The very bright (gleaming) fellows at FutureCrunch have written in a recent newsletter (#48) about a new favourite expression: “weaponised narrative”
It’s what the rest of us would understand as “fake news” or information on our feeds that are manipulated by outside actors. As the full scale of Russia’s possible intervention in the US elections last November is beginning to become known, the FutureCrunch guys say
“Disinformation is of course, nothing new. The difference is that the global digital reach and lightning quickness of mass media allows it to operate on a whole new scale. Technological evolution has paved the way for Propaganda 3.0, and we haven’t gotten our heads around it yet.”
The military is very interested in this as a new battlefront and an article in DefenseOne elaborates:
“Weaponized narrative seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will by generating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms. It can be used tactically, as part of explicit military or geopolitical conflict; or strategically, as a way to reduce, neutralize, and defeat a civilization, state, or organization. Done well, it limits or even eliminates the need for armed force to achieve political and military aims.“
The FutureCrunch team are keen to publish more GOOD news from around the world rather than the barrage of newsworthy-but-usually-horrible things that seem to be in most of our feeds so they use these examples to underpin the point that what we read is curated and manipulated by algorithms to be readable, clickable, and addictive, so probably not good-news stories. And that’s the stuff that isn’t necessarily an explicit attempt to undermine an opponent’s civilisation.
It’s interesting — but completely obvious when you step back and think about it — that this classification can exist. The idea that “narrative” can be weaponised is nothing new. Wikipedia tells me propaganda goes back to 515 BCE so manipulating the story harks back to pretty much the start of our written records. But, as stated above, global reach and speed is the new new. The pace and scale of dissemination of a message that a Facebook with its 1b users can facilitate is unprecedented.
One wonders what the master propagandists of old might have done with such an instrument of broadcast.
My brain cannot tell the difference between truth and lies on the internet. Possibly, the future of media lies in proof of authenticity and that content is not fake news. In the same way as I have identity certificates working in the background to help make my internet experience more secure, it would be helpful to have a content certificate to help me know I’m not being sprayed with a weaponised narrative. Like the folks at FutureCrunch, I love the term. Like the folks at FutureCrunch, I hate that such at thing exists.