Peter Pomerantsev - The information war and the digital ”Trojan Horse”

Peter Pomerantsev, Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, discusses the information war and how we could win it.

About Peter Pomerantsev
"I’m a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs of the London School of Economics and at the University of Johns Hopkins.

I research disinformation, hate speech and polarisation to try to work out what we can do about it."

The digital “Trojan horse”

This idea of the “information war” has become a very common metaphor through which we try to understand what’s going on in our new, digitally-driven information landscape. But I believe that the most dangerous part of “information war” is the very idea of information war. Let me explain what I mean.

There’s always been a tradition of militaries and secret services doing “psy-ops” – psychological operations – in order to confuse, dismay, undermine the opponent. That’s a long and glorious tradition. I think maybe the earliest example of this is the Trojan horse. The Trojan horse is one of the finest information operations ever launched in the history of warfare and a metaphor that we still use all the time when talking about the information space. And, obviously, with these new digital tools, someone in the military or in the secret service can do a lot more to perturb the other side. There are now bots, trolls, closed online spaces that can be used to destabilise an enemy, and we urgently need to adapt to that. Countries probably need a new military and security doctrine to make sense of these technological attacks that are not exactly military aggression.

For example, NATO hinges on the premise that all the member states of NATO will defend each other in case of a military attack. So, if tanks were to ever enter Estonia, the other member states would respond accordingly to defend their military ally; that’s quite straightforward. Now, say they suffer a cyber attack instead, a hit on their digital infrastructure, how does a military organisation include something like this kind of information attack? It’s not as straightforward because information is not actually warfare. There are a lot of problems in just defining this legally, let alone in trying to counteract this. This is part of an old story that has a new iteration. The other great difference with conventional warfare is that information attacks are not just launched by governments now. The barrier to entry is very low: anyone can do one of these operations. So that’s something serious that needs to be dealt with, and this is a legitimate way of thinking about “information war” and information war doctrine. It’s an important debate that is led by experts in the field.

Key Points

• “Information war” refers to a very real change in conventional warfare and military doctrine on digital attacks.
• “Information war” is used also as language that legitimises conspiracy theories.
• The only way to shield ourselves from the hysteria is to learn to take a step back and contextualise the information we find online.