#TheWeaponizationOfSocialMedia

Book excerpt: #TheWeaponizationOfSocialMedia develops a framework to understand how social network media shapes global politics and contemporary conflicts by examining their role as a platform for conduction intelligence collection, targeting, cyber-operations, psychological warfare and command and control activities. Through these, the weaponization of social media shows both the possibilities and the limitations of social network media in contemporary conflicts and makes a contribution to theorizing and studying contemporary conflicts. Democracies operate as if Information is second to the other elements of national power. In fact it is the aspect from which all power is derived. We fail to understand this at our peril, while our adversaries ‘get it’. In democracies to autocracies, information is a valuable resource that is increasingly difficult to control. That is how it should be. However, the Weaponization of Social Media, as Thomas Nissen adeptly describes it, is simultaneously based on and enabling several dangerous trajectories. These include new marketplaces for loyalty, the ability to opt-in (and out) of identities, perceived transparency across battlefields and diplomacy, and media illiteracy and a commensurate decline in the standards of journalism.