A Carter-Ruck report

FROM THE ADOLESCENT BEDROOM TO THE CHIEFS OF STAFF: AND FUTURE WARFARE Dr. Carl Miller Research Director, Centre for the Analysis of , Demos

Strange beginnings and thought. They called it attention hacking, and used it for another In 2003 a teenager called Chris Poole invasion: using images of cats. started an anonymous image board site named after a Japanese trend called Attention hacking: proto-Fake 4chan. It was a remote, largely News offensives anonymous pocket of the , and on it new feelings of identity and Part of 4chan’s campaign of attention collectivity began to set its inhabitants hacking was to use the internet to break apart from the mainstream. It grew into the mainstream media. They used quickly and soon millions of posts were an auto-voting programme that flowing through the site, all of them spread on 4chan to manipulate TIME impenetrable to anyone not steeped in magazine’s online public poll to find the the thickly woven layers of lore, slang, world’s 100 most influential people. inter-board trolling, in-jokes and Chris Poole came first. They built fake running feuds that each of the different social media accounts — ‘sockpuppets’ boards on 4chan quickly developed. — to make certain hashtags trend and appear more popular than they were. This might be a strange place to start They created fake websites that looked the story of Fake News, but it was on like the real thing, and manipulated 4chan where the reality of Fake News search engine rankings to knock today really started. For Fake News is corporate websites off the front pages not just people sharing incorrect things. with their own jokes and forgeries. It’s the intentional creation and amplification of information with Then there were the ‘actions’ where a grounding in human behaviour and 4chan would swarm a target. In 2006, psychology to change peoples’ attitudes 4chan began a series of organised raids and beliefs. And it was 4chan who on the online game Habbo Hotel. Acting accidentally stumbled on it. on rumours that moderators there were banning avatars based on their skin 4chan saw companies, corporates, and colour, they arrived en masse, blocking ‘normies’ joining ‘their’ space in greater entrances and causing servers to crash. and greater numbers. They thought 4chan celebrated each victory with an their internet was being invaded, and endless deluge of shareable images decided to launch a counter-invasion. (“memes”) of cats. They began working out how to cause 4chan succeeded in what they set out to information to spread, how to grab do. It wasn’t really about cats; all of this attention, how to use the internet was really about seizing and using to influence the wider offline world. attention and influence. Forgeries, 4chan’s boards began to fill with spoofs, gaming, swarm-actions, discussions of social engineering, manipulating search engines and psychological manipulation, and memes were all part of a new body of ideational diffusion, much of it taken techniques and skills that were forming. from mainstream academic literature. It was about finding ways of using the They worked together, tested things, internet to become more influential, and began to find ways to use the to change in controllable ways what internet to change what people saw people saw and even what they thought.

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The military get interested: increasingly important role” it states. • In Turkey, 6,000 ‘white trolls’ have UK, Russia, US The doctrine explains that information allegedly been enlisted to manipulate operations should be used to target discussions, drive particular agendas, Others quickly began to copy and an enemy’s ‘will’: and counter government opponents develop the techniques that 4chan on social media. pioneered. Political communications “For example, by questioning the consultants brought attention legitimacy of leadership and cause, Freedom House assessed 65 countries hacking into political campaigns. information activities may undermine for online ‘manipulation tactics’. They Viral advertising agencies opened, their moral power base, separating found that 30 had evidence of paid and the murkier, more illicit side of leadership from supporters, political, pro-Government commentators, 20 online advertising sold search engine military and public, thus weakening showed evidence of political bots, 16 manipulation software to build bots their desire to continue and affecting had seen deliberately misleading news and spam services. their actions.” pumped out during elections, and in 10 countries social media had been Militaries can never stay out of State security and ‘hijacked’, forcibly taken over to spread questions of influence and they, like information warfare information against the owners’ wishes. 4chan and advertisers before them, re-defined their professional art to Fake News is many things, of course, Your opinion is a military target put information at its heart. In 2014, but as military after military redefined a memo was sent across the British warfare, it became part of a concerted, The concept of what a conflict or a military entitled Warfare in the systematic exploitation of the internet military operation really is has widened: Information Age: by militaries and state security transferring outside the kinetic arena bureaucracies around the world, and into the battlefield of ideas, “The common theme” the memo states, facing outwards at foreign publics, information, beliefs and opinions. “is that information-centric capability and also at domestic populations. Compared to a tank, or a missile, employed in information-centric Fake News is trivially cheap and operations can ameliorate many of the • China employs two million people technically straightforward to do. shortcomings of a reducing number of to write 448 million social media platforms and people.” A new doctrine posts to ‘distract the public, change It is a new form of warfare that is not was developed, called Integrated the subject’. described in international law, and not Action. “Part of the whole purpose bounded by international norms. It is • In Saudi Arabia, researchers of Integrated Action is to change also a form of control that inherently have revealed thousands of ‘fake’ attitudes and behaviour in our favour”. benefits authoritarian States more accounts generating than liberal, democratic or rights- In December 2014, the Security hundreds to thousands of tweets respecting ones. Council of the Russian Federation also per hour of “anti-Shia and anti- published a new military doctrine. “The Iranian propaganda”. An assault is being made on your characteristic features and specifics of beliefs. Your opinions are objectives, • In Mexico, an estimated 75,000 current military conflicts are…military your news diet a strategic target. This automated accounts are known force, information, political and is the reality of Fake News; a weapon locally as Peñabots, flood hashtags economic measures” they concluded. in a new kind of warfare, redefined for associated with corruption or the information age. Or take AJP 3.10, NATO’s Allied Joint political scandal. Doctrine for Information Operations • In the Philippines, salaried social from November 2009. “The ever- media commentators mount a increasing use of technologies such “fanatic defense of Duterte” as the internet have resulted in a and manipulate online polls. world where information plays an

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