Social Media Introduction to Social

Warfare
Media
Social media warfare describes the use of social
media as a kind of weapon with the aim of causing
lasting damage to certain actors such as
governments or companies.
Examples of means in social media warfare include:
1. the dissemination of (false) information in social media
networks,
2. the use of social bots
3. and the influencing of defined target groups by means of micro-
targeting.
Who is involved
in Social Media
Warfare?
They can be roughly divided into four categories.

1. Political Actors
2. Economic Actors
3. Actors with special interests
4. Actors with mixed interests
Political Actors

•Political actors use social media to push through a certain political agenda.
•For example, social media warfare is intended to influence election results, destabilize political
systems, or dismantle society’s trust in a government.
• Political actors include alliances of states, individual states, parties or even military units.
Economic actors: •In the economic sector, the motive of social media warfare
is usually of a financial nature.
•Industrial groups or sectors want to assert their interests in
order to gain an advantage or harm others.
•In addition, companies also use social media to discredit
their competitors, to gain a competitive advantage and
ultimately to assert themselves on the market.
Actors with special •Besides political and economic ones, there are other
motivations to participate in social media warfare.
interests:  •Lobby groups, for example, try to influence public opinion
in order to obtain certain regulations and religious or
political groups try to recruit more followers for their
purposes.
 •Ultimately, not all actors can always be assigned
to a specific group, because some attackers pursue
several goals at the same time or merely work on
Actors with mixed behalf of other actors.
•The group of hybrid actors includes exactly these
interests:  attackers. One of the best-known examples of such
an actor is the Internet Research Agency – a
Russian company that has been involved in various
information operations in the past to enforce the
interests of both the Russian government and
individual Russian companies. 
All in all, social media warfare is nowadays accessible to everyone
without much effort, because little technical know-how and
Internet access are enough to launch a digital attack in social media.
LIKE WAR!!!
•Authors Peter W. Singer and Emerson T.
Brooking describe this as “likewar,” a term
that plays on the Facebook “like” feature.
• In their new book, LikeWar: The
Weaponization of Social Media, they
explain how these platforms have become
persuasive tools of propaganda. 
 What are the
strategies and means
in social media
warfare?
In the context of social media warfare, social media can be
used in different ways and with different strategic
orientations.
They can be represented
by four categories:
• Targeting and Information
Gathering

• Manipulation through
information

• Mobilization and commitment

• Social Cyber Attacks

Targeting and Information Gathering

•In targeting, social media is used to identify potential targets for attack.
•In a military context, for example, this means locating enemy troops by investigating the social media
behavior of the members of the troops (e.g. by means of geo-tagging) or by gaining access to social
media accounts.
•If we look at targeting in the context of corporate attacks, one of the aims is to identify individual
targets within an organization – who, for example, is the CEO of the company and how could his social
media behavior be used for an attack? This aspect is closely linked to the possibility of using social
networks to gather as much information as possible about the target and the stakeholders of the target.
If, for example, the opinion of a certain group (customers, business partners, etc.) is to be manipulated,
social media profiles are first identified and analyzed. The information then helps to design precisely
tailored tactics and content in order to manipulate this group as effectively as possible
Manipulation through information

•The manipulation of entire societies or individual stakeholders is a central strategy in social media warfare. For example, the
opinion, values, emotions and thinking of a specific target group are to be influenced in such a way that consequential effects are
created that damage the actual target of the attack. For instance, the use of digital propaganda is supposed to influence election
results or induce customers to stop buying from a certain company. To achieve this goal, attackers can pursue different
approaches:

•Deception: By spreading false information or rumors, attackers try to deceive their target group in a systematic way. It is also
common to produce artificial attention for one topic in order to divert attention away from another.
•Confusion: By providing contradictory information, attackers try to create confusion and a feeling of insecurity in the target
group. This makes the target group more prone to simplifying representations and propaganda designed to harm the target.
•Division: The attackers try to divide societies or groups by spreading extreme opinions as well as hatred and agitation on the
Internet. The public conflict, in turn, is supposed to lead to strong negative feelings and a higher susceptibility to certain
narratives.
•Exposure: The attackers publish (false) confidential information or data in order to publicly expose the target of the attack.
•Discrediting and defamation: The aggressors attack the reputation of the target and spread reputation-damaging and
defamatory content in the social media. 
 Mobilization and commitment
•In addition to influencing perception, thinking and emotions, social media warfare is also about the
manipulation of behavior – even outside the social web. It not only tries to influence what people like,
share or comment on, but also how they behave far away from the digital world.
•The digital attackers, for example, try to persuade a particular target group to get involved in a campaign
against the actual target and, for example, to call for protest against political plans or boycott companies or
products.
 •A special category of social media warfare is the
Social Cyber Attacks combination of classic cyber-attacks and
manipulation methods in the social web, the so-
called Social Cyber Attacks. 
How to manage the danger
of social media warfare?
In order to best prevent such an inability to act in an emergency, it
is essential to raise awareness of the topic, to incorporate the
danger of “social media warfare” into one’s own risk
management and to prepare defensive counter-strategies for the
emergency.
Better be safe than
sorry!!!
Thank You!!!