PGC – For a long time, the governments of the West seemed to openly concede the whole digital social media space to the rest of the world, and nation-states such as China and Russia entered into the fray with great enthusiasm and, more importantly, more direct capital investments, training and housing armines of social media operatives to tilt the narrative balance in the favor of their particular interests.
The battle for the hearts and minds of humanity is becoming more and more centered around what emanates from that device we should hardly even call a phone at this point.
Perhaps because early on the platforms themselves were predominantly American and secondarily European when the phenomenon first rose, governments of the West reiled on the national origin of the platforms to assure that whoever was operating that platform would protect the interests of the nations of their origin. Perhaps early on that might have been the case, before social media become the lucrative cash cow that it has now become, before it became the fundamnetal filter of ‘legitimate news’ for the vast majority of humans on this planet, especially in certain countries such as China, the United States, and Russia.
Now, social media is beholden to a world empire that lives outside the parameters of the nation-states they come from, and they have offices in almost every country in the world, and every country will protect their physical assets should citizens rise up in rebellion against it. It’s a strange relationship in that one, social media, relies on physical protection from the other, the host nation-state, but the other, the host nation-state, also relies on social media for ese of control. It’s an uneasy partnership, one fraught with many attempts to sabotage and usurp the other as families derive their power still largely from the new wealth, social media, or the old, political business partnering.
In this backdrop, the state itself is vulnerable to the de facto world empires it hosts, especially where the bulk of its commerce and public discourse is taking place, centralized, easy to track, easy to understand, predict, manage. It’s a hard easy button to walk away from, even when that button might also work to undermine your very sovereignty for one of its host nations, or potential host nations, offers more gold in exchange for its controlling services.
So now the Unted States and other Western European nations are about ready to test the loyalty of the social media empires that have physical space in your lands. Facebook, will you protect America from her enemies? It could be as simple as that, but not likely. It will be offering contracts to these social media companies to train American social media soldiers to combat the Chinese and Russians alone, and then the nudge to suggest they also make sure the American trolls get preferential treatment.
This should be fun to watch unfold.
Western armies turn to startups in the “data war” with China
From sifted.eu
2021-08-12 00:00:19
Excerpt:
Richard Gwilliam of British geospatial intelligence company Geollect, says that Western militaries have been “caught on the hop” by Russia and China and are only now beginning to think seriously about how to exploit masses of freely available data.
“Russia and China have been absolutely superb on asymmetric warfare — we’re playing catch-up.”
“What Russia and China have done is, instead of just competing with us on platform warfare, they’ve been absolutely superb on asymmetric warfare — we’re playing catch-up,” Gwilliam said.
He cites cyberattacks, misinformation and interference around Brexit and the Trump election as examples where Russia and China have successfully manipulated everyday tech like social media to destabilise the US and Europe.
