stand-up comedians, Tik-Tokers, and many more – regular people.”

The overall western narrative on Ukraine and Zelensky’s position can be summed up in the lines from a recent article “Glory to You, President Zelenskyy,” published in Harvard Political Review (March 3, 2022): “Tens of millions of people worldwide have seen President Zelenskyy’s videos shared online and on television. He has harnessed the power of social media to become history’s first truly online wartime leader, bypassing traditional gatekeepers as he uses the internet to reach out to the people. His uncensored, unadulterated spirit shines through in each broadcast” and Zelenskyy, “through his tactful use of social media, has rallied the world to the cause of Ukraine.”

In the information war, the winner is unquestionably Zelenskyy but it is important to note that information is not the only front in this War!

Now the big question among the Western strategist is – how long can we keep the short-attention-span internet audience (particularly the Americans) interested and engaged in Ukraine’s real-time war series?

Weaponization of AI – A Trailer

It is not that Russia was not aware of the growing Western might on the technology front. In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement on AI made the headlines, when he said: “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind, it comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict.” And “whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” Russia’s military systems are also well equipped with advanced AI capabilities including AI-enabled robotic weapons, autonomous tanks, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), long-range strikes involving high-precision missiles, and the Russian military already use AI for intelligence gathering, C4ISR, logistics, and development of autonomous weapons.

But backed by U.S. and NATO support, Ukraine has a clear edge over AI and digital technology, particularly in the psychological and cognitive warfare domains.

Last month, in the middle of the war, a conversation between two Russian soldiers got automatically captured, transcribed, translated, and analyzed using artificial intelligence algorithms (developed by a US company called Primer). There is news that several unsecured Russian transmissions have been posted online, translated, and analyzed on social media. It is also important to note that every single tech platform and social networking site that, not just Russians or Ukrainians, but the entire globe is using to explore the War, every single platform where people talk/ share or present their views on the Russia-Ukraine crisis, have embedded advanced AI algorithms, that are recording our response/ reactions and emotions in real-time in this big laboratory of psychological experiments called the Internet.

So in a way technology has made everyone a participant (with or without our consent) in this war and from that point of view, it is indeed a kind of virtual WW III. But given the possibilities of AI weaponization in the future, it can still be called only a trailer or snapshot of the future!

From an outer view, the latest developments in Cognitive Warfare and associated psychological manoeuvres appear as matters of the Big Power game, where countries like India have some scope to remain ‘untouched’ and ‘neutral’ but the question is – Can we afford to ignore the fact that in this battle of public perception, every single user, irrespective of his/ her national/ cultural identity, knowingly or unknowingly is a potential team member of some regional/ national or global battalion, recruited to serve the interests of forces, outside our borders?

India’s National Security Concerns

Recently, India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval remarked about these new trends/ shifts in approach to warfare and their possible impact on India, when he said, “The civil society is the new frontier of warfare,” and it is “the common people, their thinking, their perceptions, their sense of well being, and their perception of their own governments,” and everything that can impact the “will of the nation,” is under attack, in this new age of information revolution.

These tech platforms which made their way into the Indian market in the name of some educational activities (Amazon as an online book store), some aid in research (Google search), and occasional entertainment activities (YouTube), now become not only the source of radicalization of a large section of youth but also a significant facilitator in illicit trade and anti-national activities. Today, we have reached a situation where, whether it is some engineering graduate living in a metro city or some rural youth indulging in farming in his village, the cognitive weapons of the information revolution are capable of affecting everyone’s “wetware” irrespective of their personal/ educational/ social or professional background.

When we trace the root of the problem, we find that it all began not with computer technology and the Internet but with “Reality TV” culture, the initial platforms of psychological experiments, and what we are observing now is largely a scaling up of that culture through a more precise and targeted information weapon in our hands – the smartphone and its 24/7 streaming apps.

From Reality TV to Live Streaming

Similar to computers, Reality TV made its debut in India in the name of some singing, dancing and adventure sports/ activities, and through their auditions among the youth, they developed a mass appeal. The craft was fairly simple – putting some people under complex psychological situations and collecting the reaction of the different groups and societies, via voting lines (dial-in mobile phones or SMS). That was the beginning of an active mass engagement and an implementation of the “Persuade, Influence and Change,” frame of traditional PsyOps.

Now, these experiments are entering a new phase. The technological developments in the last few decades have accelerated the pace and reach of such entertainment products to a different level. This phase marked the full exploitation of advancement not only in the digital technology domain alone, the other complementary fields such as Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology have undergone significant progress too. It is important to note that due to absolute presence and unhindered access for over two decades, now makers of these platforms have a rich experience in analyzing the message and communication exchanged between different groups of our society too, across all regions/ cultures and age groups. Our actions, reactions, emotions, behavior, choices, likes/ dislikes, and overall psychology is nothing but bit-sized information stored in their massive data servers! As a result, their tone, flavor and craft of experiment are consistently improving and getting more precise with each passing day.

Alignment with the Youth ‘Psych’

These days YouTube is circulating and advertisement that their growing creator ecosystem contributed Rs 6,800 crore to the Indian GDP and supported 683,900 full-time equivalent jobs in India in 2020. What does that mean in simple terms?

Entertainment, gaming, dancing, music, cooking, travel, comedy, pet care, home care, self-care, talking or any other hobby or routine, is no more some leisure activity. These are the new employment opportunities for the youth and a highly rewarding career too.

Indian society is inherently outcome-oriented. When a child spends more than usual hours on something, the parent usually asks  – what’s the return? By keeping this psyche of youth and society in mind, these platforms have revamped their strategy too. Today, the more a youth spends time on social media, the more he/ she is capable to earn followers/ likes/ shares/ impressions, higher the chance of his success in life (this is what they highlighted). And when they see around, what do they find? There are several success stories, that originated from a common source! There are several influencers-cum-celebrities out there who not only have a highly rewarding career/ income on social networks but a post-retirement plan too. Several such faces can now even be seen in our regional/ national politics. And if these local examples are not sufficient then search globally – these platforms have created several success cases, for each region/ race/ color/ culture on the planet (at this moment, Zelenskyy is one such face too). On a broader level, all that makes traditional career/ education/ innovation/ discovery/ research/ engineering kind of path appear as a less attractive and less rewarding option for the young minds!

This is the psyche of our Gen Z and Gen Alpha, which are born and nurtured in this environment!

Conclusion

“Elevate yourself through the power of your mind, and not degrade yourself, for the mind can be the friend and also the enemy of the self.” (The Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 6, Verse 5).

From perception to change to influence to command, computer technologies’ improvisations are now entering a state for which we have a reference in our ancient texts. In Ram-Ravan Yuddh, it is said that there came a moment when Ravan invoked “Maya” (the weapon of illusion), the weapon created an illusion of reviving all the armies and their leaders already killed in the war. Then Ram was reminded by his charioteer Matali that: “In your original identity, you are the creator of illusions in this universe. Ravan has created the illusion of phantoms to confuse you. If you make up your mind, you can dispel them immediately.” It is said that then Ram invoked the weapon called “Gyaana” (wisdom) and soon the entire illusion of terrifying armies created by Ravan evaporated into the thin air.

To deal with the Cognitive Warfare’s new improvisations, India’s ancient wisdom and thousands of years of experiences of experimenting with human intelligence can show a path! If name/ fame/ greed is the focus of the approach of Western model, then ‘Tyag and Tapasya’ is a time-tested approach of Bharat. It is this approach of our great rishi munis (who were the world’s leading inventors/ explorers and scientists) which made us thrive in several human endeavours in the past!

Bharat can develop a unique counter-Cognitive Warfare doctrine of its own and a time to work in that direction has come!

ALSO READ: Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 1)

The post Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 2) appeared first on IMR.

ALSO READ: Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 2)

Misinformation, Propaganda, Narratives, Info War, Psy Ops and other non-kinetic tactics of World War II and Cold War phase, are rapidly getting replaced by tools of the 21st Century, that are more concise, precise, targeted, and at the same time largely ‘extremist’ in their approach. These are designed keeping the continuously reducing attention span of targeted viewers and the needs of hyper-empowered ‘homo digitalis’ in mind.

In the classic war strategies, it is often said that the best deceptions are based on ambiguity, mixing fact and fiction so that one cannot be disentangled from the other. In all the previous forms of psychological operations, whether leaflets, loudspeakers, radio, print and electronic propaganda, the truth remained an important ingredient of use and the key idea was that for manipulation to be effective, it had to be based (to a maximum extent) on some Truth and Credibility, otherwise it would not work in the long run. But all that is now a thing of the past. Those strategies belong to a phase when deceptions or manipulation operations used to be some irregular events, not a 24/7 live-streamed reality! In the world of bite-sized content and streaming communications, the philosophical concepts of ‘Art of War’ have mostly been replaced by psychologically fascinating ‘Art of Lying’ and the ideas of fact, logic, truth and credibility are gradually becoming obsolete and ineffectual.

So how the future recipe of psychological experiments will taste with these new ingredients? Russia-Ukraine War offers a perfect snapshot of that future!

After over 40 days of stunning speeches and standing ovations, massive cheerleading campaigns, TikTok manoeuvres, Instagram/ Twitter/ YouTube revolutions and all-out internet invasion, some horrific images of Ukrainian civilian causalities started coming out to the surface, and the world heard the “silence of ruined cities and killed people,” as Zelenskyy rightly quoted in his Grammy award message. These images do not go well with the much celebrated “heroic victory” of the Ukrainian President, yet he shared them with the global audience with some kind of ‘guarantee’ that neither the blame nor the accountability for this whole episode would ever come to his shoulders!

After all, it is Russia, the aggressor who committed these “war crimes.” NATO partners who betrayed the Ukrainians and the rest of the world, which is unable to decide whom to side with, is further making it worse! So where is the fault of Zelenskyy in all this? He is only doing the job that best suits him, carrying the image of “servant leader” (that elected him to chair) managing public opinion/ perceptions, and giving perfect shots for this live-streamed war series, in real-time! But how do those millions of Ukrainians who turned ‘refugees’ overnight and those who lost their families and dear ones in this nonsensical campaign for “NATO membership” see all this? How they perceive the role of their social media hero President whom they elected to end the war not to accelerate it, perhaps, will never come to the light!

“Ukraine has gone from bread basket to bread line,” said UN World Food Programme Head, citing the serious humanitarian crisis in the country. According to UN reports, Ukrainians are trapped in besieged Ukrainian cities, lacking access to food, water and essential services. Interestingly, from day one of the war, providing ‘uninterrupted internet’ connectivity to civilians tops the list of priorities for the Ukrainian government. As of now, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in partnership with Elon Musk has provided over 5,000 Starlink satellite internet terminals to Ukraine, which are largely up and running despite missiles and cyber attacks.

From absolute internet control to weaponization of public opinion, in many ways, the Ukraine war is a classic case of 21st-century Cognitive Warfare, pilot-tested successfully!

‘Persuade, Change, Influence and Command’

“Communication is a kind of war, its field of battle is the resistant and defensive minds of the people you want to influence. The goal is to advance, to penetrate their defenses and occupy their minds,” writes Robert Greene in his book “The 33 Strategies of War” (2006).

In the middle of the Ukraine War, the White House invited selected social media influencers on a zoom call to guide them on how to educate their millions of followers spread across the world, about U.S. policy on Ukraine. The White House digital strategy director tweeted: “An astonishing amount of people are learning about the invasion of Ukraine through digital creators who have begun to cover it,” and “we take that really seriously, and are working to make sure those creators have the ability to have their questions answered.”

That in simple words was an open invitation for social media influencers to join NATO Psy Ops and Cognitive Warfare against Russia.

What is Cognitive Warfare?

“Cognitive Warfare is the weaponization of public opinion by an external entity,” for “influencing public and governmental policy” and “destabilizing public institutions,” defines NATO’s report: ‘FALL 2020 – Cognitive Warfare – An Attack on Truth and Thought.’ The study says that Cognitive Warfare is different from earlier forms in the sense that it is not limited to controlling the “flow of information” rather it is a fight “to control or alter the way people react to information.” It highlights the “power of words/ ideas and non-kinetic war,” citing how “the Soviet Union watched the collapse of the Iron Curtain,” and the impact of the power of “blue jeans and rock and roll.”

The document mentions Russia 54 times, China 20 times, and Iran 6 times, citing how these three had waged cognitive attacks against the Western bloc through misinformation/ false narratives campaigns about the Corona outbreak and what the three could do in the near future. It highlights how the combination of social media, news networks, automation algorithms, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology is paving the way for a dangerous future and talks about adopting the “defense forward” doctrine of the USA, which means “preemptively preventing and proactively searching for attacks.”

A careful look at the Ukrainian leadership approach in this war reveals that it is largely inspired by findings of such NATO reports on psychological and cognitive warfare.

Cognition refers to “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses,” and Cognitive Warfare attempts to influence this process and its internal mechanism. A recent definition comes from Oliver Backes and Andrew Swab of Harvard’s Belfer Center, in their published work in Dec 2019 that says: “Cognitive Warfare is a strategy that focuses on altering how a target population thinks – and through that how it acts.”

If we look around, from a teenager to adults to senior citizens, what are the sources for acquiring knowledge and understanding through “thought, experience, and senses,” in this Google’s system of the world?

According to a recent report “Digital 2022 – Global Overview,” there are approx 4.95 billion internet users in the world (62.5% of the global population) and 4.62 billion active social media users, who spend on an average 6 to 7 hours daily online. India comes in the list of countries where people spend more time than the average on the Web and now Gen Z (the generation born between 1997 and 2012) is the biggest target audience of these platforms. Major activities, which information prosumers (one who both consume and produce) perform online, include keeping up-to-date with news/events, watching/producing videos, TV shows/ movies/ gaming, live streaming content and chatting with family/ friends and social networks. And most importantly, all these activities they perform not with a routine mindset, there are inbuilt elements of ‘addiction’ in these algorithms that are the product of ongoing research on psychology, neurology, sociology and science of influence, designed to affect the ‘wetware’ of the human brain, which is also called the “grey matter” of the brain in which opinions/ perceptions are formed and decisions are made.

If Media is psychological and cognitive warfare’s most useful weapon then Content is its ammunition. Advanced research in the domains of Artificial Intelligence (AI), psychology and neuroscience has the potential to impact the cognitive functioning of human brains and when this potential gets leveraged for the psychological operations in real-time through a device that people carry 24/7 in their hands, the results are simply remarkable!

Zelenskyy’s Leadership Approach – a Brief Case Study on ‘Persuasion’

In the middle of the Russia-Ukraine War, Netflix decided to stream Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s political series “Servant of the People” again! It is a political TV series created and produced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who stars a 30-year-old history teacher, who got unexpectedly elected as the President of Ukraine (after a video of him ranting about the corrupt system goes viral). The series, which is the product of Kvartal 95 studio (a studio founded by Zelenskyy in 2003) ran for three seasons from 2015 to 2019. It is interesting that, while the series was still on the air, in 2018, Kvartal 95 studio registered a political party similar to the title of the series “Servant of the People,” and the whole election campaign of Zelenskyy was orchestrated to establish this narration that Zelenskyy in reel life and real life was the same.

Zelenskyy ran the entire presidential campaign on a virtual mode, avoiding human contact with his electorate, and addressed his voters through YouTube shorts, TikTok and Instagram posts and garnered millions of views. There was news that he also spent a good amount of time of his campaign producing the next three episodes of the TV series. An article “The World Just Witnessed the First Entirely Virtual Presidential Campaign,” published in Politico magazine on April 24, 2019, mentions that: “He not only traded on the image of a complete outsider, he also did no face-to-face campaigning, made no speeches, held no rallies, eschewed travel across the country, gave no press conferences, avoided in-depth interviews with independent journalists and, until the last day of campaigning, did not debate.”

The article further notes that Zelenskyy’s “virtual-first strategy” allowed him to run his campaign “on general themes and vague promises and to avoid issuing detailed positions on policy issues,” and the entire campaign was focused on the “discontent with the way things are—and lambasting Ukraine’s business and political elites for making them that way.” And finally, it concludes thus, “the U.S. and the West can help ensure that the choice Ukrainian voters have taken in electing an ambitious but untested political newcomer pays off and does not plunge Europe into an accelerating conflict with Russia.”

In a nutshell, from the 2019 election to the 2022 War, the internet and Western help were always on the back of Zelenskyy, and if one keeps the virtual propaganda aside, it seems like a classic case of installing a puppet leadership!

ALSO READ: Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 2)

The post Cognitive Warfare in the Ukraine War (Part 1) appeared first on IMR.

Information Weaponsied in the Ukraine War

Russia-Ukraine war is not the first war of the Information age but it certainly marks the beginning of a new and dangerous trend in Information Warfare. The ease with which more than half of the world’s population is being denied to their basic right – the right to freedom of ‘opinion’ and ‘expression,’ the way 4.9 billion internet users have been made hostage to tech platforms’ filtered worldview (on the click of a mouse), must be a matter of concern for all responsible countries of the world!

The plight of Ukrainians is heart-wrenching and cannot be justified but that is one side of the War, and knowing the other side, no matter whether it’s black or white, comes under the most celebrated definition of individual freedom as well!

From the beginning, it appears that for the Big Tech club, this war offers a perfect moral terrain to test their enormous digital might (accumulated over the years) – to see how much their improvisation can influence social, political, and geopolitical events to shape the destiny of a War, in real-time! But what if this pilot completed successfully? Will it be called the loss of Russia alone!

Recent Developments

On 16th March, while introducing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to U.S. Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (in an emotional gesture) led the members of the house in chanting “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine). The virtual address of Ukraine’s social media star President aired live, received millions of views, likes, comments, re-tweets, impressions, and shares across the world. Within a few minutes of the live stream, almost all major social media platforms got flooded with public reactions/emotions in the support of Zelenskyy and an equal proportion of hatred against Russian President Vladimir Putin. From the beginning, Zelenskyy’s moves tok the internet by storm, and everything related to him was ‘viral’ on social media platforms, and that was, perhaps, a sufficient reason to hail the ‘glory’ of a President, whose country was in the middle of a war!

Before ending his speech, Zelenskyy played a 2 min 20 seconds video too, where mass devastation of his country by Russian troops, along with scenes of good old days and present scenario were presented in a single frame (with slow music in the background). The video was so perfectly composed that it makes one wonder whether the Ukrainian President is sitting inside a bunker with his troops (from where he often posts pictures and videos on his Instagram/Twitter/YouTube/Facebook etc.) or with his ‘Kvartal-95’ studio staff!

If the Russia-Ukraine war would have been a movie or a reality show, it would have been declared a global blockbuster by far and Zelenskyy would have been nominated for an Oscar 2022 (through online voting lines)! But unfortunately, this is not the case. In between these much-celebrated ‘glories’, standing ovations, routine social media lives, and heroic press conferences; there are some grim realities of War and some real numbers that exist too.

War has already caused grave damage to common Ukrainians, their properties, infrastructure, and source of livelihood are severely destroyed. According to a recent UN report, War in Ukraine damaged over $100 billion worth of infrastructure and inflicted hundreds of civilian and military causalities. And if the conflict drags on, it risks creating a “devastating freefall into poverty” and “extreme vulnerability” for millions of people. There are also estimates that if the War protracted at the current pace, the rest of the world will soon start feeling the heat as well, and all prospects of post-Covid global economic recovery will get seriously affected!

But far from all these real-life challenges, the Ukrainian President is busy fighting a different kind of war.

Weapon of Mass ‘Deception’ and New Front Lines

It is said that “control people’s perceptions of reality and you control them.” Applying aggressive PR campaigns to deceive the real objectives/status of the War, is a part of a long and tested Western strategy. But what has changed now is that this time it turned more open, blunt, precise, and real-time, with the help of big tech platforms and their political/diplomatic executives.

It is interesting that when Russian troops marched toward Ukrainian borders, Zelensky sent an SOS call to Meta executives to block Russia’s media outlets from posting to Facebook in Ukraine and to cut off Facebook and Instagram in Russia itself. Nick Clegg, former deputy Prime Minister, United Kingdom, and current Policy Affairs head of Meta (who was promoted to the position a few days before the War) responded to that call by not only blocking Russian Media in Ukraine but by making ‘temporary’ changes in the platform’s overall policy toward hate speech too (so that Ukrainian can post ‘death threats’ to Russians and Putin). According to Bloomberg’s report, from the beginning of war, Clegg is in constant touch with Zelensky and his staff, he is sending them regular updates over emails, and facilitating them by providing additional features such as blocking pro-Russian accounts, hiding their friend lists, and blocking ads from Russian businesses, etc.

When asked an explanation for such motivated moves by Russian prosecutor, Nick Clegg tweeted that: “Our policies are focused on protecting people’s rights to speech as an expression of self-defense in reaction to a military invasion of their country.”

Now the question comes if media which Russian government controls is called ‘state-controlled,’ then how Meta can be called ‘free’ medium, after such politically motivated steps and ‘special gestures,’ taken by a former political executive?

It is interesting that for every social media/big tech product that the Russian government blocks in their country, there are VPNs and Onion Routers kind of service protocols to surpass that and to open the gates of the dark web for Russians but when a normal internet user, sitting in a third country, try to access Russian media outlets from Google, a “403 – Forbidden. That’s an error,” message returns to their screen (as an extra token for the so-called liberty)!

Volunteer Hackers and Digital Mercenaries

On 27th February, Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation, called out all hackers of the world to join Ukraine’s “IT Army,” and help the country to fight on the cyber front. On the same day, pro-Ukrainian hacktivists of the infamous ‘Anonymous’ hacker group launched a series of cyberattacks against websites of the Russian government, their financial institutions, media, and businesses. Within 48 hours, they claimed to take down over 300 Russian government platforms. As per the latest updates, more than 300,000 volunteer hackers (mostly millennials and teenagers) from different parts of the world have already joined the fight from Ukraine’s side. Through a telegram group “IT Army of Ukraine”, these volunteers are coordinating with each other, disrupting Russia and the neighboring Belarus government and their critical infrastructure, including Railways, and electricity grids, sharing the location coordinates of Russian tanks and troops with Ukrainian forces, and launching simultaneous propaganda war against Russia, with a simple and innocent claim- “they are fighting for what is right and what is truth.”

Covering the key in charge of this entire campaign, Mykhailo Fedorov, The New York Times article (published on 12th March) says: “The work has made Mr. Fedorov one of Mr. Zelensky’s most visible lieutenants, deploying technology and finance as modern weapons of war.” In fact, “Mr. Fedorov is creating a new playbook for military conflicts that shows how an outgunned country can use the internet, crypto, digital activism and frequent posts on Twitter to help undercut a foreign aggressor.”

Now Mykhailo Fedorov has a new request, which he again tweeted from his official account: “If Apple and Google notify all the smartphones in the world about the constant Russian shelling of Ukraine, all the people would force their governments to close the sky over Ukraine because of war horrors.”

From a simplistic view, it appears healthy participation of pro-active internet users to bring down the evil army of invaders but what if this trend becomes the new normal! Can the trend of running such a global war recruitment exercise and activism campaign, on the basis of morality and truth, bypassing all geopolitical talks/negotiations/efforts and other sovereign nations’ own national interests, be called moral and just, in all the cases, all the time? And what if in the future, some real terror regime will start a similar open hacking cum social campaign against the world? Then what would be the moral basis to fight against that kind of war?

Smartphones, Fast Internet, and Influencers cum War Fighters

On 18th March, a video of the Ukrainian president went viral on media, when he paid a visit to civilians wounded by attacks on Ukraine, at a hospital in the capital Kyiv and met a teenage girl receiving treatment for shrapnel wounds. Seeing the president next to her, the little girl started crying out of joy, and then she told the Ukrainian Premier how he is popular on “TikTok,” adding: “everyone supports you in TikTok,” it prompted Zelensky to smile and he joked: “Yes? So we have occupied TikTok?” The girl replied, “all talks are about you, it is all about you.”

This light-hearted moment is, unfortunately, the reality of common Ukrainians at the moment, which is also called the first “TikTok War” of our time! The country is under serious attack but Elon Musk’s Starlink’s fast internet services are healing the wounds of Ukrainians with TikTok, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, Twitter, and FB lives.

From the beginning of the War, social networks have been flooded with videos from Ukrainian civilians documenting their live experiences of War, and the images of women and teenagers/kids posing for selfies, shooting ‘TikTok’ videos (wrapped in blankets in underground bunkers, army tanks in the streets, and so on.), playing music instruments amid the debris of buildings destroyed by shelling, etc. are going viral everywhere. Ukrainian social media influencers, who usually post videos of their travel, fashion, movies, foods, etc., have now started sharing their war experiences posing with combat gears and machine guns and they have virtually turned into ‘war-fighters’ on the battlefields of social networks.

If this social influencing game would have played out between the two countries, then it would still be called OK, but the problem lies in the unfair acceleration of this trend, at the global level. While on one hand, all major social networks have restricted Russian content from their platforms, on the other hand, they encouraged battalions of social media influencers (Ukrainians/Non-Ukrainians) to run a one-sided campaign against Russia.

We must note that there are millions of social influencers (cum paid workers of tech clubs) with direct access to billions of smartphone users! Encouraging them to leverage their access to spread propaganda for objectives of a War, under the guise of morality, truth, democracy, freedom, and ‘western values,’ kind of things, is certainly more dangerous than the state-controlled propaganda machines!

State Controlled vs. Internet Controlled

The Russian news editor, who unfurled an anti-war sign behind the newsreader on a live TV show and flashed a placard with words like: “Stop the war,” and “Don’t believe the propaganda. They are lying to you here,” earned a social media star and international celebrity status overnight for her ‘daring’ act of speaking against the government and army of her country (from Zelensky to Macron, everyone praised her for this act). But the question is- Will a regular internet user who expresses his/her views in support of Russia, be allowed to become a celebrity/influencer on the U.S.-controlled tech platforms? Forget about expressing support for Russia, even accessing the Russian side of the story is being completely forbidden in the so-called platforms of freedom and democracy!

So what is worse, State-controlled media or Big Tech club-controlled internet?

Occupying the moral ‘High Grounds’

It is often said that wars of self-interest usually end when the winner’s interests are satisfied but wars of morality are often “longer and bloodier.”

In 2009, while launching NATO’s new strategic concept, former US Defense Sectary James Mattis said: “we need a new Strategic Concept that reconciles war’s grim realities with the human aspirations of our own people and the global audience,” as changing character of war in the information age will require military forces that recognize that “capturing perceptions” is the new ‘high Ground’ in today’s conflicts, as “the moral is to the material as three is to one.”

From the beginning of the War, the focus of Ukraine is on holding the moral high grounds with the help of information weapons- Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Telegram and TikTok and they certainly have an edge here. But there is an interesting side of this superficial moral high ground as well.

From Churchill to World War II’s ‘Darkest Hour’ to Pearl Harbor to ‘9/11,’ to Terrorism to Third World War, in his speeches, Zelenskyy- the moral warrior of the social media age, is using every occasion to call out his allies and partners to turn this war into a global crusade for democracy, liberty, peace, and freedom! But at the same time, with the full support of the narration industry behind his back, he is quite assured that he will never be called an ‘aggressor,’ a term which is more frequently used for the Russian President (who on the contrary consistently cautioning the world to refrain from contributing to any kind of escalation).

Influence on India

In his article “To Be or NATO be: Putin’s War on Ukraine Is Also a Western Creation,” former foreign secretary, Kanwal Sibal writes: “The propaganda against India by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist and so on shows that a free press is no guarantee of objective information.”

The approach of Indian media (print/electronic/social) in this entire event exposed our vulnerability and vacuum in the narration industry too, Kanwal Sibal summarized our situation more precisely when he wrote: “The Ukrainian crisis has also exposed how our own press is incapable of reporting responsibly on international affairs. It is treating the Russian assault on Ukraine as a quasi-assault on India, with an outpouring of emotional sympathy for Ukraine and castigation of Russia as the aggressor, ignoring the complex causes of the conflict and the need for mature, balanced, and factual reporting, with due consideration of not being entirely out of line with the country’s foreign policy interests in search of TRPs.”

This war has many lessons for the countries like India, where not only in traditional media but on new-age tech platforms too, the western bloc has an absolute and ever-increasing dominance!

We observed that how social media policies can be relaxed for ‘violent speech,’ tech mercenaries (army of hackers) can be recruited online, funds to run the War can be crowd-sourced via crypto, releasing coordinates of troops movement to enemies has become the new definition of morality, and the War itself turn into a military show streaming 24/7 in smartphones, now should we continue to enjoy this free entertainment or take some steps for the future war preparedness?

What Next – Weaponization of AI?

In the Russia-Ukraine crisis, one thing which comes out in open is that every single western product or idea – from food to money to social media to technology is a potential strategic weapon! And a decision on how, when, and where to launch it, will not be taken by voting in the UN!

If the weaponization of information via social networks is capable to attack the ‘wetware’ of billions of people, what would be the scale of damage when AI will be weaponized in the future? We must note that all these tech platforms already have inbuilt AI capabilities, it is only a matter of convenience and choice of Big Tech and their PR staff to leverage it for their goals or not!

With 100 percent market access, we have given a free pass to Big Tech club in our Narration Industry (and their related economy) but what would be our future options when AI would be weaponized against our own strategic interests? And how are we planning to tackle that situation?

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On face it may look merely about money, but the narrative building has larger geostrategic implications. Muslim Brotherhood’s entry into Kashmir means it will keep festering the region. It is not a coincidence that Qatar, Turkey and Pakistan are actively behind this. This is a war and it has begun, the report said.

“Having tested waters, and putting key players in place, we should expect a call for BDS against India seeping in with the narrative of genocide. The ’emerging’ conflict industry in Kashmir could play out in cultural, academic and economic boycott,” it added.

As expected, the Pak troll army is ever ready to hype the narrative of genocide and BDS. Hundreds of fake handles are created virtually before each campaign to push fake narratives.

A boycott campaign was launched in September last year by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) nexus against India as well as targeting Saudi Arabia and the UAE apart from France. The campaign was supported by the troll factories of Turkey and Pakistan. It was the first open campaign by MB through the new emerging nexus of Qatar-Turkey-Pakistan, dubbed as QTPi.

While it had all the characteristics of propaganda, including the liberal use of fake pictures and videos, it was not an ordinary propaganda. It appears as a strength test for Muslim Brotherhood, as it put several of the news media from its arsenal to use, including the jewel Al Jazeera, risking their credibility, the report said.

The sheer resource that MB-led QTPi deployed in this fake news-driven propaganda made it abundantly clear that not only Brotherhood has arrived in India, but it also intends to stay.

The intent was soon clear when a hush-hush Tribunal was organised in Sarajevo (Bosnia & Herzegovina) in December 2021 on the Kashmir issue. This was a good enough indicator that the Brotherhood has decided to put their attention to this part, the report said.

Disinfolab said contrary to the usual noise created around such events, the Tribunal was kept rather low-key. They were again testing reactions to an attempt by MB on appropriating Kashmir, less from India and more from the Jamaat stakeholders. Replacing the traditional crowd, all major players at the Tribunal was connected with Muslim Brotherhood. The next step — yet another report on Kashmir within a month by a UK-based legal-cum-investigative-cum activist firm which came as no surprise.

These events are part of a larger design, a build-up to create a conflict space in the conflict industry. Muslim Brotherhood had successfully run a conflict industry in Palestine for more than a decade. Now it is looking to shift the business to a new location. And one of the key tools for making a viable conflict industry is BDSM: Boycott, Divestment, Sanction, Movement.

The narratives that have been built in India in the last few years — from Islamophobia, fascism to now genocide — are building blocks for this business enterprise.

Going by the record, the conflict industry runs into billions of dollars. The Disinfolab report seeks to unmask the various fronts of the Muslim Brotherhood which have already been deployed into this new theatre.

The report also makes an effort to not only expose the MB networks and various individuals, but also provide a blueprint of the playbook that is going to be deployed. Given the quantum of resources invested into this new startup, it is going to be a protracted battle, the report said.

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