The 5th Generation of War
I remember watching a documentary called “Loose Change”, which was produced in part by Infowars’ Alex Jones in 2005. Back then, Jones was already an established conspiracy theorist and the documentary alleges that 9/11 was planned by the U.S. government. The film went viral, but its ideas remained on the fringe. Journalists, engineers, historians and other experts wrote articles, spoke on television, and debunked the film’s alleged evidence of an inside job. Back then, facts could still beat fake — to some degree.
Earlier this month, the Global Disinformation Index released its latest research about the threats posed by the spread of disinformation. The findings make for disturbing reading. Disinformation, conspiracies and erroneous fringe ideas have always been around, but the report explains how bad actors have mastered the frameworks of our online world and are intent on using digital tools as weapons of warfare. The authors describe this as a paradigm called fifth generation warfare, or 5GW, a conflict which doesn’t feature armies or clear objectives. Instead, it will be a free-for-all motivated by frustration rather than ideology.
Here’s what the researchers found:
- The landscape of today’s online threats is significantly more complex, which may lead to many abusive and harmful behaviors slipping through the gaps of our current moderation models.
- Disinformation agents, both domestic and foreign, have a large library of content to draw from in crafting new adversarial narratives. In practice this means less overtly fabricated pieces of content.
- Adversarial narratives like “Stop 5G” campaigns — which seek to halt the expansion of new mobile networks — are effective because they infame social tensions by exploiting and amplifying perceived grievances of individuals, groups and institutions. The end game is to foster long-term social, political and economic conflict.
- One key element of these disinformation campaigns is that they contain elements of factual information that are then seeded throughout.
- As seen in the “Stop 5G” campaign, it is only consumers travel away from the original source that the fabricated conspiracy elements start to be added on.
- Understanding and defending against adversarial narratives requires analysis of both the message’s contents and context, and how disinformation spreads through networks and across platforms.
I wrote in a previous newsletter about radicalization online, using as an example the case of Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in a church shooting in 2015. One explanation for his actions is that Roof found himself diving deeper into a wormhole of “black-on-white crime” after becoming interested in the death of Trayvon Martin. In today’s world, radicalization often begins with an online search.