Social Media, Technology, and Conflict Midterm

Doxing

- Another way people are harassed online is "doxing." Doxing refers to the disclosure of personal information online against a person's will, ranging from home addresses to hacked private emails.

Cities and Online Connectivity

- Cities brought large numbers of people in concentrated areas that altered the architectures of interaction and visibility. Online connectivity functions in a very similar way, but an even more profound alteration because people do not have to be in the same physical space to connect with one another. - In the past, spaces where people met, such as coffeehouses in the Middle East and salons in France, had restricted access to gender and wealth as were digital technologies early on. However, as modern technologies have rapidly become cheaper, they have rapidly allowed poorer communities to utilize them and join the online connection.

The Dirty Origins of Digital Freedom

- Following a viral fabricated report about the high levels of pornographic material on the internet from a CMU student Marty Rimm, Congress passed one of the strictest obscenity laws. The Communications Decency Act (CDA) stated that if any obscene material was sent or displayed to persons under 18, the punishment would be two years in prison and a $100,000 fine. - However, two Congressmen argued the entire internet could be paralyzed out of fear of lawsuits. The subsequent amendment, Section 230, was passed and is considered the most important law in tech. - Section 230 provided protection for good faith efforts by internet providers to uphold US law even if they fell short. Most of CDA was struck down as unconstitutional, but Section 230 remained and the internet was left to mostly govern itself. - The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) aimed to target violators of intellectual property rights. YouTube was ground zero for the copyright battle. In 2006, the company introduced its ContentID system to spot matches of uploaded content with a database of copywritten material. - In 2009, Microsoft announced a free service called PhotoDNA, which matched posted images and videos with a massive database. Every major social media platform adopted the tool and essentially eradicated child pornography from their networks. - After a young girl committed suicide stemming from a case of cyberbullying in 2006, dozens of states enacted cyberbully laws. For the first time, Americans were forced to reckon with offline consequences from online actions. Engineers in social media companies were pulled ever closer to regulating free speech on their platforms. To do otherwise would invite the government to jump in and pass much stricter legislation. - Throughout the years since, cases of potentially damaging content led to more rules, each requiring more precise and often absurd clarification. - A handful of Silicon Valley engineers were trying to enforce a single set of standards for every nation in the world in an attempt to avoid scandal and controversy.

MENA and Free Speech

- For decades, authoritarian states throughout MENA built-up extensive control and censorship of the mass media. The public sphere was closed, controlled, characterized by censorship, and ruled by fear. The Egyptian media would not report news that reflected the government poorly. - People feared talking about politics. In this climate, many people in MENA did not know whether their neighbors also hated the autocrats who had ruled with an iron fist for decades. - Digital technologies changed this. In 2009, Facebook was made available in Arabic, greatly expanding its reach into the growing digital population in the Arab world. - Additionally, Facebook and other social media platforms connected family and friends and were difficult to shut down because they were not only used by social activists.

Lo and Behold

- In 1968, JCR Licklider and Robert W. Taylor wrote a paper titled "The Computer as a Communication Device." They predicted a vast constellation of globally linked computers that would share and process information. The theoretical foundation of the internet had been laid years prior to its first proof of concept. - Licklider and Taylor were employees of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and were in a place to make their vision a reality from the support of the US military. The project was called ARPANET. - On October 29, 1969, the first message was processed between two linked computers at Stanford University and UCLA. The message was intended to say "LOGIN," but was ultimately a miscommunication and said just "LO."

War Goes Viral

- In the summer of 2014, ISIS roared into Northern Iraq. #AllEyesOnISIS organized by diehard fans and Twitter bots orchestrated the popularity and advertisement of movement towards a caliphate. - #AllEyesOnISIS quickly became the top-trending hashtag on Twitter. ISIS' online presence acted as an invisible artillery bombardment sowing terror and defection. - Iraq had drastically changed since the 2003 invasion. - Although once banned, three-quarters of Iraq now owned a cellphone and had easy access to the internet. - Sunni and Shia sectarian conflict still raged; soldiers and police did not trust each other; and the Sunnis trusted both groups even less. ISIS was able to easily recruit spies and insurgents via online forums. - ISIS's prized target was the city of Mosul and the brutal content shared from their hashtag caused thousands of government defenders to flee the city before the invasion occurred. - The tactic Blitzkrieg allowed Nazi Germany to overwhelm the French ranks and take over the country in under two months by speedily invading and terrifying the army. - Similarly, ISIS pioneered a blitzkrieg utilizing the internet and displaying heroic victories. - Whether the content they shared was accurate, the videos and images moved faster than the truth. - ISIS didn't hack the network, but instead hacked and manipulated the information on it. - ISIS recruited over 30,000 foreigners from around a hundred countries to join the fight in the months that followed. Other groups and individuals were utilizing technology to do the same thing. Nearly every rebel group in the Syrian civil war used YouTube to recruit, fundraise, and train, while Bashar al-Assad used Instagram to display himself in a positive way. - Social media was used to instantly stream the carnage throughout the fight with ISIS and was even used as a column of peace via @MosulEye to help civilians in danger. Social media had changed the dynamics of conflict.

What Do We Know? What Can We Do?

- The LikeWar has rules: -- For all of the sense of flux, the modern information environment is becoming stable. Most of the key players will remain the same and the prominent social media companies and voices will play a crucial role for years to come. -- The internet is a battlefield. It is a platform for achieving the goals of the actor who manipulates it most effectively. -- This battlefield changes how we must think about information itself. Everything is now transparent, yet the truth can easily be obscured. -- War and politics have never been so intertwined. Politics has taken on elements of information warfare, while violent conflict is increasingly influenced by the online tug-of-war for online opinion. -- We're all part of the battle. There is no neutral ground.

Traditional Journalism vs. Social Media Journalism

- Traditional Journalism -- Can only see what is in front of their nose and hear what they're told -- Try to solve the problem of scarcity: lack of cameras at an event - Social media journalists -- Can see hundreds of feeds that show an event from many points of view -- Try to solve the problem of abundance: telling fake reports from real ones and composing a narrative from a chaotic supply of news - 140journos reported uncensored news and could not misstep as they would lose credibility. One method they used was analyzing the metadata in sources: a time stamp, a geolocation, and an author.

Wael Ghonim

- Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian who worked for Google and resided in the UAE, was outraged after the brutal murder of Khaled Said by Egyptian police forces. Ghonim started a Facebook page called "We Are All Khaled Said." - The page quickly grew and became a focal point for Egyptian dissident political discussion. After much heated discussion, Ghonim posted a Facebook event inviting people to TAhrir Square on January 25, 2011. It eventually led to the ousting of Mubarak.

"140journos"

- 140journos is a citizen journalism collective and was founded by a group of tech savvy young. They were inspired by Akinan's tweet to use social media as a way to bypass censored mass media and arguably they were the most reliable news source of teh Gezi protests. - Like teh mass media world, the networked public sphere has formal and informal institutions, gatekeepers, hierarchies, etc., but the challeng eis there is too much information rather than severe censorship. Spreading the truth is not easy or automatic.

A Networked Public

- A profound transition in human history was the shift from face-to-face communities to communities identified with cities, nation-states, and now a globalized world order. - Technologies, from railroads and circulated newspapers to computers, alter our ability to preserve and circulate ideas and stories, the ways in which we connect and converse, the people with whom we can interact, the things we can see, and teh structures of power that oversee the means of contact. - The public sphere is not a single uniformed phenomenon, but instead different groups of people coming together under different conditions with varying extent and power. Early on, the public sphere was facilitated at places like coffeehouses.

Community Watches and Digital Serfs

- AOL became a sprawling digital empire by the mid-1990s. Early on, AOL recognized that the internet was teeming with scum and villainy, and there was no way the company could afford to hire enough employees to police it. - They decided to enlist their most passionate users to police it for them through the AOL Community Leader Program. In exchange for muting disruptive users for up to dozens of hours a week, they were given free or reduced internet access. Ultimately, AOL was sued and forced to pay the volunteer police force $15 million for conducting a "cyber-sweatshop."

Authenticity: The Power of Being Real

- Achieving a sense of authenticity has become an important milestone for any online operation. For example, Taylor Swift has claimed, "In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans - not the other way around." Swift has used her social media accounts to personally acknowledge and reach out to her fans, creating an army of fervent, engaged fans. - ISIS expanded its influence not only through propagandists, but also through a general sense of authenticity. Fighters proved this by posting their personal lives online from photos of battles to birthday parties and pictures of their cats. ISIS's professional choreographed imagery was completed by seemingly candid footage. - Internet-age authenticity has proven most crucial in electoral politics. In the US, the politician who seems most down-to-earth has long carried the day. Ironically, those who run for political office aren't relatable in reality, tending to be rich and elitist. As a result, American politics has long been a tug-of-war over who seems most authentic. - With the rise of social media, the fight to be real turned to what it meant to be real online. Donald Trump wasn't taken seriously initially by political analysts. At the heart of his authenticity was his Twitter account. On the effectiveness of his account, reporter Maggie Haberman said, "People feel like he's talking to them."

Turkey's Media Environment

- After a coup and military regime in the 1980s and heavily censored public sphere in the 1990s, Turkey's media environment began to change in the 21st century. - First, the internet was introduced and quickly adopted to people widely, particularly to use social media platforms. Second, despite a proliferation of mass-media channels, a new censorship regime emerged based on ownership of mass media by corporations who needed the government's favor to profit. - Turkey went from one censorship regime to another in mass media, but the latter regime existed alongside a burgeoning digitally networked public sphere. In this new sphere, a Tweet inspired a few college students to organize a movement using social media, which became the Gezi Park protests of 2013. Turkey's biggest protest in decades.

Signaling Capacity as a Framework

- All social movements bear a mix of capacities based on their interests, goals, culture, and resources. Digital technology allows new configurations to arise that intermingle the technical, political, and social dynamics of a movement. - Looking at digital technologies through the lens of capacity formation and signaling allows us to better understand the ongoing unbundling and recoupling of capacities in social movements, and digital technology's interaction with all of this.

All Hail Our Bot Overlords

- Angee Dixson joined Twitter in 2017 and immediately began supporting alt-right movements, posting some ninety times a day. However, none of the cases Dixson tweeted were real and neither was the profile. - Angee Dixson was a bot - a sophisticated computer program masquerading as a person. Dixson was one of at least 60,000 Russian accounts in a single "botnet" (a networked army of bots) that infested Twitter, warping and twisting the US political dialogue. Likes and retweets attract lots of attention. If enough are given, it can lead to going viral, ultimately dominating pockets of social media networks. - Often, botnets, can play the role of political mercenaries, readily throwing their support from one cause to the next. During Brexit, researchers watched as automated Twitter accounts that had long supported Palestinian independence abruptly shifted their attention to British politics. - The 2016 US presidential race stands unrivaled in the extent of algorithmic manipulation. On Twitter alone, researchers found roughly 400,000 bot accounts that fought to sway the race - two-thirds of them in favor of Donald Trump. - Behind this army of bots are a mix of campaign operatives, true believers, and some who just wanted to watch the world burn. Most infamous went by the handle MicroChip, a freelance software developer. He had a strong tech background, allowing him to manipulate Twitter's programming applications and ultimately being dubbed as the "Trumpbot Overlord" by a Republican strategist. Bots were putting the disinformation campaign on steroids.

Anonymous Spaces

- Anonymous forums are transformative for public spheres dominated by the powerful, where strong social norms make it difficult to have conversations about intimate subjects. People can explore a sense of self and belonging and had their perspective of what was acceptable move beyond societal norms. - An example of this ist eh use of IRC (internet relay chat) an anonymous site that allowed Arab Spring activists to anonymously discuss desired societal changes.

CNN Turkey

- As events carried out, CNN International live broadcasted the protests, highlighting the protests similar to 140journos and similar Turkish social media organizations. - In the meantime, CNN Turkey, owned by the government, was eager to please the government and instead played a documentary about penguins. An outraged viewer put the two screens side-by-side, snapping a picture of both. The picture documenting the stark media blackout went viral, and a penguin would later come to symbolize censored media.

Accidental Emperors

- As their platforms went from thousands to millions and even billions of users, the bright young social media founders were not thinking about the impact they may have on politics and conflict. They mostly struggled to keep up to the demand and keep the sites running. - A senior Facebook vice president wrote in a 2016 memo, "We connect people. Period...That's why all the work we do in growth is justified...Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated by our tools." - The Silicon Valley myopia may matter less if these services were inventions, like the telegraph, which could then be repurposed by other inventors. However, these companies are platforms - services that deliver the most value to users who visit them frequently, often addictively. - The heads of the social media platforms have almost universally been progressive, establishing rules and regulations that seek to mirror the permissive speech codes of the US. New York Times journalist John Herrman wrote, "These companies [put] on the costumes of liberal democracies." - Their "boss" is not the UN or even their user base, it is the shareholders. The only metric that matters is stock price and yearly profit, not the numbers of humans shielded from harm. - However, for example, when Mark Zuckerberg dispatches engineers to ensure the integrity of German elections or vows to uphold peace, prosperity, and freedom he is no longer simply a tech CEO. - Should these companies restrict the information that passes their servers? What should they restrict? How should they do it?

Attention

- Attention is oxygen for social movements. Without it, they cannot catch fire. In the 21st century and the networked public sphere, it is more useful to think of attention as a resource allocated and acquired on local, national, and transnational scales, and censorship as an effort to actively block information from getting out. - Movements have had other obstacles besides censorship. A movement may not get favorable media coverage because of ideological or corporate reasons. Traditional journalists may trivialize, marginalize, or ignore a social movement because they dislike it or a corporate parent may do so because it does not align with their financial interests. - However, the mass media no longer holds a monopoly on attention. Neither censorship nor the competition for attention operates in the same way.

War by Other Memes

- Carl von Clausewitz would have understood almost everything the internet is doing to conflict today. He thought was is part of all the interactions that takes place between people and governments. Ultimately, war is simply a way to get something you want by using force to compel an enemy to your will. - Social media has allowed adversaries to attack the spirit of the people without massive, expensive bombing and propaganda campaigns. Everyone with access to the internet can take part in intimidating the enemy and be active in social media warfare. - Twitter cofounder Evan Williams confessed, "I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world [was] automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that." Just as the internet has reshaped war, war is now radically reshaping the internet. - Five core principles form the foundations of LikeWar: -- The internet has left adolescence. -- The internet has become a battlefield. -- This battlefield changes how conflict is fought. -- This battle changes what "war" means. -- We're all part of this war.

Censorship

- Censorship during the internet era does not operate under the same logic it did during teh heyday of print or even broadcast television. When Mubarak cut off internet and cell phone communication, his move backfired and many more people traveled to Tahrir Square to check on and be with their friends and relatives. - The protestors were also able to circumvent the internet blockade quickly; all they needed was a line to the outside, and the rest of the world would amplify their message. - Foreigners may struggle to understand the nuances of Egyptian politics, but they could easily relate with the brute censorship of cutting off the internet and cell phone use.

Control the Spirit

- China joined the global internet in 1987 and by 2008 passed the US in number of active internet users. Today, Chinese citizens make up a quarter of all the world's "netizens." - From the beginning, it was clear that China could not allow a freewheeling internet network and the government has viewed controlling ideas as a vital duty of the Chinese state. Chinese internet is a closed system and has become defined as the Great Firewall. - China launched its Golden Shield Project in 1998 intending to create the largest surveillance network in history. - The Golden Shield Project has records of every citizen, an army of censors, and automated systems to control and track all of the data transmitted on the web. Chinese censorship actively bans world news and keywords to maintain the national harmony the government desires. - In 2017, Winnie the Pooh disappeared from China's internet as censors figured out "Pooh" was a reference to President Xi who walks with a similar waddle. - Chinese censorship extends beyond clearly political topics to complaints that can be seen as challenging the state in any way. China seeks to censor any message that receives too much grassroot support, even if they're apolitical, because only the central government should have the power to mobilize on mass scale. - Aside from suppressing public opinion, China has actively shaped it. Now known as the 50-Cent Army, public officials, college students, and regime supporters publish positive posts to enhance the view of the Chinese state. - Most ambitiously, China has established a "social credit" system that gives citizens a numerical score reflecting their trustworthiness.

Digital Technologies

- Digital technologies have allowed ordinary poeple new means of broadcasting to millions. Citizens have an increased ability to report wrongdoings and authorities have altered their tactics to control and shape the public sphere. - Rather than imposing outright censorship, governments are producing informational gluts, inducing confusion and distraction, and mobilizing counter-movements to confront social movements.

Disruptive Capacity

- Disruption can happen in momentary interventions, such as a Black Lives MAtter group briefly shutting down a highway, or prolonged interventions, like the Tahrir Square occupation. - However, disruptive tactics do not always receive positive media coverage, and they risk angering people if teh disruption is perceived as illegitimate, counterproductive, or violent. Disruptive capacity carries the highest risk of backlash.

The "Kurdish Question"

- During the 1980s, the Turkish mass media referred to the Kurds as "Mountain Turks" rather than an actual ethnic minority. There were allegations of widespread human rights abuse against the Kurds, but most of Turkey did not hear such news. - In the 1990s, the Kurdish insurgency sparked and tragically claimed 40 thousand lives. News spread around the country, but only in a form that the government was fighting terrorists. There was no way for independent journalism to report otherwise. - In 2002, an Islamist political party less beholden to the military took power and held peace talks with the Kurds. Openly Kurdish representatives were elected into power and they were acknowledged as an ethnic minority. - Under the new government, a new control regime on mass media was established that would use "tax penalties" as a tool to shutdown companies and journalists critical of the government. - In 2011, 34 Kurds were killed by a military jet while smuggling petrol and cigarettes across the border to make a small profit. Journalists remained quiet and waited for the government to isntruct them on what to report, but in teh age of the internet this was not enough. - Serdar Akinan was a journalist in one of these newsrooms, but couldn't sit idle. He flew to Roboski were the bombings took place. Akinan tweeted a picture of the line of coffins and the government could not contain the virality of the internet.

The Super Spread of Lies

- Edgar Welch fully believed the restaurant Comet Ping Pong Pizza was a cover for a Hillary Clinton secret pedophilia ring. After entering the restaurant armed and searching the building without finding anything, Welch quickly surrendered to the police. Welch's beliefs could be traced to a flurry of conspiracy theories known as #Pizzagate garnering more than 1.4 million mentions on Twitter alone. - The far-right and Russian sockpuppets working St. Petersburg latched onto #Pizzagate and following the election, a poll indicated that nearly half of the Trump voters believed that the Clinton campaign had participated in pedophilia, human-trafficking, and satanic ritual abuse. - #Pizzagate shows how online virality is a force that can be manipulated and sustained by just a few influential social media accounts, such as Alex Jones and Jack Posobiec. This is known as "power law." In internet studies meaning rather than a free-for-all among millions of people, the battle for attention is actually dominated by a handful of key nodes in the network. - Modest lies and grand conspiracy theories have been weapons in the political arsenal for millennia. But social media has made them more powerful and more pervasive than ever before. - Researchers at the Columbia Journalism Review broke down roughly 1.25 million news stories published during the 2016 election cycle. They confirmed that liberal and conservative news consumers were both relying more on social media than on traditional media. However, left-leaning users were divided across several mainstays such as the New York Times or the Huffington Post, while right-leaning users all clustered around the hyper-partisan platform Breitbart. - After Andrew Breitbart's death in 2012, Steve Bannon ran the organization and claimed Breitbart to be "the platform for the alt-right." - Thousands of smaller, far-right platforms clung to Breitbart in a tight orbit by sending hyperlinks and advertising profit to each other but almost never outside of their closed network. Breitbart had eclipsed even outlets like Fox News, more than doubling share rates among Trump supporters.

Work-From-Home Sherlock Holmes

- Eliot "Brown Moses" Higgins used YouTube and Google Maps to report on conflict zones that quickly rivaled professional news media and some government intelligence agencies. He began a crowdfunding campaign for "citizen investigative journalists" and established an organization called Bellingcat. - Higgins and the Bellingcat team investigated war crimes, presenting only the facts, by using simple and accessible technologies paired with information floating around social media sites. - Higgins and Bellingcat displayed the power of what is now known as "open-source intelligence" (OSINT).

"Cute Cat Theory" of Activism

- Ethan Zuckerman argues taht platforms that have nonpolitical functions can become more politically powerful because it is harder to censor their large numbers of users who are eager to connect with one another or to share their latest "cute cat" picture.

"Golden Nuggets" of Actionable Intel

- Flynn stressed the importance of piercing through the "fog" of modern information environments to find intelligence that lurked within social media. - Although it is harder than ever to keep a secret, it is also harder than ever to separate the truth from lies. In the right hands, those lies can become powerful weapons.

War in the Open

- Following a drone strike killing the Hamas commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, the Israeli military's official Twitter account taunted Hamas operatives as they progressed through a bombing campaign killing roughly 100 militants. Israel fought on three fronts: the physical fight, the cyber fight, and the social media network streaming videos and images of the offensive maneuvers against Hamas. - The social media network was a narration of the Israeli "Operation Pillar of Defense" from both Israel and Hamas throughout the ongoing conflict. This included exchanges from either side on Twitter taunting their adversaries as the firefight continued. - Israeli reputation was devastated with blowback from their offensive campaigns against Palestinian villages in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Videos and images emerged of young Arab children dying by the hand of the IDF. - In response, Israel conducted a nation-wide effort to reverse the negative feedback and monitored social networks for users "inciting violence" by supporting resistance movements. Between 2011-2015, more than 400 Arabs were arrested for social media crimes with a conviction rate of 99%. - Supporters and officials of Hamas and Israel used social media to influence their respective causes. Information on the field was manipulated to coerce viewers both near and far from the conflict zone to garner international attention to the battle between either side. - Socially mediated conflicts are theatrical. They are about bolstering friends and dissuading foes to back off before the first punch is thrown. Whether the threats are between celebrities, gangs, or nations, users aims to sap their enemies and energize their supporters through use of viral content that proliferates across the network.

Internet Censorship

- For governments to successfully censor the internet, it is not effective to completely deny access, but rather a denial of attention, focus, and credibility. - The goal of the powerful is not to convince people of the truth, but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people.

True Believer

- Former director of the DIA Michael Flynn said, "The exponential explosion of publicly available information is changing the global intelligence system...It's changing how we tool, how we organize, how we institutionalize - everything we do." Professional spies have needed to adjust to a world without secrets. - Former US intelligence community initiatives like the Foreign Broadcast Information System (FBIS) and extensive encyclopedias on regions of interests became shuttered from the volume of OSINT on the internet and sites like Wikipedia. - Michael Flynn argues that the intelligence community must shift from traditional spying techniques that only the government could succeed at in the past, to mining open-source data. This means a shift in nearly every aspect in the intelligence community from budget priorities to changing the way one views the world. - Before social media, according to Flynn, 90% of useful intelligence had come from secret sources, but today nearly 90% comes from open sources that anyone could tap. - Flynn was aggressive with his ideas for the future and was forced into retirement after 33 years of military service. He became a fierce critic of the Obama Administration and started his own Twitter account in 2011. As he entered politics, his persona had changed and his Twitter feed pushed out messages of hate and conspiracies. - A once highly respected intelligence officer, Flynn produced a disinformation campaign that went against his own advice in the past discussing the important of finding accurate information. - Despite this, Michael Flynn was appointed as national security adviser under the Trump Administration, only being fired within a few weeks.

Global Voices

- Global Voices is a grassroots citizen journalism network that spans the globe. Global Voices holds conferences every other year so that people from different countries in the network can meet one another face-to-face. - For activists in Tunisia, Global Voices kept them going. One Tunisian social activists said, "[Global Voices] were the people who were listening to me when nobody was, and cheering me on when nobody was. i might have given up had it not been for them." - To be ready to play key roles in social movements that emerge quickly, activists must maintain themselves as activists over the years even when there is little protest activity or overt dissent.

Governments Strike Back

- Governments have learned how to respond to digitally equipped challengers and social movements - and have even adopted some of their repertoire. Governments sometimes organize protests to oppose social movements. - Nowadays, governments or powerful groups also make rhetorical attacks on bona fide experts by positioning these movements as authorities to be resisted, protraying the media as a tool of the elites (often distant or foreign).

War Between Everyone

- Hacktivists pooled their efforts against the Islamic State's online campaign most notably following the public denouncement of the caliphate by the group Anonymous. Despite their trolling, hacking, and amateur spying against ISIS militants, their impact was modest and foreign recruits continued to flow into ISIS ranks. - However, their goal wasn't to defeat the Islamic State. The point of the anti-ISIS campaign was to simply push back and establish a resistance where before there had been none. - Social media allows anyone with an internet connection to partake in any given global conflict. People most likely won't be willing to travel to a conflict zone to join the physical fight against an adversary, but they are able to take time to fight their cyber activity. - By merely giving attention to the thousands of online disputes, users become a part of them. Like cyberwars, LikeWars are about hacking, but they're targeting human minds not computer networks. - Unlike wars from the past, combatants in LikeWars are all powerless in one key way. Each user is fighting for their own personal and global war, but they are not the ones writing the rules.

Control the Body

- In July 2016, Turkey faced an attempted military coup. Although mass mobilization of the Turkish people would not have been possible without social media, the target of the coup, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, used the coup to his advantage. - Those who opposed the government both in person and online faced persecution and arrest, including an American journalist Dion Nissenbaum. - Within months, 135,000 civil servants were purged including prominent military, social, and political leaders. Nissenbaum said, social media was a "volatile political background" that carried "real-world consequences."

The Business of Veracity vs. Virality

- In Veles, Macedonia, young teenage boys heavily profited from social media by creating catchy websites to appeal to the public. They relied on Facebook shares to drive traffic and generate profit from advertisements. In a town of 25% annual unemployment and under an annual income of $5,000, the best of the young Macedonians were making tens of thousands of dollars a month. - Competition swelled, but the business venture was timed around the 2016 US presidential election. Veles soon became hub of hundreds of American politics-related sites. - The stories provided by the young Macedonians were not spinoffs of actual news coverage, but flat-out lies. The teens did not care about Trump's message but said, "nothing [could] beat" his supporters when it came to clicking on their made-up stories. - The single most popular news story of the entire election - "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President" - was a fabrication from Macedonia. Three times as many Americans read and shared it on their social media accounts as they did the top-performing New York Times article. - The monetization of clicks and shares - known as the "attention economy" - was achieving the same thing governments in Turkey, China, and Russia sought to do when obscuring the truth as a matter of policy.

Inundation: Drown the Web, Run the World

- In retrospect, Trump's win as president shouldn't have been all that surprising. By almost any social media measure, Trump was a literal superpower compared to his Republican and Democratic opponents. He had by far the most social media followers, notably having as many as all of his Republican rivals for the GOP nomination combined. - More important was the digital troll army of supporters that organized in many corners of the internet. They labored tirelessly for Trump without being formal members of the campaign. Whenever online attacks were clearly profane or bigoted, he could deny association. But when the activists struck gold, the messages could be incorporated into official campaign messages. - The strategist behind the online operations was Brad Parscale. Trump's digital team began to guide his travel, fundraising, rally locations, and even topics of speeches. Parscale said, "[The campaign] put so many different pieces together, and what's funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn't pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well." - To "win" the internet, one must learn how to use these elements of narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation. If you can "win" the internet, you can win feuds online and in the physical world and even warp how people see themselves and the world around them.

Signaling Capacity

- In the context of social movements, a capacity approach means evaluating the movement's collective ability to achieve social change, rather than solely measuring available benchmarks. - Instead of focusing on outputs or indicators like the number of protests or the number of people who attend a protest, we should look at what a protest represents in terms of the movement's capacities in specific arenas. -- What did it take to organize the protest? What was the threat the organizers faced? Was the protest a one-time gathering or a recurrent meeting of a group of people? Does the ability to hold that march also entail the ability to carry out other acts?

The EArly Internet Versus Today

- In the early days of the internet, activisits would try to figure out how to circumvent censorship or even how to hide identity. Today, they try to figure out the authenticity of identity and the veracity of its metadata. Sowing doubt has become an increasingly potent strategy of both governments and counter-movements.

Bots Post-2016 Election

- In the final month and half before the election, Twitter concluded that Russian propaganda had been delivered to 454.7 million users. Facebook's internal analysis estimated that 126 million users saw Russian disinformation on its platform during the 2016 campaign. - After the election, data scientists Jonathon Morgan and Kris Schaffer analyzed hundreds of thousands of messages spread across conservative Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and Breitbart comments sections. Most starkly in April 2016, obvious patterns began to proliferate. The data showed a coordinated group of voices had entered the communities and their voices could be sifted out from the noise by their repeated word use. - Morgan and Schaeffer wrote, "Tens of thousands of bots and hundreds of human-operated, fake accounts acted in concert to push a pro-Trump, nativist agenda across all three platforms in the spring of 2016."

2011: Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt

- In the immediate aftermath of Hosni Mubarak's resignation, the protestors' spirit and optimism seemed to shine. - Digital technologies provided multiple avenues for people to find like-minded others and to signal beliefs in public psheres that once did not allow them to. - Without social media, Sana, an interview subject, might never have found the core group of activists that sparked the movement against Mubarak.

Modern Responsibilities in the 21st Century

- Internet providers and social media companies knew they needed to accept more moderation responsibilities. The solution was to split the job in two parts: -- Crowdsourcing to all users, who were invited to flag content they did not like. -- Hiring full-time content moderators, usually contracted overseas. - Doing so allowed the companies to keep direct involvement to a minimum. However, the strategy has not bee completely successful in moderating harmful content. - Silicon Valley engineers have vast far for an answer. Unsurprisingly, they think the answer is more technology.

Community: The Power of Others

- Internet-age authenticity doesn't just empower an idea or person. It also draws us into contact with others who think and act like we do. "Community" connotes a group with shared interests and identities that make them distinct from the wider world. In the past, a community resided in a specific location. Now it can be created online, including among those who find a common sense of fellowship in the worst kinds of shared identities that exclude others. - Aside from ISIS, these groups include neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and white supremacists. - As extremists have banded together, they have carved out online where they are encouraged "to be themselves." In the US alone, from 2014 to 2017 50 people were killed and another 82 were injured by young white men fueled by alt-right ideology and white nationalist social media. Ironically, the tactics used by the far-right are similar to that of ISIS. - In each case, recruits to extremist causes are lured by the warmth and camaraderie that seems lacking in their own lives. Such groups build communities that attract people globally that show almost no diversity of thought.

The Wars for Attention and Power

- Junaid Hussain was a Pakistani boy who grew up in Britain, but fled to Syria as an early volunteer for the jihadist group that would quickly be known as ISIS. He helped organize the Islamic State's "Cyber Caliphate" through an online persona that was infused with charm and righteous indignation. - In 2015, Hussain had risen to become third on the Pentagon's kill list of ISIS leaders. His constant internet use eventually enabled him to be geolocated and executed by a Hellfire missile fired by a drone.

Signaling Power and Signaling to Power

- Large social movements do not always succeed. In 2003, arguably the world's largest anti-war movement with protests in around 600 cities did not stop Bush from invading Iraq. He said, he was not "going to decide policy based upon a focus group" - in reference to the social movement. - It is rarely the case that a social movement possesses either the force or numbers to overcome a modern state, especially a repressive one that can unleash indiscriminate violence. - If numbers and energy do not tell the whole story, how do we measure a protest's power? Why do some movements have little impact while others are potent agents for change?

The Conundrum of Large-Scale Harassment

- Large-scale harassment or attack on more open pseudonymous platforms has caused some activist groups to either retreat to Facebook, with its much stricter real-name policies, or to refuse to interact with anyone seeming to use a pseudonym. - Other activist groups ahve resorted to using pseudonyms on platforms to simply make the bar for harassment slightly higher, which is counter productive because being public is part of the goal for most activists.

Neural Networks in Use

- MADCOMs are only as good as their inputs. Microsoft launched a MADCOM in 2016 named "Tay" who adopted the speech patterns of a teenage girl, trolls immediately swarmed to her Twitter account. From the inputs received, Tay veered into racism, sexism, and Holocaust denial. In less than a day, Tay was brought down after tweeting "Race war now" and "Bush did 9/11." - No one can fully comprehend how they work. As smart and versatile as neural networks are, the machine does not care how it is used and are a double-edged sword for the internet.

The Gospel for Mark

- Mark Zuckerberg registered TheFacebook.com on January 11, 2004 and within a month 20,000 university students signed up. The internet exploded following the turn of millennium and had grown to roughly 820 million users in the same year. - HTML and web development languages continued to grow along with various social media sites, such as MySpace and Friendster, and user based domains, like Wikipedia. By 2007, Wikipedia had amassed more than 2 million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia in history.

The War Begins: An Introduction to LikeWar

- May 4, 2009: @realDonaldTrump posted his first tweet calling on followers to tune in to his guest appearance on the Late Night Show. - Gradually, Trump changed his online presence from bland marketing tweets penned by his staff to tweeting more personal and political content. - Trump used "flame wars" to draw attention to himself and gain a following. -- He was learning how the online game worked as well as creating new rules for politics beyond it. - Twitter has gained hundreds of millions of followers competing in a global-spanning information conflict (everyone is seeking to become an "influencer").

Social Movements Online and Offline

- Most of teh social mechanisms operate both online and offline. Digital connectivity alters the specifics of how they work rather than replace them entirely. - For example, in 2009, Tea PArty protests were held across the US on teh day tax returns were due. A subsequent study considered the effects of weather by analyzing how rain in parts of the country constrained and lessened the impact of protests on favoring teh Republican party in elections. - The study concluded that sunny protest locations spawned stronger movements with more grassroots organizing, larger subsequent protests and monetary contributions, and stronger conservative beliefs among protest participants. People met one another at the protests that could be held and then continued to organize together.

Down the Slippery Slope

- Nations around the world had gradually realized the influence US social media giants exerted over domestic politics. Between 2012 and 2017, roughly 50 countries passed laws that restricted online speech of their citizens fearful of terrorism, extremism, and fake news. - American born Anwar al-Awlaki became radicalized. His YouTube channel had millions of views across his 700 lecture videos. Although there was no explicit violence, he promoted and inspired violence, inspiring dozens of attacks worldwide. - After he was killed by a US drone strike, his videos acted a digital shrine of a martyr and the intelligence community noticed an uptick in the views of his videos as well as global terrorist attacks. It took YouTube another 6 years to block the videos. - Twitter ultimately became terrorists' main social media platform. Twitter's original commitment to free speech and reluctance to censor allowed ISIS to span at least 70,000 accounts at their peak. Their propaganda seeped across the platform and Twitter was unprepared to deal with the consequences. Every employee who spent time policing the network was an employee not growing the network and demonstrating investor value. - Is the purpose of social media companies to fight against propaganda or increase profitability?

Robo-Reality Wars

- Neural networks are a new kind of computing system. They work as an artificial brain that are composed of millions of artificial neurons in an attempt to mimic human thought. They function by means of pattern recognition, sifting through massive amounts of data to recognize and identify details in images and videos. - Social media companies can use neural networks to analyze the activity of their users as well as the links that users share. - The most important application of neural networks are simulating humans online. Neural-network trained chatbots (MADCOMs) have no script like former "dumb" chatbots, but study speech patterns of billions of conversations.

Neural Network Application

- Neural networks are able to mimic voices, steal faces, edit audiovisuals in real-time, and artificially generate images and videos. With the combination of these applications, it is tough to shake the conclusion that humanity is teetering at the edge of a cliff. - Today, information conflicts that shape politics and war are fought by clever humans using viral engineering. The LikeWars of tomorrow will be fought by highly intelligent algorithms that will spread falsehoods that makes the current state of affairs look quaint. - Does Singer's prediction of the "good AI" and the "bad AI" seem overblown? How could the future of LikeWar be different?

OSINT

- OSINT allows anyone today to gather and process intelligence in a way that would have been difficult for the CIA a generation ago. In some cases, a human is not needed. For example, GVA Dictator Alert uses an algorithm to track the flights of dictators in and out of Geneva, Switzerland, a popular destination for shady political business. - OSINT can be used for good, but also to aid evil causes. Terrorists and criminal organizations are able to use social media to conduct illicit activities, such as identifying and pursuing potential kidnapping targets.

The Occupy Protests and Mass Media

- Occupy as a movement was inspired, both spiritually and methodologically, by the uprising in the Middle East. The young Tahrir protestors captured the world's attention through their deft use of social media. - The Occupy protests were scarcely covered by the mass media, except during pepper-spraying and policy brutality incidents. Their message of inequality between the rich and poor was shadowed by these incidents. - Although the protests had little to no direct electoral impact in the aftermath, they used social media to widely discuss their message and change the conversations previously championed by the mass media.

Seventh-Century Cyber-Revolutionaries

- Oddly, the word "slick" was used more than 5 million times online to describe the Islamic State's online presence. ISIS was a religious cult that was subscribed to a medieval interpretation of the Quran commanded by men who had been jihadists since the 1980s. - However, ISIS was also largely composed of young millennial recruits who grew up with the internet and smartphones. - What resulted was a terrorist group holding a seventh-century view of the world paired with the capabilities of successfully utilizing social media and other tools on the internet. - Mobile internet access could be found even in the remote deserts of Syria that would easily be taken advantage of by young jihadis. For those not accustomed to the internet, a group called Jihadi Design offered to take ISIS supporters from "zero to professionalism" in a few online sessions. - Viral marketing became ISIS's greatest weapon and they posted gruesome videos of executions mongering global fear of the group. ISIS was the first terrorist group to hold both physical and digital territory. On the internet, their propaganda flourished, fighters could mingle, global opinion could be tracked and manipulated, and the group could continue to fight on even after losing physical territory. - ISIS had mastered the key elements of weaponizing social media: narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation.

Fake News and Military Action

- On christmas Eve 2016, the Pakistani defense minister read a false online report that Israel was threatening to attack his country if it intervened in Syria. The fake report said "[Israel] will destroy them with a nuclear attack." The Pakistani defense minister responded with a real threat of nuclear weapons until the original report was debunked before the crisis worsened. - In mid-2016, rival armies of South Sudan's president and vice president had settled into an uneasy truce after years of fighting. When the vice president paid a visit to the presidential palace, his spokesperson published a false Facebook update that he had been arrested. This sparked a raid from the vice president's men to rescue him sparking a series of battles over 300 dead and plunge the nation back into conflict. - Even after a cease-fire was declared by both sides, social media then fueled a new cycle of sectarian and ethnic violence helped by a heavy dose of online hate speech and false accusations.

Social Media and the End of Secrets

- Operation Neptune Spear, the mission to get UBL, was one of the most secretive military missions in history. However, even it was not safe from the reach of social media. - Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) is a Pakistani tech geek that hides in the mountains to take a break from society. He was working on a late night software project when he was distracted by the Navy SEAL helicopters flying above. Athar live tweeted his complaints of the noise and coincidentally liveblogged the secretive UBL raid. - One CIA officer said, "secrets now come with a half-life."

Russia Today (RT)

- RT was founded in 2005 and initially declared to share Russia with the world. Today, it acts as the most visible vehicle for the disinformation campaign and shows why all other countries are wrong. - During the Cold War projects like Operation INFEKTION would take years. Utilizing RT and other state sponsored wings, similar operations take mere hours and reaches millions more people. - Through its social media campaigns, Russia blunts any news that is harmful to the state in defense. Offensively, Russia aims to create civil unrest with its web brigades, such as their role in the 2016 US election.

Sub-Reddit: "Jailbait"

- Reddit contains many disturbing sub-cultures. One community was called Jailbait and participants shared a common interest of desiring sexual relationships with females younger than the age of consent. - The Reddit karma system legitimized within the small community the thoughts and actions of teh sub-Reddit and it emerged as a self-affirming community interested in young girls. Despite CNN and other national news outlets calling out "Jailbait," Reddit allowed the community to flourish for 4 years based on arguments of "free speech."

Reddit and "Karma"

- Reddit's reputation system is called "karma" and it is represented through points users can earn as other Redditors upvote the links posted or comments made. Reddit users can also earn "Reddit Gold" - a gold-star symbol displayed next to their name. - There are many sub-cultures within Reddit called sub-Reddits. They generate their own internal norms and vary in size. - Unpaid volunteers monitor almost all Reddit forums and Reddit's management generally sticks to a hands-off approach.

Every Wire a Nerve

- Roughly half the world's population is now linked by the internet. It supports and spreads global news, information, innovation, and discovery. One-fifth of Americans admit that they essentially never stop being online. - Using the internet and understanding it are two different things. To truly understand the internet, one must understand how it works, why it was made, and whom it empowered.

"The Firehose of Falsehood"

- Russia censors their population through disinformation. A RAND report referred to this phenoenon as the firehose of falsehood. The primary goal is to confuse and overwhelm the audience and avoid responsibility for the campaign. - Russia does this via an unofficial army of trolls that operates both within its own population and around the world.

Daze and Confuse

- Russia pioneered the strategy of global censorship by means of disinformation by recruiting people to assume fake identities, hijack conversations, and spread lies. The strategy of weaponizing falsehood has been used since the birth of the USSR, throughout the Cold War, and now today utilizing the internet. - Soviet operations used "black propaganda" in which made-up sources craftly created made-up facts. Most notoriously was Operation INFEKTION that claimed the US military invented AIDS, a lie that circulates throughout the internet to this day. - The fall of the USSR seemingly brought an end to such initiatives in its newly adopted constitution, but in reality the Russian Federation became even more inclined to spread disinformation with the rise of social media. - Vladimir Milov, former Russian energy minister turned government critic, said, "Imagine you have two dozen TV channels and it is all Fox News." Russia does not prevent political opposition as long as the unspoken rules of the game are followed. -- A "good" political opponent is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who ran on a movement that, for example, promised free vodka for men and better underwear for women. -- A "bad" political opponent is Boris Nemtsov, who argued for political reform and corruption investigations. - Nemtsov was murdered in 2015, who was one of thirty-eight prominent opponents of Vladimir Putin killed between 2014 and 2017. - Russia allows dissent among independent journalists, but within certain boundaries to create a façade of free speech. Those who become too popular face backlash from the government via arranged scandals, disinformation campaigns to smear their reputation, and more forcefully suspicious deaths. - The Russian military has taken advantage of the possibilities the internet has offered offensively and defensively. Fundamentally, it attempts to fight a "war on information warfare against Russia."

The War You Cannot See

- Russia quickly learned how to yield the power of the internet and social media. They coupled their efforts online with established intelligence and defense ministries to mobilize an offensive against Ukraine that ultimately led to the annexation of Crimea. - Russia used social media to conduct a "PR-strategy" provoking a violent, confusing, and paralyzing mess that shocked the world and allowed an invasion without declaring an official invasion. - Following their success in Ukraine, Russia planted seeds within other ethnic-Russian minorities in Eastern European countries via fake viral stories to till the soil for future operations if they were needed. - The purpose of these Russian information offensives was to dismiss, distort, distract, dismay, and divide target communities to influence local populations. - For example, Russian media utilized Germany's decision to have an uncapped limit on Syrian refugees migrating to the country. RT covered a story of a 14 year old girl viciously raped and beaten by three Arab migrants that sparked widespread anti-immigrant protests among Germany's far-right. Despite the story being false, copycat articles proliferated and fueled the trend #Rapefugees. - Russian propaganda involvement ranging from Montenegro joining Nato to the Catalonian secession vote led to an official EU response. The European Parliament declared, "Hostile propaganda against the EU and its member states seeks to distort the truth, provoke doubt...and incite fear and uncertainty among EU citizens." Putin responded by mocking them and continuing his operations. - Russia uses falsehoods abiding by two principles: -- Believability: Propaganda carries what seems like a grain of truth that plays on existing prejudices to convince readers that the content is legitimate. -- Extension: Propaganda extends among vast numbers of people and across time.

Narrative Capacity: Changing Minds in Society

- Social activisits must persuade their communities that hte goals of the social movemnet are worth pursuing despite the entailed risks to build the foundations of the movement. - After that, there is a struggle to gain acceptance within the broader society for the movement's version of the issue. Is the issue an actual general grievance affecting the population or only a small sample of people? - Changing the minds of elites and law enforcement is also important. The willingness of police and the army to side with the government can be decisive at crucial turning points.

The Internet World Collider

- Social media is utilized by gangs to create an online presence and persona, even inciting "flame" wars between neighborhood rivals. In Chicago, Shaquon "Young Pappy" Thomas became a star in social media and gangland by taunting other gangs, but at 20-years old was ultimately shot and killed. Thousands of young men across the US have faced this similar fate. - In 2017, more people were killed in Chicago than in all US special operations forces across a decade of fighting in Iraq and Syria. At the center of this violence is social media. - Social media allows rival gangs to taunt one another online, which usually ends up with real like retaliation. Most of the disputes have everything to do with settling personal scores rather than drug sales or gang territory. - Gangs and insurgent groups use social media to gather and clash, recruit, and show their progress by displaying acts of violence. - State actors, such as Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte, have changed diplomacy from a less private and policy-oriented practice to increasingly public and performative.

Social Movements

- Social movements are both a type of public itself and a claim made to a public that a wrong should be righted or a change should be made. They aim to reach and intervene in public life, which is centered on the public sphere of their time. - The dizzying speed of advances in digital networks and technologies, their rapid spread,a dnthe fact that there is no single, uniform public sphere complicate this discussion. - To understand dissident movements, it is crucial to understand the current dynamics of the public sphere. Digital technologies are especially important during teh initial formation of social movements.

Electoral Capacity

- Social movements can affect elections in multiple ways. Activisits signal to leaders their power by highlighting corruption and other grievances against politicians, turning into political parties, and influencing political outcomes by mobilizing voters to act electorally through monetary contributions, efforts on campaigns, or through voting.

"Stranger-on-a-Train" Effect

- Some communities are not only distant from offline identities but also have little or no persistence or reputational impact. It is as if people are talking to each other while walking by without a promise that they will encounter each other again. - Social scientists called this the stranger-on-a-train effect, describing the way people sometimes open up to anonymous strangers more than to the people they see around them every day.

Narrative: Spin a Tale

- Spencer Pratt figured out how to use "reality" television to create his own fame by manipulating the masses and media into tuning into the show The Hills. Pratt, the self-made villain on the show, and Heidi Montag built a narrative that brought them to be among reality television's highest-paid and most visible stars. - Narratives are the building blocks explaining how humans see the world and how they exist in large groups. The power of a narrative depends on many factors, but the most important is consistency so events link logically to the next. - An effective digital narrative is one that can be absorbed almost instantly. Junaid Hussain used simple, direct vernacular that proved effective in reaching out to jihadi millennials versus the book-length treaties of earlier recruiters. - Another factor of successful narratives is resonance. Nearly all effective narratives are products of a frame of particular language and culture that feel instantly and deeply familiar. Among its supporters, ISIS achieved resonance by promising mystery, adventure, or lofty purpose. - Lastly, the most effective storytellers tweak, subvert, or break a frame, playing with the audience's expectations and demanding new levels of attention. For example, a single image of an ISIS fighter posing with a jar of Nutella was enough to launch dozens of copycat news articles.

The Worldwide Web Goes Mobile

- Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007. It wasn't the first internet-capable mobile phone, but was a massive improvement offering a user-friendly browse and the App Store, which opened up the mobile phone to games and various utilities. - Twitter was an early beneficiary of the smartphone. Twitter allowed users to bypass journalists to get their own messages out and became the engine driving political reporting across much of the world. Donald Trump said his Twitter account was like "owning your own newspaper." - The internet is now controlled by an oligarchy of titan companies that have enormous budgets. For example, Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion, the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in history. - The internet is now familiar but unrecognizable to its founders. Tim Berners-Lee said, "the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to [weaponize] the web at scale." - A major difference between this and earlier tech revolutions is that powerhouse companies do not exist just in the West. WeChat allows nearly a billion users concentrated in China to navigate the isolated Chinese internet network. It is so essential to modern living that Chinese citizens are not allowed to delete their accounts.

RAce and Gender

- Targeted harassment campaigns demonstrate the continued importance of race and gender in the digitally networked public sphere. In the early days of internet studies, the internet was conceptualized as a cyberspace where people could play and experiment with gender and race as they wished. - The internet would allow disembodied minds to roam freely to engage in discussion, regardless of borders of offline identities. - However, the reverse side of this is that people can hide behind anonymity to target and harass others online while hiding their own identities, and they can do this on a large scale. Women, minorities, dissidents, and journalists writing about sensitive topics have especially been targeted.

The Race to Communicate

- The ARPANET team had accomplished something historic. They had established a technology to easily transfer information that was an ongoing race spanning back 5,000 years. - The advent of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press in 1438 revolutionized the ability to process and spread information, transforming war, politics, and the world. Without it, it is unlikely that events such as the Protestant Reformation would have been taken seriously, but the ability of Martin Luther to mass produce his pamphlets spread his ideas and fueled an uprising against the Catholic Church. - From the dawn of history, messages could only be delivered by hand or word of mouth. As late as 1815, thousands of British soldiers would be killed at the Battle for New Orleans because the news of the peace treaty signed two weeks prior had not yet crossed the Atlantic. - The world changed decisively in 1844 when the telegraph was successfully tested. By 1880, 650,000 miles of telegraph wire stretched around the world. Like the printing press, it changed war and politics, but also reshaped the public experience and perception of conflict but was limited to only communicating in dots and dashes. This changed in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. - Telegraphs and phones were only able to communicate between two points, linked by a wire. Gublielmo Marconi overcame this obstacle by inventing the radio, which allowed one person to speak to millions of people at once revolutionizing mass communication and mass entertainment. However, the radio also allowed political horrors, such as the spread of Nazi propaganda, to proliferate. - Beginning in 1925, the television began to surpass the power and reach of the radio. All of these technologies were limited to either conversing one-on-one (the telegraph or the phone) or one user could reach many at once, such as the television. No technology could do it all at once until ARPANET.

Gezi Park

- The Gezi Park protests were not expected to be large. A development project sought to destroy it to replace with expensive new housing, but environmentalists and locals showed up to try and stop the destruction. - On May 30, 2013, municipal police showed up to pepper spray the protestors and burn down their tents. Viral pictures circulated around social media and hundreds of people crowded the area. People turned on their televisions to watch events carry out, but it wasn't there. - Mass media censorship was not surprising at this point, as the bombings of Roboski exposed many people to the fact that mass media could block out major news sources. - But the public sphere was transformed and people had learned to pull out their phones to document and share. People expected 140journos and other citizen journalists organizations to compile this information to create a narrative. - People could easily compare social media enws to Turkish mass media during teh Gezi Park protests because tehy could easily travel to the location and see for themselves. By May 31, tens of thousands of people crowded the area and overwhelmed the police. People then set up living spaces to prolong a protest occupation.

Everything is Illuminated

- The combination of mass sensors and social media have created Jeremy Bentham's idea of a Panopticon into a bizarre reality, but rather than elite rulers, the masses are the ones doing the watching. - These sensors are devices, such as a camera or GPS, that gather information about the world beyond the computer. Additionally, any information put online comes with "metadata" providing details of the point of origin and movement of any online data. For example, each Tweet carries more than 65 different elements of metadata. - The amount of data being gathered about the world we live in and put online is astounding. For example, every minute there are more than 300,000 tweets posted. Aside from its massive scale and form, what stands out is that most of the data is about "us," pushed out by "us." - Citizens, leaders of over 178 countries, and agencies from every level of government are active on social media. Many of whom overshare details about their lives that will permanently float around the internet. The social media revolution has marked "the end of forgetting."

The Electric Brain Awakens

- The deadliest terrorist attack in a generation occurred in Mumbai, India over three days starting on November 26, 2008 with 164 killed and another 300 injured. The attack was live Tweeted beginning only minutes after the first explosion including the spread of rumors and false reports. - Publicly available and simple technologies such as, Google Maps, were used to plan and execute the attack by the terrorists and to report and monitor the attack by the civilian population. The mountains of data about the attack were crowdsourced, stitching together bits of data together to create a cohesive whole. - At its core, crowdsourcing is about redistributing power to the many once only reserved for the elite few. It has been used to raise awareness, fundraise, and even allow for radical, grotesque transparency. In 2016, an Iraqi militia posted a photo of a captured suspect of ISIS and invited its followers to vote on whether to kill or release the prisoner. Two hours later, another photo was posted of the young Syrian laying in a pool of his own blood with the caption, "Thanks for vote." - Social media and crowdsourcing has blurred the line between observer and participant, while forcing users to gaze at the vast "now" causing difficulty in some to seriously reflect on the past or plan for the future.

The Power of the Digital Public Sphere

- The digitally networked public sphere can help people reveal their (otherwise private) preferences to one another and discover common ground. STreet protests play a similar role in showing people that they are not alone, but digital media blurs the boundaries of private and public, home and street, and individual and collective action.

The Public Sphere

- The dynamics of public spheres are intertwined with power relations, social structures, institutions, and technologies that change over time. - As technologies change and alter the societal architectures of visibility, access, and community, they affect the contours of the public sphere, which in turn affects social norms and political structures. - The 21st century public sphere is referred to as the digitally networked public sphere. It is a complex interaction of publics, online and offline, all intertwined, multiple, connected and complex, but also transnational and global.

The Echo Chamber of Me

- The early envisioned "Daily Me" in 1995 by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte prophesied a curated stream of information tailored to individuals personal interests, while also aiming to expose other viewpoints in hopes to lead to a smarter society. - As the internet exploded in popularity, the "Daily Me" began to take shape and some wondered if the opposite were to be true. Instead, people were using the endless web to seek out information they already agreed with. - With a few keystrokes, the internet can connect likeminded people over vast distances. Social media guarantees that you can find others that share your viewpoint, whether the cause dangerous (i.e., terrorist organizations), mundane (i.e., political parties), or inane (i.e., flat-earthers). - Flat-earthers would not have gained traction in a pre-internet world. However, proponents now have an active online community and an aggressive marketing scheme. - This is an example of the phenomenon homophily, love of the same, and explains the social nature of human beings wanting to congregate in large, like-minded groups. - Endless feedback loops leaves groups such as anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, and political extremists only more convinced that they are sane and defending the "truth." - Social media encouraged the political society to self-segregate into communities of the like-minded, intensifying connections among members of the same group while increasing the distance among different groups. - New York Senator Daniel Moynihan is accredited for one of the classic quotes of the 20th century, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." 13 years after his death in 2003, a Trump campaign spokesperson said, "There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts." - On social media, everyone may be entitled to their own facts, but rarely do they form their own opinions. Someone else manufactures the beliefs that go viral online.

The Enormous Scale of Free Speech

- The enormous scale of the new networked public pshere means that older ways of thinking about it don't necessarily apply. One person telling you that your political views are stupid or treasonous is almost certainly free speech, but it is another matter when tens of thousands of people attack your political views, interspersed with a random scattering of more serious threats. - Scale and anonymity combine to change much of our understanding of the obstacles to exercising freedom of speech.

A Social Science Fiction

- The first computer network grew quickly. By 1971, fifteen university computer labs had been connected and in 1973, the first international connection was made incorporating computers at the Norwegian Seismic Array. - Instead of labs and universities joining ARPANET, they established their own mini-networks with differing infrastructure and governing authority. The networks couldn't easily link up and the spread of information was held back until the father of the internet, Vint Cerf, designed TCP/IP, which bound the mini-networks to the original ARPANET. - In 1979, Cerf received a message from the newly developed electronic mail system. Through email, the internet was no longer an improvement to transfer files, but it established interactive communities. Email early on took up 2/3rds of the ARPANET's bandwidth. - In the beginning, the internet was only used by the US government and engineers but by 1989, nearly 160,000 users were active. - In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web by binding computer databases together defining each item with hypertext markup language, determining how hypertext was sent between internet nodes, and assigning a unique, easy to find URL. - The World Wide Web shaped what internet communication looked like and made the network usable by the masses. The World Wide Web matched up perfectly with the introduction of profit-seeking from the new technology. In 1995, a longstanding ban on online commercial activity was lifted. By the end of the millennium, there were 360 million users. - The web created new connections and ventures for academia and businesses. However, it also allowed groups such as the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) to unite and revolt against their government by use of the internet.

The New Rules and Rules of LikeWar

- The founders of social media platforms we use today likely did not think their websites would become as large and influential as they are now. Facebook was a product of the juvenile, hacked-together FaceMash and Twitter was the result of a pivot from a failing podcasting service marketed originally to the rave community in San Francisco. - Despite their modest, typically geeky origins, these founders now rule digital empires that influence the globe.

National Security Implications

- The government must take this new battleground seriously. It is a space that threatens both individual citizens and national security. Information literacy is no longer an education issue, but a national security imperative. - Those who deliberately facilitate the efforts of enemies online must be seen for what they are and face the consequences. Cloaking in the ambiguity of partisan language or bigoted remarks cannot be an excuse. - Silicon Valley must accept more of the political and social responsibility that the success of its technology has given it.

The Impact of Digital Connectivity

- The internet allowed networks of activists in MENA to connect before protests broke out in the region in late 2010 and early 2011. They were able to overcome what was otherwise a discouraging environment and remain political activists even amidst the repressive environment partly because they could find friends. - Many activists did not only know each other online, but had overlapping and strong friendship networks that occurred both online and offline. Such tight networks allow people to sustain one another during quieter times, but also play a crucial role when protests erupt.

Censorship, Disinformation, and the Burial of Truth

- The internet has allowed civilians to overcome authoritarian censorship. Governments have been unable to keep up with networks that could quickly disseminate information and quickly mobilize millions of citizens. - For example, civilians in MENA sparked the Arab Spring by using social media platforms to spread political unrest throughout the region. - However, activists failed to sustain their movements as authoritarian governments began using social media using a countering wave of repression and censorship.

A Childhood's End

- The internet has left adolescence. Half of the world's population is online and the other half is quickly following. According to US National Intelligence Council estimates, more people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have access to the internet than to reliable electricity. - The internet is the most consequential communications development since the advent of the written word. Like past technologies, it is tied to politics and war and has become a colossal information battlefield.

Early Digital Connectivity in the Arab World

- The internet was used by a minority of the population in many countries in MENA even as late as 2009. However, digital connectivity across an entire society because people online would communicate with others not yet connected what they saw online through other means: face-to-face conversation, texting, or telephone.

The Role of Social Media Today

- The role of social media firms are profit-motivated, mostly US based businesses that manage themselves like global governments. - The small, elite group of each company's controller have been given the task of shaping the nature of society, the economy, war, and politics. - How do they build systems to stop unacceptable behavior? What do those systems look like?

Advantages of Capacity Versus Outcome Analysis

- The steps required to organize the protest are a stronger signal of a group's underlying capacities. The advantage of focusing on capacity is especially apparent in understanding the impact of digital technology on social movements. - The author discusses three crucial capabilities of social movements from the point of view of power: -- Narrative capacity: The ability of the movement to frame its story on its own terms, to spread its worldview. -- Disruptive capacity: Whether a movement can interrupt the regular operations of a system of authority -- Electoral/institutional capacity: A movement's ability to keep politicians from being elected, reelected, or nominated unless they adopt and pursue policies friendly to the social movement

The Conflicts That Drive the Web and the World

- The term "netwar," coined by RAND Corporation political scientists, argued that the internet allowed a new way of thinking about conflict. It meant that online information is used to dismantle some realities and to build others in their place in the form of a weapon. Massive political change could occur without shedding any blood. - Today, online battles are an integral part of global. For example, China has used the internet within "the three warfares": psychological, legal, and public opinion, to amplify their strengths and hide their weaknesses. - Every "LikeWar" is a battle for attention with a specific objective in mind, while being challenged by an opponent.

The New Middle

- The word media comes from the Latin word "middle." For the past century, media has been used to refer to professional journalists but social media has put new voices in the middle. - There is a new breed of civilian journalists emerging, who fill the gap that traditional reporters either choose not to or are unable to do so accurately. Social media has erased the distinction between civilian, journalist, activist, and resistance fighter. Anyone with internet can play these roles, often all at once.

Solutions to Fight Harassment and the Downsides of Pseudonyms

- There are no easier solutions to the problmes of large-scale harassment. There is no ideal paltform for activists, nor ist here neutrality or impartiality on online platforms. Yet, given the role of these platforms in governance and expression, acknowledging and exploring these ramifications and dimensions seem more important than ever. - How can platforms successfully address large scale harassment campaigns? Is the future of social media platforms to allow users to have a more traceable reputation?

Control the Signal

- Today's electronic communications network is under the control of only a few thousand internet service providers (ISPs) with just a few supplying almost all of the world's mobile data. - No individual or governing body can "destroy" the internet, but regimes can control when the internet is on or off and its content. - Less-than-free nations can control the internet by completely cutting off the connection, "throttling" (slowing it down), or localizing the web by breaking the global network into a series of tightly policed national ones.

The Challengers and Dangers of Pseudonyms

- Twitter allows pseudonyms, users to have multiple accounts, and parody accounts. These features attract many users, but this laissez-faire environment fosters other threats. - One Turkish activist came to the author in a panic as she was receiving a barrage of death threats from Twitter users described as "eggheads." - Egghead refers to the default Twitter profile of accounts that do not give bother to change the default picture provided. Such profiles can often be bots, but also real people hiding behind anonymity.

Suspension of ISIS Twitter Accounts

- Twitter eventually saw success in controlling terrorist accounts. By 2017, the company announced its internal systems were detecting 95% of troubling terrorist accounts and deleting three-quarters of them before their first tweet. But what precedence could this set? - Singer argues that the purge of ISIS accounts steered Silicon Valley to deal with even more ambiguous political challenges - the alt-right movement. Amid national outcry, social media giants moved to expand their definition of hate speech and banish offenders from their sites. - In their founding, social media companies stood by their services being a marketplace of ideas. However, even the most naïve engineers realized they have become battlefields.

NAmes and Connections

- Unlike Facebook, Reddit is very friendly to pseudonyms: people can easily and quickly pick a nickname and start posting without even entering an email address of phone number. But this is not a reputation vacuum. Reddit allows these nicknames to acquire a traceable history, reputation, and ranking setting up a fascinating. - However, despite teh anonymity of REddit, reputation plays a role in the Reddit community and many Reddit communities display characteristics of other communities, complete with norms, customs, and hierarchies of status and power.

Global Censorship

- Very few countries have the kind of vast censorship apparatus that can carefully censor much of the information coming from outside the country and respond in real time by taking down potentially effective posts. - China's and Iran's response of essentially splitting the internet from most of the rest of the planet is relatively rare and is difficult for most countries to implement effectively, not only because it is expensive to operate now, but because the Great Firewall was built decades ago. If you were not already thinking like China and Iran in the 1990s, it is quite expensive and difficult to switch to that model now.

Memes and Memetic Warfare

- Viral memes have turned political. Pepe the Frog, for example, transformed from a comic shared on 4chan to a political icon throughout the online Trump campaign as a weapon for far-right activists. - It takes only one event, group, or person to alter a meme's meaning for everyone who might use it. Despite the intended use, a meme can be weaponized to represent a community online without the creators consent and change the underlying meaning forever. - In 2006, US defense analysts first analyzed "memetics." They argued that armed conflict would increasingly be decided by dueling ideologies on a nonlinear battlefield. Militaries would need to track the memes promulgated by their adversaries, counter them, and respond with memes of their own. - Memetic warfare recognizes the power of virality - the need to produce and propel content. That content, the meme, can easily be hijacked to fit the needs of illicit groups. - In a larger picture, memes are akin to the skirmishes of LikeWar. They act as a microbattle for a tug-of-war for global influence.

A Mass-Media World

- We no longer live in a mass-media world with a few centralized choke points and just a few editors in charged, operated by commercial entities and governments. Now, there is a chaotic, interconnected world that allows ordinary citizens or activists to generate and circulate ideas, documents, and responses to mass media. - These dynamics are significant social mechanisms, especially for social movements, since they change the operation of a key resource: attention.

Emotion: Pull the Heartstrings, Feed the Fury

- What captures the most attention on social media isn't content that makes a profound argument, but it is the content that stirs emotion. Amusement, shock, and outrage determine how quickly and far a given piece of information will spread in social media. The stronger the emotions involved, the likelier something is to go viral. - In 2013, Chinese data scientists discovered anger was the emotion that traveled fastest and furthest through social networks. This is due in part because it is the most interactive. As social media users find ways to express or exploit anger, new content is generated setting off additional cascades of fury. - The graphic online propaganda served a dual purpose. It elicited waves of shock and outrage in the West, driving a violent anti-Islamic backlash. ISIS could use this to fuel renewed anger and resolve among its own recruits. - If attention is the thing that matters most online, brazen self-promoters will go to any length to achieve it. Because anger is so effective at building and sustaining an audience, those seeking viral fame have reason to court controversy and adopt extreme positions, gaining rewards by provoking others (simply known as trolling). - Trolls consistently emotionally manipulate others to achieve their goals. Trolling makes the internet a worse place, but the worst trolling doesn't necessarily stay online.

Tahrir Square

- What was the difference between the 150 Egyptians protesting teh police in Tahrir Square in 2010 versus the few thousand in 2011? The number of protestors isn't the key difference in a city of seven million people, but the 2011 protestors had organized through a Facebook page that reached millions of Egyptians, publicly signaling widespread discontent. - These activists were social media pioneers; they had been blogging, tweeting, and organizing online for years. Once their protest caught on even a little bit, they knew they had the narrative capacity to tell their story. Once the physical protest grew, the members held one of the most important squares in Cairo, making it difficult for the government to keep the city running smoothly. Narrative capacity plus disruptive capacity made a powerful combination.

Mubarak and Online Media

- Why didn't Mubarak and other governments not crack down harder on online media? -- Partly because they were naïve about the power the internet had and dismissed online acts as powerless. Since it was virtual, authoritarians early on believed they were unimportant. - This msianalysis, among others, was fueled by the ignorance of people in power who had not grown up with digital communication technologies. Government leaders around the world remain remarkably incognizant of how the internet works at even a basic level. - This poses problems for democracies, but cripples dictators whose rule depends on controlling the public sphere.