Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Overview
A recent RAND report looks at the role of information warfare and how targeted social media campaigns and similar approaches are deployed to cause damage to a state. RAND has coined the term “hostile social manipulation” to capture this phenomenon, which builds on familiar influence techniques including propaganda and disinformation. Hostile social manipulation is used to gain a competitive advantage by manipulating the political, social, and economic conditions in target countries through information channels. It targets beliefs and attitudes, not physical assets or military forces, allowing the activity to operate in a gray space that exists below the threshold of war.
The report takes a deep dive into Chinese and Russian activity, as they are the leading practitioners of such techniques that broadcast, shape, invent, block, and otherwise manipulate information to achieve harmful effects on other societies. Russia’s campaign has partly taken the approach of aggressively targeting discrete audiences and pushing false content to exacerbate political prejudices, creating division and social strife. China’s approach, on the other hand, appears to be part of a much more general attempt to control information both within and beyond the state with the goal of making the world safe for the Chinese Communist Party, normalizing it, and extending its power.
Although the subject of social manipulation has gained international attention following the reports of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, authors of the report make it clear that the degree of influence on the elections is outside the scope of the study. Instead, the goal is to more broadly evaluate forms of hostile social manipulation both nations have employed and to conduct an initial assessment of how effective they have been.
While these emerging tools and techniques represent a potentially significant threat, the U.S. and its allies have not been able to effectively recognize and combat social manipulation campaigns. RAND argues that too many basic relationships are poorly understood, and more research is called for to better grasp the true level of risk, the most effective types of manipulation, and the most powerful responses.
The report has identified the following conclusions:
Summary of Russian Activities
Throughout the Cold War-era, the Soviet Union invested significant resources into social manipulation efforts. In the 1980s, the U.S. was estimating that Soviets spent approximately $4 billion on propaganda to influence public thinking and policies abroad. Today, Russia still employs the tactics and techniques of the Soviet era with the intent to weaken Western cohesion and governance, in part through undermining faith in public institutions, leaders, and political parties and intensifying partisan and ideological divides. However the key question remains, after decades of attempts to effect change through social manipulation was Russia ever successful?
By assessing Russian doctrine from the last 20 years, the report peels back the first layer to identify three key themes on the country’s conceptualization of social manipulation. First, Russia views the global information space as a threat to their national security. They believed to “lag behind” others in the information sphere where states were leveraging information technology to undermine the Russian Federation. Second, Russia views information warfare as holistic and integrated into other tools of national power. They may use information as a tool, target, or domain of operations which is in contrast to how the West segments its approach. Third, information warfare is perpetual and conducted in both war and peace to serve offensive and defensive objectives. These three elements have resulted in Russia’s perception that they are permanently at risk from social manipulation efforts.
It is much easier to characterize Russian propaganda efforts than it is to address the issue of their effectiveness. Research on the topic often focuses on the number of rubles spent or the sums of tweets produced, but these criteria may not be the most illustrative. RAND suggests that Russia most likely focuses on the outputs of its social manipulation efforts rather than their outcomes, which makes sense given the challenges to measure changes in behavior or opinion. Although some will argue that Russia has in fact been effective, as Western governments were forced to react and expend resources to countering the threat.
Summary of Chinese Activities
The Chinese Communist Party has used ideology and propaganda as governing tools since its founding in 1921. Overall, the Chinese system of rule can be characterized as “governance through information control” where efforts to shape public opinion focus first on defending the regime domestically, and second on swaying foreign audiences. However, as China deepens its engagement with the world, it is stepping up efforts to manage the ideological sphere. The Chinese government sees itself in a perpetual ideological war with the West and the internet is simply the latest battlespace.
In recent years, RAND notes that China has started to leverage social media platforms more broadly to spread propaganda, shape foreign views of China, and extend Beijing’s influence. While the strongest evidence of Chinese hostile social manipulation has been aimed at Taiwan, China has successfully penetrated Western social media platforms which suggest a driving interest in engaging English-speaking foreigners. Under President Xi Jinping, China has made major investments to build up the country’s soft power by targeting key influence agents, such as foreign media, cultural outlets, academics, and government decisionmakers on social media.
Despite the evidence that China is conducting extensive social manipulation operations around the world, it is impossible to truly determine their effect on public opinion toward the state. Existing surveys have demonstrated that China’s favorability has actually been decreasing in countries like France, India, and the U.S. Yet, RAND predicts that China will become increasingly sophisticated in their online messaging and gain credibility as they learn what works over time. China has also been studying how other countries use the information space. For example, Chinese analysts have started to draw lessons learned from the Russian disinformation campaign aimed at U.S. elections in 2016 in order to “weaponize social media” for Chinese interests.
Conclusion
In sum, the report states that Russian and Chinese social manipulation efforts have not proven to be measurably effective in achieving the concrete geopolitical outcomes that either country was seeking. (Although absence of evidence does not mean there is evidence of absence.) Nevertheless, both countries see information competition as integral and are investing significant resources in this realm.
But make no mistake, the fact that foreign governments are using this capability should be of great concern to the governments, corporations and citizens targeted by the campaigns. RAND underscores the point that no matter the effectiveness, the U.S. and other affected countries must work to ensure such manipulation cannot happen in the same way again.
A set of proposed research topics for the future include the following:
Defending America’s Cognitive Infrastructure from Social Manipulation
OODA co-founder Bob Gourley, has published a two-part series that describes America’s cognitive decision-making infrastructure, why it is at risk, and a set of mitigation techniques that the government and private sector should consider.
Read more at:
About the Author
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence