The Emerging Risk of Virtual Societal Warfare: Social Manipulation in a Changing Information Environment

Abstract

This analysis is part of a larger study on techniques of social manipulation and was motivated by recent Russian efforts to manipulate Westerninformation environments. This study focuses on the future of social manipulation efforts and involved a survey of multiple, overlapping information-related technologies and their potential for manipulation. It describes the emerging phenomenon of virtual societal warfare and suggests avenues for Western democracies to respond.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2019
Accession Number
AD1088626

Entities

People

  • Abigail Casey
  • Luke J. Matthews
  • Michael J. Mazarr
  • Ryan M. Bauer
  • Sarah A. Heintz

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Birds
  • Computational Science
  • Distributed Ledger
  • Employment
  • Health Services
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Information Science
  • Information Systems
  • Medical Personnel
  • National Security
  • Network Science
  • Personnel Management
  • Psychology
  • Recreation
  • Social Media
  • Web Browsers

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • East Asian Political and Security Studies within the Soviet Union
  • Economics