Acum ceva vreme un general din armata britanică spunea că victoria și eșecul vor fi noțiuni ale trecutului dat fiind faptul că în ziua de azi contează mai mult percepțiile luptătorilor, postările din rețelele sociale și informarea sau propaganda pe care fiecare parte reușește să o trimită:
Sir Nicholas Carter, chief of the general staff and formerly Britain’s most senior officer in Afghanistan, said in a speech on Tuesday that “the character of conflict has changed in this information age in which we find ourselves”.
“Manoeuvre is now multidimensional. It started being two-dimensional with fire and movement. We introduced a third dimension with air and artillery. We moved through manoeuvre in the electromagnetic spectrum and we now find ourselves in an era of information manoeuvre.”
Under its new doctrinal approach — dubbed “integrated action” — strategists and tacticians would be encouraged to think of allies and adversaries as “audiences” to be influenced while the use of traditional “hard power” would feature far less, he said.
Sir Nicholas added. “It is a truism that war is about minds, not stuff. It is much harder now to distinguish between defeat and victory. It is much more about the perception of those who are involved.”
‘Victory’ and ‘defeat’ things of the past, says top UK general – FT.com / £
Audiențe! Mesaje! Armata s-a trezit acum că are nevoie de ceea ce noi numeam communication planning. Ce s-a schimbat lumea.
Tind să fiu de acord cu el și în ce privește munca cea de toate zilele dar m-a dus cu gândul la raportul ăsta destul de detaliat care urmărește obiceiurile luptătorilor din ISIS/ISIL în rețele sociale (făcut de Brookings Institute / PDF).
Vorbind de manipularea percepțiilor, mi se pare fascinant faptul că toată lumea tinde spre automatizarea mesajelor, că e vorba de un cont pe care îl setezi să trimită tweeturi automat sau e un Hootsuite / Tweetdeck pe care îl programezi să trimită chestii la ore prestabilite:
„545 accounts tweet between 150-200 times a day. Some apps [responsible for the non-user tweets] are apparently devotional in nature, tweeting prayers, religious aphorisms, and content from the Quran, although they may also serve as identity markers or fulfill some kind of signaling function. These apps, such as knzmuslim and du3a, can produce staggering numbers of tweets per day. Knzmuslim was clocked at more than one million tweets per day, and around 1,000 tweets per minute, at one point in early January.
Other apps are intended to disseminate ISIS propaganda at a pace and volume that enables their wider distribution. The most successful of these was known as the “Dawn of Good Tidings.” In mid-2014, thousands of accounts signed up for the app, which was endorsed by top ISIS online personalities. At its peak, it sent tens of thousands of tweets per day. The app was terminated by Twitter in June 2014, silencing thousands of ISIS-supporting accounts overnight.
In the wake of that setback, ISIS supporters have responded by creating a large number of bots in small clusters, with each cluster using a different service to post tweets of the propaganda and hashtags it wishes to promote. If one “family” of bots is suspended, there are still many others that will continue to tweet. Thousands of such accounts were detected in the course of this analysis. Many from this new generation of bots were constructed using popular third party automation services such as IFTT (If This, Then That), which Twitter is unlikely to shut down since it is much more commonly used for innocuous purposes by ordinary users.
Additionally, by monitoring the combined feeds on a large-screen TV, it was often possible to evaluate—literally at a glance—the importance of new media material, themes, and issues. When ISIS releases important propaganda (such as the video showing the killing of Jordanian pilot Muaz al Kasasbeh), the video can be seen propagating in a distinctive visual pattern on the screen, enabling a swift evaluation of its significance and whether it was an official release.”
Nu contează cine e acolo să trimită tweeturile, the content calendar must go on!