It’s been happening for around a decade now. NATO was probably first, back in 2009. A few years later, Russia did it and then in 2014 the British military too. They all had realised that a victory is now won as much in the eyes of the watching public as between opposing armies. That the battlefield extended from a muddy field all the way to online blogs. “To”, as the British Army said, “change attitudes and behaviour in our favour”. One by one, militaries around the world began to fight, as they saw it, a new form of warfare, one fit for the information age. Information warfare.
Since then, researchers have begun to uncover what this new kind of warfare looks like in practice. In China, it looks like two million people employed by the government to write 448 million social media posts every year. In Mexico, it looks like 75,000 Peñabots, automated Twitter accounts, busily lionising President Enrique Peña Nieto. In Thailand, it looks like 100,000 students trained as “cyberscouts” to monitor and report online behaviour deemed to threaten national security. And it looks like an office block in downtown St Petersburg full of digitally savvy millennials, each paid by the Kremlin to manage dozens of different online identities.
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