A N A L Y S I S
Its systematic use and ease of dissemination have turned it
into one of the main vehicles for hybrid threats
DISINFORMATION
and the European Union
Lieutenant Colonel Vicente Diaz de Villegas Roig
Private Office of the Undersecretary of Defence for Political Affairs
THE truth is the first victim in conflicts. The duty of every
civil society is to develop its own resilience and protect
information as a common good. If you fail to take your
place in the information environment, others will. During
the Cold War, the potential mutual destruction guaranteed by a
conflict with nuclear weapons served as a deterrent in the physical
environment. However, the Internet and the subsequent boom of
social networks have led the information environment to become
a battleground. Government agencies, private organizations and
other pressure groups fight a 24-hour battle for the narrative, where
the technological gap no longer represents a determining factor.
Disinformation is taking precedence in today’s crises. Although
it is not a new phenomenon, its systematic use and ease of
dissemination, as a result of new technologies, have turned
it into one of the main vehicles for hybrid threat. In this regard,
the Joint Framework on Countering Hybrid Threats published by
the European Union in 2016 states that “massive disinformation
campaigns, using social media to control the political narrative or
to radicalise, recruit and direct proxy actors can be vehicles for
hybrid threats”.
ANOTHER VICTIM: CRITICAL THINKING
In the battle for the narrative, disinformation seeks to generate
doubts about the truthfulness of the facts, and thus the truth is
relativized by devaluing public discourse so as to generate distrust
in the institutions governing society. The main tool to achieve this
effect is not so much a blatant lie, but rather the exploitation of
information taken out of context and of messages that appeal more
to emotion than to reason. An individual who doubts, mistrusts and
is permanently subjected to infosaturation has a fickle opinion,
which is an ideal situation to turn a passive opinion into an active
conviction.
Assessing the effectiveness of disinformation is no simple task;
the question is whether disinformation can create new opinions
or simply strengthen existing ones. In order to do so, we need to
consider society’s vulnerability factors such as the existence of
external and internal divisions, the presence of minorities, fragile
institutions and a weak media culture. Furthermore, the media
utilized play a fundamental role. Customized narratives, in some
cases microtargeting or even individualized targeting, interference
in democratic processes, self-serving leaks, document falsification,
etc. are just a few examples.
BOOM OF SOCIAL NETWORKS
Those responsible for disinformation campaigns have found an
ideal place to hide their digital footprint in cyberspace. In other
words, the web makes it difficult to attribute actions, at least under
traditional regulations.
The horizontal nature of social networks enables just about any
citizen to become a journalist without going through any editorial
filter. Community saturation and the presence of troll farms (people
who make provocative comments attempting to create controversy
or divert attention from a topic) have transformed the dynamics
in the generation and dissemination of information. In addition
to the foregoing, there are also semi-automatic and automatic
20 Revista Española de Defensa August 2020