Abstract
Through case studies of incidents around the world where the social media platforms have been used and abused for ulterior purposes, Chapter 6 highlights the lessons that can be learned. For good or for ill, the author elaborates on the way social media has been used as an arbiter to inflict various forms of political influence and how we may have become desensitized due to the popularity of the social media platforms themselves. A searching view is provided that there is now a propensity by foreign states to use social media to influence the user base of sovereign countries during key political events. This type of activity now justifies a paradigm shift in relation to our perception and utilization of computerized devices for the future.
TopBackground
The Arab Spring of 2011 is an example of the use of social media messaging in unexpected ways (Al-Abdin & Costello, 2015). The epicenter was Tunisia after a street seller torched himself whilst protesting against the authorities who had seized his vegetable stand because he did not possess a permit (Huang, 2011; Wolfsfeld et al., 2013). Consequently, pro-democracy activists seized the opportunity to further protest in Tunis and this action ultimately caused the Tunisian dictator to abdicate and escape to Saudi Arabia (Wolfsfeld et al., 2013; Markham, 2014). Other countries followed with demonstrations at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt as well as uprisings in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, igniting civil wars (Howard et al., 2011). Academics have listed Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as key platforms that were used during the Arab Spring revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East (Wolfsfeld et al., 2013). Some believe that the use of social media in the Tunisian and Egyptian cases encouraged their tyrants to be deposed over a very short period of time. Protesters used these platforms to organize themselves and communicate with the outside world. People are still using social media today in Syria for communication and for keeping abreast of the news (Gire, n.d.). Researcher Gerbaudo (Coretti & Maha, 2013) provided a convincing argument that in the case of Egypt’s disturbances when the government isolated Internet Service Providers to quell the disturbances, it had the opposite effect of driving more people onto the streets to demonstrate – thus escalating the problem. Another academic Moussa believes that online platforms like social media can facilitate the organization of protests where offline communities may not exist, and the message of the protest movement can percolate across borders using the Internet (Coretti & Maha, 2013).
Key Terms in this Chapter
PSYOPs: The art of persuading and in some cases educating a non-combative populace with suspected allegiances with the enemy in a warzone to not to take up arms and fight. This approach avoids bolstering the numbers of fighters in the fray.
OCEAN: A method to categorize and score key personal attributes for research purposes based on the following categories: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Glavnoye ypravleniye General'nogo shtaba Vooruzhonnykh Sil Rossiyskoy Federatsii: The main directorate of General Staff for the Russian Federation is the Russian Military Intelligence arm also known by its previous Soviet acronym GRU.
Troll: A means to disseminate falsehoods about someone or something. Normally associated with attacks against individuals on social media that is hurtful and categorized as cyber-bullying by some nations but has now transitioned into a coordinated means of conducting political misinformation campaigns.
Brexit: A synonym used during the EU Referendum in the United Kingdom to mean Britain’s exit from the EU. Ironically, the vote and the impact of the result effects the whole of the United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.