LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

In an age of livestreamed terrorist attacks and viral misinformation, a new pocket-sized battleground has emerged.

Through the weaponization of social media, the internet has transformed war and politics. Terrorists livestream their attacks, “Twitter wars” produce real world casualties, and viral misinformation alters not just the result of battles, but the very fate of nations.

In their new book LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, authors Peter W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking study what social media has been doing to politics, news, and war around the world, drawing upon everything from historic cases to the latest in AI and machine intelligence. They track dozens of conflicts in every corner of the globe, studying the spread of YouTube battle clips, a plague of Nazi-sympathizing cartoon frogs, and even enlist in a digital army themselves.

A conversation with the authors as they tackle the questions that arose during their five years of research: What can be kept secret in a world of networks? Does social media expose the truth or bury it? And what role do ordinary people now play in international conflicts?
 

Participants:

Peter Warren Singer, @peterwsinger
Senior Fellow and Strategist, New America
Contributing Editor, Popular Science
Co-author, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

Emerson T. Brooking , @etbrooking
Former Research Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
Contributor, The Atlantic and Foreign Policy Magazine
Co-author, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

Moderator:

Anne-Marie Slaughter, @SlaughterAM
President and CEO, New America
Author, The Chessboard & the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

Lunch will be served. Copies of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media will be available for purchase.