The year 2024 is one of the biggest election years in history, with billions of people going to the polls around the globe. Although elections are considered protected, internal state affairs under international law, election interference between nations has nonetheless risen. In particular, cyber-enabled influence operations (CEIO) via social media—including disinformation, misinformation or “fake news”—have emerged as a singular threat that states need to counter.
Influence ops initially skyrocketed into public awareness in the aftermath of Russian election interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They have not since waned. Researchers, policy makers and social media companies have designed varied approaches to counter these CEIOs. However, that requires an understanding, often missing, of how these operations work in the first place.
Information, of course, has been used as a tool of statecraft throughout history. Sun Tzu proposed more than 2,000 years ago that the “supreme art of war” is to “subdue the enemy without fighting.” To that end, information can influence, distract or convince an adversary that it is not in their best interest to fight. In the 1980s, for example, the Soviet Union initiated Operation Infektion/Operation Denver aimed at spreading the lie that AIDS was manufactured in the U.S. With the emergence of cyberspace, such influence operations have expanded in scope, scale and speed.
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