Social Media and Information Warfare: Knowledge, Organisation, and Radicalisation (original) (raw)

This paper examines the role of social media in information warfare, utilising examples from the Arab Spring. It explores the way in which news and propaganda dissemination are more readily achieved through social media, and creates the foundation for groups to organise around centralised ideologies based on location, ethnicity, and class. Such networks of information are found to be non-hierarchical, in opposition to traditional media, making the task of removing combatant intelligence–gathering and –sharing abilities more difficult that has been previously seen. The way in which social media circumvents traditional media avenues is used as a justification to outline how individuals in similar situations are motivated to emulate information –sharing behaviours amongst their demographics. Such groups then develop identities that lead to radicalised behavior and violent extremism, based on the way in which social media creates knowledge about their relative deprivation, and polarises them with dominant social, economic, and political narratives. Such media then allows radicalised groups to organise their behaviour, whether through education, recruitment, or military action. It is seen that, by analysing the literature on social media information sharing dynamics within groups, how this dictates identity, and how identity plays an significant role in the radicalisation literature, the military and intelligence community must address social media within the warfare context in order to counter the roots of their opponent's ideology, by undermining their opponents information warfare practices.