The Affective Politics of Information Warfare

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Megan Boler, who continues our focus on algorithms. She begins by noting a concern about the affective politics of information warfare, as well as about the increasing targetting of emotions through social media activity.

Such developments have become a great deal more visible since Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We have seen many revelations about the use of marketing and behavioural science in targetting and affecting users’ emotions, and all sides of politics have realised the importance of emotion in increasing political polarisation and hyperpartisanship.

Large-scale affects of confusion, affect, and overwhelm are crucial to undermining democratic foundations and fomenting polarisation; the ethics of such a bypassing of rationality in order to target emotional responses must also be investigated. Much of this is also connected with the current post-truth crisis.

These developments occur in the intersections between corporate, political, and military information warfare interests, in the United States and elsewhere. Social media analytics has entirely transformed intelligence gathering, leading to the rise of the concept of open source intelligence; some of the leaders of these developments in military contexts have subsequently moved into corporate roles, or continue to straddle both sides, and they are often hired by political organisations. Meanwhile, military operations are now also directed at civilian and domestic social media populations, and build in part on cutting-edge commercial systems.