The fog of (information) war

An interview with Emerson Brooking, an update on truckers, and revisiting tragedy in Portland

US Army Blackhawk flies behind a cloud of smoke. (Flickr Commons/Matt Hintsa)

The war in Ukraine has only been underway for a couple of weeks now. It’s hard to wrap my head around that fact. The scale of the inhumanity, aggression, and fear displayed on the world stage has been sickening and sometimes even disorienting. Simultaneously, a plague of misinformation, inflammatory punditry, and general internet brain worms has descended—often on the same online venues where people are finding their news about the war.

I wanted to try to get a more solid footing on how all this has played out online, so I talked with Emerson Brooking. He’s a co-author of the book “Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media” and my colleague at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). Longtime listeners to the SH!TPOST podcast may remember other times I interviewed Emerson in 2018 and 2020. He has a particular expertise in the overlaps between the internet, disinformation, and armed conflict, so I was eager to get his perspective on the disorder playing out across our social media timelines. The following interview was conducted via a Slack chat on March 7.

---

Jared Holt: Hey Emerson, thanks for taking a minute to chat. Readers won’t know this beforehand but we tried to record a bonus episode last week and had tech failures. I’m grateful you are making time again for SH!TPOST.

Emerson Brooking: Glad we could still make this happen!

Jared: When we were recording that episode last week, you said something that stuck with me over the weekend. You said that the “fog of war” exists even on social media. That term is usually used to describe chaotic or confusing situations that participants in a battle can experience, often in the context of decisions made in the moments of conflict. Can you elaborate on what you meant? How might that same dynamic play out online?

Emerson: Sure. To start with the very obvious: social media creates a window into war that has never existed before. Casual spectators can watch livestreams of firefights or the TikToks of Ukrainian teens huddled in bomb shelters. They can track Russian shells as they rain on Ukrainian cities and, with some basic geolocation, even guess at the location of Russian artillery pieces. They can speak directly to Ukrainians in harm's way and (for now, at least) many Russians too. There are many ways to describe this immediacy: surreal, certainly, but also heartbreaking and terrifying.

The irony, though, is that this endless stream of videos and images doesn't actually give you much insight into how the war is going. In fact, this content can often mislead. See a scary video of Russian troops in Kharkiv and you might assume the city has fallen; see enough videos of Ukrainian farmers towing away abandoned infantry transports and you might think the Russians are in full retreat. So while any of us can see the war, no armchair doomscroller can put all these pieces together in real-time. We are like goldfish: we may see everything, but we only have 7 seconds of memory to make sense of it.

Jared: There have been a handful of instances where exaggerated and misleading statements have come from Ukrainian politicians and government officials, only to be regurgitated at face value by reporters and digital onlookers. Would you say that this plays into the same dynamic? Or am I making a leap here?

Emerson: Yes, this "fog of war" problem very much feeds into that. Especially in the first days of the conflict, many Ukrainian Twitter accounts—most especially President Zelensky—reached a kind of mythic status. These figures were truth-tellers, battling Russian lies. They were the voices of peace and compassion, contrasted with Russia's bloodthirstiness and cruelty.

Although I think this frame is mostly true, it also sets an impossible standard. Ukrainian politicians aren't trying to be your fave—they are trying to win an existential war! If this means occasionally misrepresenting or exaggerating events to bolster the morale of their citizens, they will do that. I don't fault them for that. But I do worry when journalists don't take that extra step to check or contextualize Ukrainian messaging.

Here's an example. Last Thursday, all of Twitter briefly paused to watch a livestreamed firefight at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Russian forces were firing rockets at nuclear reactors and you could check the radiation levels in real-time; it wasn't good. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister took to Twitter claiming that this could trigger "Chernobyl 10x"—a claim that got about 50k retweets as people understandably panicked. But as it turns out, while the situation was terrible, this was a different type of reactor that did not pose a meltdown risk anywhere near Chernobyl. Nuclear engineers tried, largely in vain, to clarify this reality.

When I wrote a pretty anodyne tweet about this, numerous people accused me of being a Russian propagandist.

Emerson T. Brooking @etbrooking

A reminder that Ukrainian government officials should not be treated as the arbiters of truth. They are in an existential fight that is aided by Western attention and outrage. One can be deeply committed to the Ukrainian cause and still pause before amplifying such claims.

Dmytro Kuleba @DmytroKuleba

Russian army is firing from all sides upon Zaporizhzhia NPP, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Fire has already broke out. If it blows up, it will be 10 times larger than Chornobyl! Russians must IMMEDIATELY cease the fire, allow firefighters, establish a security zone!

Jared: Are you a Russian propagandist?

Emerson: If so, I’m very bad at my job.

Jared: It’s hard to believe that the war in Ukraine started just a couple weeks ago. It feels like a century. And it has produced some of the most mind-bending behavior online I’ve seen in recent memory. But I wanted to ask you to respond to assertions that I’ve seen that the war in Ukraine is “the first social media war.” The Spectator ran a piece with a headline saying as much. Here’s an excerpt:

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not only the largest European land conflict since the 1940s—it’s also the first for the TikTok and YouTube generation.

As videos pour in across Twitter and Instagram and other social media platforms are leveraged for credit or propaganda, it’s become evident that we are in a brand new era, much like the one that arrived with twenty-four-hour cable news coverage of the US invasion of Iraq in 1990. Back then it was grainy night vision images of patriot missile launches and target explosions that dazzled homes all over the United States. Now anxious audiences simply launch their favorite social media app on their smart phone to see the latest hi-definition shelling of buildings in Kyiv from Russian forces, or viral news clips of Ukrainians threatening to “fuck some Russians up”.

Now, the column’s author goes on to use this premise to take a shallow dig at mainstream media (yawn), but I want to look at that premise a bit closer. It’s true that even reporters at major outlets are keeping up with this war on social media. But that’s not unique at all, is it? It feels ahistorical. At least that’s not the impression I left with after reading Like War. What do you think is driving these takes?

Emerson: Calling something a "first"—because it's the first time you yourself personally noticed it—is one of the West's proudest cultural traditions. There's even a term for it, born out of the Balkans research community: "Westsplaining."

Obviously: these takes are a little facile. The first "internet war" was most likely the 1994 Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, Mexico, which avoided being crushed by the military by using internet message boards to draw support from the international leftist community and sympathetic journalists. The first "YouTube War" was also likely in Mexico: the height of the drug war of the late 2000s (the first violent video uploaded to YouTube was a music video of cartel executions.) The first "Twitter War" was the survival and reconstitution of Al Qaeda-affiliated movements and especially the spread of Al Qaeda franchises in Africa, which used social media to get press coverage. The first "TikTok war" was the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020, fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan and defined by viral videos of Armenian defiance, even as they were slowly overwhelmed.

That said, the more I've thought about these "first" takes, the more sympathetic I've gotten. Many people are waking only now to the fact that they can click a button and summon tens of thousands of hours of atrocities. The human suffering is terrible and inexhaustible and anyone can watch it in real-time. So how do you possibly rationalize this? How do you deal with this? One obvious starting place is to establish that this is "new"—that this has never happened before. Because the alternative, that this horrible and dreadful and indescribable thing has been happening the whole time...that's hard for anyone to stomach.

Jared: What’s your favorite thing on the internet right now?

Emerson: Late in the evening of Feb 23, as Russian missiles began to strike Ukraine, my first reaction was a deep hatred for Vladimir Putin, who had unleashed his genocidal wrath on a free people. My second, uninvited thought was: those Web3 assholes are going to monetize this somehow.

Well, I'm thankful that the first monetization of the war actually came from the government of Ukraine. Ukraine launched a crypto fundraiser with the promise of an airdrop to randomly selected $ETH wallets. Ukraine raised $50m and then announced that, regrettably, the airdrop was off and they'd be doing an NFT line instead.

So Ukraine became the first nation to 1) launch a wartime crypto fundraiser and 2) immediately rugpull its donors. Which is great and fits the vibe of Web3 perfectly. Slava Ukraini.