Angry Planet - Social Media Has Changed War Forever

Episode Date: December 12, 2017

War. War has changed.Anyone can keep up to date with the latest conflict on Twitter. Facebook is a great place to watch the propaganda game of entire countries unfold. YouTube amplifies previously marginalized conspiracy theories to millions. Everything is different now.This week on War College, we talk to author and journalist David Patrikarakos about his new book War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Putin may one day raise so many tensions over Ukraine, unless he does something major, he's backed himself into a corner, and that's when war, a major war can start. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello, welcome to War College.

I am your host, Matthew Galt. My co-host, Jason Fields, is deep behind enemy lines and stuck in a meeting. So I am steering our leaky ship of mixed metaphors today. Social media has changed the way we live and work. Most of us are on Facebook, avoiding our families, and there's a good chance some of our listeners are staring at Twitter right now. It's changed everything, including war. here to talk us through how war has changed is journalist and author David Petra Karakos.

His new book, War and 140 characters, How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the 21st Century, is all about this. David, thank you so much for joining us. All right, so I think my first experience with kind of what you're talking about here came in 2008 during the Mumbai terror attacks. I remember Litt's learning about that and watching it on TV and learning that both the attackers and the victims were using Twitter and Flickr, I believe, to kind of coordinate and help each other out and

also figure out where people were. And I'm wondering, when did you first realize that something was going on here, that social media was changing warfare itself? Well, I mean, obviously social media had sort of gradually made its way into my life. So I was becoming increasingly aware of it, increasingly reliant on it. But it was only until I went to Ukraine and spent eight months. months covering the Russian-Ukraine war that I really understood how it had begun to change conflicts.

Because just four years earlier in 2010, I'd been in the Congo invading with the UN peacekeepers on the front lines in the jungles against the Lord's Resistance Army. And, you know, those conflicts were four years apart, but it was this I was covering a conflict in a different century. I mean, I understand one was in Africa where, you know, social media is. less prevalent in Europe, but nonetheless, it was clear that, you know, a very different kind of war had emerged in Russia, Ukraine, that anything I'd seen before. What was it about that conflict that struck a chord with you?

Well, I mean, pretty much everything. I mean, you know, if you look at a war as traditionally understood, you have two or more sides to, you know, have a fight in an area almost as delineated as a boxing ring, and the winner, you know, achieved military victory, and from there imposes the political settlement on the loser. But in Ukraine, you know, this wasn't happening. You know, Russian President Vladimir Putin had no intention of rolling into Ukraine and defeating the Ukrainian army, which in the beginning he easily could have done and forcing the government to accept the settlement, let's say, accepting the annexation of eastern Ukraine,

as he just stole in Crimea. That wasn't the goal. The goal was, and I was seeing this as I traveled. from occupied cities in the east, like Deneit, Lehm, Slovian. The goal was to get Eastern Ukrainians to subscribe to a particular narrative. And that narrative was that Kiev was following the Maidan revolution, which overthrew the Putin-backed Yanukovych, President Yanukovych, that Kiev is now a fascist junta that was dominated by Nazis, intent on persecuting ethnic Russians in Ukraine

and stamping out of speaking of Russians in the country. And this, I mean, he had sent in troops across the border. He had backed separatists, essentially to create a space to allow this narrative to seep in unfiltered. And that is not a military goal. That is a political goal. To get people to subscribe to a particular narrative is a political goal. It's like when I spoke to U.S. and American and British soldiers who'd fought in Afghanistan, and they told me that the goal in the end became not to militarily defeat the Taliban,

but to convince the local population not to join them, which is a political, not a military goal. So once I realized that actually this was the goal, you see that actually the dissemination of narratives, the dissemination of propaganda becomes the ultimate goal. So, you know, propaganda is as old as war itself. But traditionally, as war is traditionally understood, propaganda has supported military operations on the ground. What I saw in Russia and Ukraine were military operations on the ground supporting propaganda operations in cyberspace and TV. Military campaigns are meant to achieve a political end, typically, right? So isn't this kind of cutting out one of the unpleasant parts in the middle, or at least, you know, scaling it back?

Couldn't it be argued that this is a good thing then? Well, it depends what your political goal is, if it's an extremely malign one. then no, because the violence still exists. I mean, in fact, I think it's a negative thing because, as Russia-Ukraine showed, no war was ever declared. It started with Crimea when unidentifieded soldiers wearing uniforms with no in Sydney

marched in, no war was declared, so no international organization was able to react. And this is the basis of Russia's doctrine. Now, let's say, for example, the same thing happens in a NATO state, but no war is officially declared. What can the war is done? I mean, Article 5, can it be invoked? We don't know. You know, it stretches the rules of warfare as we understand it, and it's predicated on a belief, especially coming from Russia, that 20th century institutions like NATO are obsolete. So in fact, it's more dangerous because what it's done, by blurring, by blurring, by blitz,

slurring war into politics. Klausowitz famously said war is a continuation of politics with other means, or by other means. But this is war as politics. And when you align the separation between war and politics, it becomes very dangerous because where does it end? Politics never end. You know, so the possibility for a great chance of perpetual war is greater. So, I mean, it may have some upsides in that perhaps battles don't have to be as farocious as well as war. too, but it certainly has a lot of downsides that I've outlined, I would argue. Why do you think that Russia is so savvy and so savvy so quickly? It feels like the West is not playing the same game, right? It seems like Putin especially figured all of this stuff out very quickly. I agree 100%. The Russians have a tradition, obviously, which they call Maskadovka, war by war by exception, which again is obviously not unique to Russia.

But they did figure this out very quickly, and I think Ukraine was a testing ground for all of this. They are the first ones who have truly understood how to harness this new information technology. And when I say the first ones, what I mean is the first bad actors. Now, if you look at bad actors we might call totalitarian states, Iran, China, but Iran and China, they are clumsy. They censor the internet And you don't want to censor the internet That's why I call Putin a post-modern dictator Because he understands that

You can Russia I mean Russia is a dictatorship in all but name But he still maintains that democratic veneer So instead of the gulags and the firing squad You have fines for tax evasion Or your NGOs shut down for the zoning violation What Putin understood early on Or what the Russians have understood

is the dangers of what, again, Morrow's are called cyber utopianism, many in the West, especially in Silicon Valley, thought that when social media emerged, when Web 2.0 emerged, the Internet emerged, that this would be transnational, it would bring us altogether, and that, you know, it would spell the end

for dictators and tyrants. And to a degree, you know, there is some truth in that. You can't kill people en masse now, because anyone with a smartphone can broadcast your every state is in your every state, is in every brutality to the internet. But in the end, the same tools that Democrats and resistance people use will come to be used by, you know, what is used by the oppressed will come to be used

by the oppressor. And Russia has called on to this very quickly, very early, and you see the result. And we are behind them. And this is another point that I made that's very important, which is that democracies are out of disadvantage in this warfare, because Russia can pretend to be what it is. It can set up troll farms. it can lie brazenly. Now, obviously, we in the West have information operations.

We obviously have our own propaganda, but we cannot set up troll farms as they have in St. Petersburg, writing fake Ukrainian websites, and we cannot use trolls in the same way the Russia does because all it would take was one newspaper expose in the Wall Street Journal on New York Times, and all hell would break loose. All right, you mentioned the troll.

farms. I'm wondering if you can get into some of the other things that Russia is doing, like the nuts and bolts of this stuff, really kind of elaborate for our audience. What, you know, what are they doing specifically? Well, they do a variety of things. We know recently, obviously, because of the tech hearings, that they bought a load of ads that reached, I mean, they say figures vary, but about 130 million people, I mean, almost the amount of people that voted in the 2016 presidential to the election. So they do that, which is, I mean, a lot of it is quite rudimentary. We have this idea that Russians are all, you know, chess playing grandmasters, thinking 20 moves ahead. But a lot of the stuff they're doing is just throwing everything that the kitchen sink at the

wall and opening with 20% of it sticks. So they'll buy fake ads. They will write face articles, fake articles in the hope that they go viral. They will create means, anti-abama means, anti-Hillary Clinton means, pro-Donald Trump means. And obviously the thing with social media is that what is popular is, you know, there is no correlation between popularity and quality. In fact, quite the inverse. And often what goes viral is what is most sensationalist. And obviously what is most sensationalist is often not true. So essentially they will create memes, they will troll on Twitter and Facebook. They will just deluge, deluge, deluge with a narrative or conflicting narrative. And if 20% of it works, then it can make a difference. And to take the recent

election, if, let's say, their ad did reach 130 million people, I mean, when they say reach, even if, you know, only a few million read them, if 20% of them of that number were affected, then that, you know, could well be enough to have swung the election for Donald Trump. I mean, it's serious. And this is the election of the most powerful person on earth. But I also think that kitchen sink method, kind of doing everything they possibly can, is also about mudding the waters of their intentions. So it's never quite clear what they want, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you've hit the nail right on the head. And this is the interesting thing about the nature of modern Russian propaganda. If you look at old Soviet propaganda,

it was clear, you know, it was to try to produce a positive image of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is the ideal society. The Soviet Union is utopia on Earth. Russia doesn't try to do this. I mean, look, I'm sure it would like to, but I suspect it knows it has no choice, you know, it has a little chance of this message being actually widely believed. So what it's done, what it does it, is it attempts to not convince anyone of a particular truth, but to send out so many bewildering narratives that is to flood the information space with so many narratives that are effective, not by their quality, but by their sheer volume. Now, I'll give you an example.

I was in Ukraine when flight M817 was shot down by what we now know was a Russian book missile given to separate by the Russian army. Now, I was in Ukraine and news were a plane being shot down over. He said civilian plane, a civilian airliner, which is obviously key here. And within minutes, you know, it was the trolling started. It was the Ukrainians that did it.

It was the Americans that did it. It was the Ukrainians and the Americans that did it. Now, the point was not to create a clear counter-narrative, but essentially to flood the space with so many narratives, that unless you're a political excessive like you or me, you know, normal people have lies. If you were trying to go on Twitter to find out what was going on, you know, you couldn't, you know, there was so much stuff.

You wouldn't know where to start. And this is the fundamental point. It is to create so much information, to create so much, so many narratives, that it weakens people's propensity to recognize the truth when they see it. That is at the heart of it. I think that's a really powerful example, too, because there have been previous, you know, similar instances,

even as far back as a decade or two decades ago, where, you know, a major airliner getting shot down would have drawn the international community into that conflict. Yeah, and look, and it did. You know, people lined up to contend Putin. It did. but perhaps not quite to the degree that it would have done 20 years ago. You're absolutely right.

All right, war college listeners, we are going to pause there for a break. We're on with David Patrick Caracost talking about his new book, War and 140 Characost, how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. Welcome back, War College listeners. You are on with David Patrick Caracos. We are talking about his new book, War and 140 characters, how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. Okay, so we've talked a little bit about, you know, some of the major players that are using social media effectively.

Has it also empowered previously powerless groups and given them advantages? Absolutely. And I think we look at, and I look in my book at the Israeli 2014 Operation Protective Edge. And in my book, I focus on a character called Farah Baca. Now, Farah during Operation Protective Edge, it was six, she was a 16-year-old. well, essentially child. I mean, a 16-year-a-child. Obviously, in Gaza, a deeply patriarchal society,

so as a 16-year-old girl in war, you thought you can't get anyone much more powerless than that. But through the use of a smartphone, an ability to speak English, and more than this, an ability to create an extremely powerful narrative, she became the face for many people of Palestinian suffering. and she gained around a quarter of a million Twitter followers. She was covered in major newspapers from the U.S. to the UK to the Arab world. And, you know, the traction she got online.

I mean, the effect she would have had on Israel's military calculations was, you know, probably negligible. But in a period where major states fight asymmetric wars, the guards of the Palestinians are never, ever, ever going to be able to work. win at the military level. But people like Farah enable them to win at the information level. And this is very important because a country like Israel, as powerful as it may be, it's still a very small country. And in order to fight wars, it needs to have, it needs to win the discursive battle. To put it like that, it needs, you know, it gets sold weapons by the US and it needs to justify use. And, you know, this Israeli discursive arguments have centered on the

right to project Jewish life for virtually any cost, the right for sovereignty, and these are the only democracy in the Middle East. And these are powerful arguments, especially in Washington, especially in Berlin. Obviously, Israel loses the discursive war in many places, the entire Arab world, part of South America, parts of Europe, but it wins it where it counts. Because fundamentally, it can win at that discursive level. The problem is, and this is widely accepted generally by the American establishment and the American people, for it. example. But, you know, when you start seeing images of dead children that are being tweeted by Palestinians on the ground, then some of the principles don't matter so much.

You know, in West Virginia, you know, who agrees arbitrarily with Israel's right to defend itself against terrorists, is now looking at dead children and she doesn't care about that abstract argument anymore. She just doesn't want to see their children. So someone like Farah who is documenting these trust feed, but more than that was creating a narrative of her life. It was interesting. She wasn't saying, look, three people killed tonight, 10 Israeli airstrikes. She was saying, oh, my God, oh, my God, I might die tonight. Here's a picture of my six-year-old sister.

She's terrified with screaming. And she created an ongoing narrative. And this is the key. She wasn't drawing documentary facts. And because of who she was, she was telegenic, she was young, she was female, it really, really, really created a storm. And it empowered the Palestinian cause to a degree that would not have been possible 15 years ago. because the Palestinians cannot win at the military level. They cannot.

They never will be able to. So the only thing they can try to do is win at the information level. And in 2014, they did. Israel lost that war in the court of public opinion. And that is huge because it makes the next war that much harder to fight. Do you think that cold hard facts divorced from a personality and a strong narrative are weaker in this new game? game? Absolutely. I mean, without a doubt. I mean, social media, what's the social media reward? It does not, it rewards the sensationalist. It rewards the emotive. It works against the nuance and the thought,

you know, and the thoughtful. Twitter, for example, you could only write, you know, two sentences until recently they doubled the word, the character account. Okay, now you can write four sentences. The problem is, you know, what I call the charisma of certainty. It is, you know, if you can be certain, something. You can say, yes, you know, Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria. You can say, yes, Israel are baby killers, where in fact the truth is, well, look, on the one hand, I mean, not at that, no one's regard to Hillary Clinton, that was clearly rubbish. But, you know, whereas, you know, in any ready context, say yes, obviously there are civilian casualties, but there are always civilian casualties. No one wants to hear that.

You know, no, there is no room for that. And social media platforms do not reward that kind of of nuanced, thoughtful approach, because for a start, it's too long and nobody reads it. They reward visuals, they reward music, they reward the emotive, and they reward the sensationalist. But absolutely, cold, hard facts. Look, social media is, what is it? It's essentially emotion without context. And what the Israelis tried to do was give context to the emotion, and they were always going to come off second best. Are the facts just not as sexy?

Is there a way to... is there a way to bring truth and reality back into this conversation, do you think? Yes, and people try. Look, it's not as if, let's not get carried away. Everybody knows that Russia, you know, everybody in the West knows that Russia is responsible ultimately for the downing of MH17. It's not as if Russia has convinced, you know, the entire American public that it was, in fact, the Ukrainians that shot it down.

So, you know, we're not losing totally. The problem is that all you need is a few shifts at the time, because it took two years for the report on MH17 to come out. We now know Russian interference may have swung the election for Donald Trump. No one was really talking about fake hours at the time. There was a lot of talk about Russia collusion, but at the time, there was no idea that the Russians were doing this in such a way. So we are losing little battles, but, you know, we're not, the war is lost yet.

We're not in a stage where great lies are believed on mass. But what is happening is that people are being convinced of stuff in real time, and bad actors are taking advantage of this. And, as I say, look, cold hard facts are not as sexy. They're just not sexy. And platforms, again, I return to this again again. they do not reward nuance. People want dopamine hits from retweets,

you know, rushes from likes. You know, if you want to have a serious and considered a conversation about politics, the last place you want to be is Twitter. Because all you'll get is either tentationalism or an argument. On that note, can you define the battlefields for us a little bit?

In terms of conflict, what's the difference between Twitter and how does it differ from Facebook and Instagram? I mean, okay, if you want to follow a war in real time, Twitter is the go-to place, which is why it's essentially what the IDF, for example, was most concerned about. It was Farah's most important tool,

because that's when things are happening in real time. So if there is an Israeli raid on Gaza, then you've got Farah tweeting, Israeli tanks are rolling in. There's gunfire all around. I'm terrified, I'm terrified, I'm terrified. Meanwhile, the Israeli going, we have launched this operation. We are doing X, Y, Z to avoid civilian casualties.

But Twitter at the same time is relatively small. And where everybody lives is Facebook. So Facebook is better when you want to mobilize people. It's for the longer game. You know, it's when you want to post that fake article about Donald Trump or that fake article about Ukraine. So it can be read at leisure or greater leisure than at Twitter anyway. Instagram, I mean, it's very good because it's the visuals, but you can get the visuals on Twitter anyway.

So the two most important platforms in conflict are Twitter and Facebook. Twitter for real time and real, you know, hysteria, drumming up hysteria, Facebook for the longer, you know, 30-day drip, drip, drip, drip, drip of pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli propaganda, depending on who you support. How do you see the West and specifically the U.S. military catching up in all of these areas? Because normally when I hear about their interactions with Facebook or Twitter, it's a scandal like Marines United, something like that. How do we change that? There just needs to be a huge cultural shift. They just need a huge shift in the way people understand and react to social media. I mean, if you've read the counterterrorist chapter in my book, you'll see that a State Department division

designed to counter ISIS propaganda was totally outgunned and completely defeated by what were essentially a few thousand ISIS fanboys probably many of them just teenagers who are just there on Twitter and this is the problem

I mean the US government is an institution and it is by its nature bureaucratic bloated things have to go up the chain of command it's very conservative it's very risk-averse it's generally at the high-level staff

why middle-aged, middle-aged men is not particularly diverse, and they just don't get it. What needs to be done is more have to be farmed out for third parties, messaging has to come from third parties, and people have to be given more freedom. I talk about homo-digitalists in the book, which is, you know,

the hyper-empowered networked individual, which is why, in my book, perhaps the most successful character is Elliot Higgins, who uses open-source material. Here's a guy who is an online nerd wargamer, who essentially took, those skills and ended up proving that the Russians provided the missile that shot down MH17. And that, by the way, if you want to understand the shift in power between institutions

like government to individuals and networks of individuals, Elliot Higgins is the classic case. Him and just a few guys hanging out using entirely open source material made the Russian government, the government of the world's largest country, come out specifically in several press conferences to rebut his work. Now, can you imagine? Imagine the Russian government coming out to rebut the work of three civilian, essentially, non-entities 20 years ago. I mean, it's ludicrous. It would never happen. Not only that, they send reporters to his home constantly to try to harass and undermine him.

It's a big deal for them to delegitimize Belling Cat and Elliot Higgins. Yeah, totally. They've tried to troll him. They've undermined him. They've written hit jobs on him. Yeah, I mean, he's become a real threat. This lone guy living in a small British town. He was previously a payments officer for a women's lingerie company.

He's now on Russia's radar. What do you see as the role of trolls in all of this? And controls be used for good, do you think? Well, the role of a troll is, as I said before, to help muddy the water. That's the point. Whether it be creating fake means, writing fake articles, you know, commenting, you know, tweeting, Facebooking, anything. It's to muddy the waters, to muddy the narrative, to do anything they can to chip away of certainty. That's a troll in my opinion. Can they ever be used for good?

The problem is, again, look, I'm not trying to say that, you know, Britain or America, we're so honorable. We wouldn't do this. My issue is if we tried to do it, somewhat, we'd get caught, and immediately there'd be a big scandal, we'd have to shut it down. It goes back to saying, we cannot use trolls in the same way because we get caught out and we'd be held to account. This is why democracies are at a disadvantage to dictatorships in this great online narrative war that is going on. Can trolls being used for good? No, not by good actors. I don't believe they can.

What good actors need to do is to debunk myths, not create more myth. Because then if you can't even trust your own side, then, you know, everything is lost. So I think trolls are a bad thing. I think the name is quite apt. You know, troll itself is not a positive name. we need anti-trials. We need more antitrails. Look, what we need to do is train armies of Elliot Higgins. That's what we need to do. That's what the government needs to do, ASAP. You know, security vet them, do all that, and then let them loose and let them do their work,

because their work is effective, they're not constrained by, so, you know, so they would obviously have oversight. But, you know, it's a 50-year-old guy sitting in the state department somewhere writing a long piece on why ISIS is bad. It's just not going to reach anyone, and no one's going to care. We've touched a little bit on how authoritarian regimes are looking at this stuff and dealing with it, and specifically Russia is way ahead of the curve of most state actors. Let's talk a little bit more about Turkey, Iran, China, and what they're doing wrong, and if you think they'll ever take a page out of the Russian playbook. Well, what they're doing wrong is, as I said before, censoring the internet. they banned you know

Facebook is banned in many places Erdogan didn't he try and take down Twitter recently I don't I forget I mean this is bad

because the optics are very bad if you're a dictator you know the last thing you want to look like is a dictator um

Iran is the same thing but they I mean Turkey was more European I mean you know supposedly more western facing

Iran is yeah I mean Iran is now it's getting more savvy but essentially, you know, these places are still behind. China is interesting because it's more concerned essentially with policing its own population. So censoring the Internet actually isn't so bad for them.

What they're doing is using a lot of, I mean, they have essentially a lot of paid bloggers who whip up feeling because they have issues in the South China Sea, as you know, because they're islands there that they believe are Chinese, and what they do is they have armies and armies of state bloggers. blogging about this and whipping their populations up into a frenzy about these islands. So essentially they use the website to A, police and shield their own populations from things that they don't like, and B, to whip their populations into frenzies to support issues that they do like.

They also, incidentally, I mean, you have things like the Clouth School, which is truly chilling, which is an online credit score that essentially evaluates you as a human being and can affect your job prospects and indeed are your prospects of a mate. partner, whatever. So there's finally different issues. The danger comes, and this is, you know, my big concern, and I say this in the book, is that you know, the more I read

about, you know, from Russian publications, you know, English language ones, saying, you know, Ukrainians are fascists, they're this, they're bad, they're trying to kill Russian speakers, the more Russians got outraged going, yes, we must kill these fascists, we must do something about it, same with China. And they run the rift at one day,

you know, in like 1914, no one really wanted to go to war. But it's for many of the, you know, for the Kaiser, for people like that, came to the point where if they didn't do something, they risk losing their own throne or their own government. But, you know, Putin may one day raise so many tensions over Ukraine, unless you've got something major, he's backed himself into a corner. And that's when a major war can start. And that's what concerns me. You see that with China with the population getting very angry. And there comes the point where if you spent years telling everyone, look what's happening in the

out trying to see it and you don't do anything about it, you lose too much faith and you have to do something, and then conflict starts. Can I get you to tease out a little aside you had just now? The Tencent-Cent-driven Chinese social credit thing? I think this is something I've been reading about for a while now, and I think it's kind of frightening. Can you explain to the audience a little bit more about what that is? Sure. I mean, look, I'm not a huge expert on this. I will be honest. Now, I generally do not use the word Orwellian, because it is such a cliche and, First of all, the brilliance of all well was not predicting the future.

I mean, 1984 did not come true, but was actually in deconstructing and exposing fascism, and colonialism and imperialism for the lives they were. But this, this is, you know, straight out of 1984. Essentially, what this cloud score does, it attracts your shopping habits, it tracks your browsing habits, tracks your banking habits, your eating habits, and creates a score for you. So, for example, it's like a credit score, but for you as a human. And we've come to a point, Matthew, where let's say your credit score is a 50, because you've done some things that the Chinese government doesn't approve of, maybe you looked at a couple of websites that weren't so good, maybe you're a bit of, in their eyes, an irresponsible spender, who knows? And if you want to meet a lady and her score is 70 and your scores is 50, you know, you're not going to be right for her.

It is truly chilling. It's essentially the commodification of the human being. And that is actually, yeah, truly chilling. And that is Orwellian. That is one thing I would say is Orwellian. Yeah, it's not created related to conflict. But it gives you an example of, you know, where this all can lead. Because, you know, you can do this now.

Facebook, if Facebook wanted to do it, it could do it. It has all our information. So, extremely frightening. And this is why, in the end, I say that the story of social media is, in a sense, the story of the rise and fall of hope. We started out so hopeful, and we understand now just how dangerous it is. And this is why I think we're in a bad place.

Our information environment is extremely unhealthy. And I think things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. I think that is a wonderful place to end the conversation on here at War College. Yeah, very nice and cheerful. Yeah, well, that's kind of a running theme, actually, on War College, is we always end on a depressing note. Sorry, the book is War and 140 characters, how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century.

David, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me on. All right, War College listeners, that is your episode for this week. I produced and hosted this week, as Jason Fields was otherwise indisposed. He will be here next week, though, as we are talking to Marty Scoveland, Jr., about his recent embed with Afghanistan's Special Operations Forces. Now, to be clear, not talking about the American special forces in Afghanistan, talking about the Afghan special forces in Afghanistan. It's an interesting episode, and on a rare note for us, actually ends positively.

So please come back and check that out. We will be off the next week because it's Christmas, and we're all going to be spending some time for the holidays with our families. There will be a rerun that week. Probably not something about Russia, though.