A New Realm of Warfare
By: Sebastian Lamontagne
Tags: Nigeria, Fake News, Disinformation, Democracy, Myanmar

A New Realm of Warfare

Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

Social media has become a battleground on which a number of disinformation wars are being waged. Governments and militaries use online platforms to keep the people they are supposed to protect in a constant state of suggestiveness and malleability through the use of fear tactics, making it impossible for citizens to tell what is real and what is fake. And social media and web portals are often used by governments for surveillance.

In 2010 Chinese hackers attacked around 34 companies, seeking information about activists and thinkers who opposed China’s leadership. Google, which had made an agreement with the Chinese government in 2006 to censor search results for Chinese users, decided to pull out of China. According to Google, the logic behind it’s agreement with China had been to slowly encourage the country to open itself up and provide its citizens with more freedom of expression online. And the company had kept it’s servers outside of China so as to sidestep pressure to comply with the government’s demands. But the attack on activists email accounts crossed a line for Google’s executives, who decided it was better to take a stand, refusing to censor Google results any longer. As a result China banned Google’s search engine (Singel)

Google, along with Yahoo and Microsoft, were part of the Global Network Initiative. The GNI was formed by the three companies in response to congressional fury over their collective eagerness to tap into China’s huge potential user base, even at the cost of bending over backwards to meet China’s demands. Yahoo is no longer listed on the GNI’s webpage as an affiliate of the group (GNI Home).

The difference between Yahoo’s reaction to China’s hacking and Google’s response was markedly different. Yahoo is a strict censor, and it keeps the servers for it’s Chinese operations in the country, thereby advertising it’s willingness to comply with the Chinese government. In 2002, Yahoo gave up the personal corrospendence of Wang Xiaoning, leading to his arrest and imprisonment. Xiaoning had been writing pro democracy screeds and disseminating them through his Yahoo account. Yahoo claimed it had been duped into releasing the emails, but was later forced to admit that it had known the intentions of China’s law enforcement all along. Unlike Google, Yahoo barely responded to the 2010 cyberattacks (Hornby)

Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton backed up Google in a speech responding to the cyberattacks: “In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all. Countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation. By reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behaviour among states and encourage respect for the global networked commons” (Crook, 291).

Clinton compared China’s censorship to the rise of communism, and warned that a new “information curtain” might be descending. Many saw Clinton’s response as an example of how unprepared many Western governments are to deal with the complex ways in which the internet is being utilized by authoritarian regimes. The comparison to the Cold War in particular struck some as an outmoded and not particularly useful way to understand Chinese censorship (Singel).

And the danger posed to democracy by the internet is much more complex than censorship. Take for instance the case of Myanmar. Up until 2017, things were beginning to look good for the country. As good as could be expected anyway. Myanmar’s transition to liberal democracy was ongoing, and at times rocky. But the future was looking hopeful, with a visit from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011 and the election of writer and scholar Htin Kyaw in 2015, who became the first President un-affiliated with the military since 1962 (Who is Htin Kyaw).

Myanmar seemed open, albeit cautiously so, to adopting new forms of governance. However, in the deepest secrecy, Myanmar’s military was working to create a new kind of genocide, one fostered on Facebook and built on the back of a massively complex disinformation campaign.

The fake news spun on Facebook by Myanmar’s military was part of a top secret operation carried out on Facebook over the course of half a decade. Facebook is ubiquitous in Myanmar, to the extent that many see it as synonymous with the internet itself. The military worked out of a series of bases in the foothills surrounding Naypyidaw. They took over celebrity accounts, and created troll accounts, which they used these to target specific demographics with a barrage of incendiary posts (Mozur).

Most of the posts were about the stateless Rohingya minority, sometimes explicitly tying them to supposed murders, rapes or massacres through the use of misleading photos and videos, including photos of dead bodies and videos of violent killings. The military stereotyped the Rohingya as potential terrorists. Meanwhile Rohingya muslims were targeted with false information about Buddhists. The goal of this campaign was to make the public feel scared, helpless, and reliant on the military to protect them. The false information spread on Facebook was used to sway public opinion against the Rohingya and it helped to legitimize a military offensive against the ethnic minority which ultimately led to over 700,000 Rohingya fleeing the country (Al Jazeera).

In Nigeria Facebook has also fueled an increase in ethnic tensions. The difference there is that the Nigerian police and military are attempting to fight fake news, rather than spreading it themselves. Major-General Augustine Agundu, who leads a peacekeeping operation in the Plateau State, where many of the worst incidents have occured, spoke to the BBC and called social media and specifically Facebook: “a new realm of warfare” adding that “fake news spirals before you know what’s happening. You have to spend a lot of effort to let people know that it is false” (BBC News).

The phenomenon that the Major-General describes can be deadly. One senior officer in the Nigerian army observed that “It’s turning one tribe against another, one religion against another.” Nigeria’s minister of communications struck a similar note at an event where he was launching a campaign to help inform Nigerians about fake news “In a multi ethnic, multi religious country like ours fake news is a time bomb” (Toromade).

One BBC article describes images shared on Facebook of “a baby with open machete wounds across his head and jaw” alongside images of “a man’s skull hacked open” and “pictures of homes burnt to the ground, bloodied corpses dumped in mass graves, and children murdered in their beds.” The images, posted to Facebook on June 23, 2018, were taken from a number of far flung places and some of them were a number of years old. But they purported to show a massacre carried out by Fulani muslims in the Gashish district. There had been violence in Gashish, and possibly as many as 283 Berom people were killed. But the phony images worked the Berom ethnic minority in the region into a froth of rage. And on 24, June eleven Fulani men, entering the town of Mangu, were dragged from their cars and brutally murdered. One of them, a potato farmer named Ali Alhaji Muhammed, was so mutilated that his wives could not bring themselves to look at his corpse in order to identify him (Busari), (BBC News).

Meanwhile, Facebook’s monitoring of fake news in Nigeria has been incredibly underwhelming, leading to frustration on the part of police who are forced to chase after false leads on a routine basis. There appear to be only four fact checkers employed by Facebook to monitor the collective output of Nigeria’s 22.4 million Facebook users (Statista). Worse still, none of the fact checkers understand Hausa, a widely spoken language in Nigeria. And the issue has largely flown under the radar of US officials. Fake news poses a real and present threat to democracy promotion. It can inflame ethnic tensions, which undermines the potential for a cohesive civil society oriented around nonviolent debate, and it can also destroy fact based discourse. It threatens newly formed democracies by causing the citizenship to become deeply misinformed and making it impossible for them to engage with democratic processes in a knowledgeable and prepared fashion. (Kozlowska).

Democracy promoters should be aware of all of this. And it should be a prerogative among them to create a set of laws and standards by which to govern US based tech companies like Facebook and Yahoo. Preventing disinformation on social media platforms, and government surveillance of web portals, should be made a top priority. The safety of consumers must come first, and tech companies should be held, at a bare minimum, to the same high standards as food and beverage companies when it comes to monitoring the potential dangers posed by their products.

Bibliography

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