War in the Age of Information (EC Blog)

For my second EOTO, I decided to delve into Citizen Journalism, or more specifically, Open Source Intelligence. Open Source intelligence is the novel practice of understanding and analyzing conflicts between nations through the social media they produce. The first example of this was the Arab Spring, where rebel movements oftentimes were broadcasted by the rebels themselves, using the medium as a platform to spread their ideas, first in Tunisia, then to numerous other Arabian countries. For the first time, a conflict was readily and immediately visible to those far flung from it.

More recently, in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, starting in 2014 social media had been weaponized by Russia, who spent the equivalent of 19 million dollars funding a staff of 600 writers to pour pro-Russian propaganda on the open forum. This continued right up until the recent restrictions and sanctions on Russian social media by Western companies and the Russian government. But prior to that restriction, Russians were free to post whatever they wanted to a global audience.

The propaganda machine the Russians created worked well to stifle dissent in its own numerous regions, but only energized those outside of it. In the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, I myself began to notice this propaganda, on Twitter, TikTok, and elsewhere. Videos showing the lumbering Russian war machine beginning to mobilize towards Ukraine began to appear in earnest in January 2022, and by February it was hard to miss the videos of tanks on trains, or soldiers drudging through the wilderness, among the cat pictures and memes. 

The videos, despite their prevalence, did not energize those in the West as much as one may have imagined. Western media that sought to energize their people against Russian aggression were often the places that were targeted by the propagandists the most. Twitter posts of news articles condemning the actions of Russia were flooded with comments by Russian bots and propagandists, attempting to defend the state's actions.

I, being completely immersed and intrigued by the implications and effects of technology on modern conflicts, chose to present on Citizen Journalism to my classmates to hopefully allow them to gain greater insight into the world we are in today. After seeing the propaganda penetrate into my own social media, I wanted to turn the presentation into an opportunity to show hard evidence that Russia was going to attack Ukraine, using the subject of my presentation to do so. In doing so I did not intend to provide an in depth analysis of the topic, but rather a practical example of the capabilities of Citizen Journalism. 

Since the invasion and subsequent restriction of social media, pro-Russian sentiment online has for the most part quieted. The videos of Ukrainians being killed do not. As I sit here writing this, my phone notified me that Kiev is currently being bombed. Yesterday I read Ukrainian government officials use facial scanning technology to identify dead Russians and notify their parents. The future will be weird, but whenever history is made, the world will now be there to see it.