Defence Strategic Communications

12

Authors: Malik R. Dahlan

Dahlan examines three books, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life, Exploding Data: Reclaiming Our Cyber Security in the Digital age, and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, and their conclusions about strategic communications in the age of fake news.

15

Authors: Tara Flores and Philip Hall

Social media in the West is shifting to become regulated and less free as backlash against uncensored content continues. This article looks at how this internet model has worked in China and East Africa.

32

Authors: Tassio Franchi and Leonardo Perin Vichi

This article discusses the development of the strategic communications of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the EZLN, between 1994 and 1996. During this period, the Zapatista movement transformed from a group focused on armed struggle into a social movement. The EZLN used rhetorical and communications strategies, not only to construct group identity but as a way to pressure the Mexican government into guaranteeing their rights as citizens and as an indigenous minority. The article also reflects on the discursive strategies employed by the group’s main leader, Subcomandante Marcos, and on the Zapatistas’ narratives and the structure of the communications they disseminated to their worldwide network of committees connected through the internet.

36

Authors: Karen Allen

This article assesses the dynamics of resistance and cooperation by Kenyan elites to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the ongoing pressure for reform to Kenya’s security services, which were heavily implicated by a commission of inquiry into the post-election violence (PEV) of 2007/08.1 This article highlights the specific context of the global war on terror (GWOT) and Kenya’s role as a strategic partner in fighting the Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s African affiliate, as well as being a victim of al-Shabaab attacks. The terrorism narrative served to reinforce Kenya’s existing strategies of opposition. This does not imply that conflating justice and security issues was a strategy intentionally adopted from the outset. However, this article suggests that over time the utility of doing so became apparent. Moreover, the response of Kenya’s leaders to events at the ICC and Kenya’s resistance to security sector reform are worthy of close scrutiny. They highlight what appears to be an international realignment of principles of justice, driven by pragmatism. They also demonstrate the fragility of international justice mechanisms and how it is virtually impossible to divorce them from political contexts.

43

Authors: John D. Gallacher and Marc W. Heerdink

The Internet has given new opportunities to those who wish to interfere and disrupt society through the systematic manipulation of social media. One goal of these cyber-enabled information operations is to increase polarisation in Western societies by stoking both sides of controversial debates. Whether these operations are successful remains unclear. This paper describes how novel applications of computational techniques can be used to test the impact of historical activity from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) on two social media platforms: Twitter and Reddit. We show that activity originating from the Russian IRA had a measurable effect on the subsequent conversations of genuine users. On Twitter, increases in Russian IRA activity predicted subsequent increases in the degree of polarisation of the conversation surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. On Reddit, comment threads started by Russian IRA accounts contained more toxic language and identity based attacks. We use causal analysis modelling to further show that Russian IRA activity in existing threads caused measurable changes in the conversational quality of the following 25-100 posts. By developing methods to measure the impact of information operations in online conversations and demonstrating a measurable effect on genuine conversations, our study provides an important step in developing effective countermeasures.