Book Review: Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News

Written by: Clint Watts

Harper, 2018, 

ISBN 9780062795984, 304pp


Reviewed by Major Lee Hayward

Messing With the Enemy is a contemporaneous look at our hyper-connected world, the way that the rise in social media has enabled state and non-state actors to influence individuals, and how these actors potentially can affect Defence, government, business and individuals.

Clint Watts points out that state and non-state aggressors will continue to evolve, migrate and innovate these new and emerging technologies to advance their goals, faster than most targets can keep pace. He suggests that, if we are to defend and harden ourselves against these ‘soft attacks’, we need to act swiftly and not just maintain a thorough understanding of emerging technology but also adjust our administration and management to decrease the impacts on individuals and governments.

As Watts takes us through the evolution of the internet, from chat rooms to the rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, he introduces us to the innovative ways in which terrorists and issue-motivated groups have been able to recruit followers and influence the behaviour of governments, militaries and individuals.

Rapid improvement in communication methods across the globe has resulted in reduced reliance on traditional sources of information such as print media. Individuals have replaced traditional trusted sources of information with what can be located on the internet. This new era of information exchange has improved global connectivity and provided the opportunity to share information that is taken for granted by many and assumed to be correct. The ability of these sources of information to be actively manipulated presents a multitude of opportunities to shape and influence target audiences.

In Messing With the Enemy, Watts talks at length about computational propaganda and the use of information and communication technology to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition and influence behaviour. As an example, he discusses the way recruitment and radicalisation of individuals was a lengthy and cumbersome process before the arrival of social media. Now issue-motivated groups can use computing algorithms and programs to identify and target vulnerable individuals and continually reinforce the feed of information those individuals get through their smart devices, social media applications and newsfeeds. Individuals who might be vulnerable to extremist messages can be radicalised and recruited at a distance, through a multitude of sources, by using confirmation bias algorithms, which amplify the presence of information appearing in news and social media feeds based on what those individuals show an interest in and who they associate with online.

The author includes an interesting case. Towards the end of the Cold War, Russia realised that it could not defeat the US from the outside and could not outspend on military hardware, but might just be able to divide and defeat democracy from the inside by adapting an approach referred to as ‘Active Measures’—that is, the use of anonymously sourced falsehoods, mixed with true information and disseminated through proxies. However, Active Measures did not become particularly effective on a large scale until the advent of the internet. Watts uses recent examples of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 US election, demonstrating how no-one escapes the risk of being exploited and manipulated by their reliance on the internet.

Messing With the Enemy demonstrates the need for greater technical education in Western democracies and for military and government to invest in, recruit and train skilled IT workers within their ranks. Watts has interesting insights into the need for more creative thinking and ability to act quickly to counter cyber attacks and disinformation when they are located.

Messing With the Enemy is fascinating and, arguably, essential reading for military leaders of all ranks who want to better understand the double-edged sword that the internet has become. It helps us understand how target audiences can be controlled and manipulated and why it continues to be important to educate and inoculate our own people to reduce the risk of falling prey to the cyber-age guerrilla tactics of state and non-state aggressors.