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The lab today: - We’ll have to solve roughly 10 of the 10-point challenges to get full points. - We need 100 points in total? - There are solutions for these labs online, but again they want us to learn. - There are hints in the website itself, and they’re supposed to be used.

2025-12-09 Information Warfare (Gísli)

A guest lecture from Jacky Mallett.

  • Information Warfare (or “cognitive warfare” as it’s being rebranded at the moment).
  • There’s only been recent awareness that this has been going on for quite a while.
  • She shows various examples of troll bots/AIs from the Russians when they were interfering with the US elections.
    • She also shows an example of a MAGA influencer tweeting from the wrong account, trying to pretend to be an African American woman as a form of information warfare.
  • John Buchan (1875-1940) worked for Wellington House, a British WWI propaganda bureau. There’s nothing new about propaganda.
  • These days it can take many different forms of course. There are hundreds of Hollywood movies that are co-scripted with the US Department of Defence, they get money for military equipment while they have to make the US military to look like the good guys.
  • Advertising is also another form of cognitive warfare. Around 50% of advertisements is actually payed by the government (“take the vaccine”, “do your taxes”, “don’t travel to $x$ country”, etc.)
  • She talks about the important fact that while yes, the Russians have quite a lot of propaganda; the Americans have a lot as well.
  • When Google made it so that if you get enough people to click a link, you can make money. And because of this, anyone can make money by being popular enough.
    • And instinctively, people have a huge confirmation bias. We tend to look for sensationalist news.
    • If nothing happened today, no one is going to pay attention to news headlines that say “nothing happened today”.
    • But if you’re a news company that always pretends that something is going on all the time, then you can make a lot more money.
  • She talks about how the Chinese government employs people to control the conversation on forums online.
  • Troll Armies:
    • Dedicated teams often for hire.
    • Manually (possibly with some automation):
      • Flood Facebook and other forums.
      • Flood newspaper comment sections.
      • Leave one star reviews and similar
    • Also used by influencers for advertising
    • Almost mandatory now to have some form of moderation
  • Rent a Mob
    • She points out a picture of a protest, but all the protest signs are the same. So there’s quite a lot of coordination. Helps to tell the difference between organised and disorganised protests.
  • Psychological Operations (PsyOps):
    • Coordinated operations to influence emotions and objective reasoning.
      • Encourage dissent against leadership.
      • Pollute the information space.
        • Essentially initiate a human level broadcast storm.
        • Prevents any useful information getting through.
    • US Army 2nd, 4th, 7th and 8th Psychological Operations Groups.
  • Bot Holiday:
    • After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started, the bot attacks suddenly stopped all at the same time across the internet.
  • Life expectancy is, interestingly enough, something that’s very hard for governments to fiddle with, no matter how much they try. (maybe?)
  • There’s a language school in China that trains 100 people to speak Icelandic every year?? This came up when a Chinese woman on Facebook was speaking very good Icelandic, and everyone was confused (many Europeans don’t even bother with Icelandic).