Review article
https://doi.org/10.37458/nstf.25.2.5
The weaponization of fiction and truth: disinformation as hybrid warfare and its strategic use in the United States 2024 election
Julia Lemmon
Abstract
This article examines the growing role of disinformation in hybrid warfare, centering on its use in social media during the 2024 United States Presidential Election. While disinformation is as old as time, the methods and its mediums have evolved rapidly since Cold-War era propaganda and towards social media infiltration. These social media campaigns, first notably observed in the 2016 United States Presidential Election, highlights a new age of conflict and foreign meddling, highlighting the global shift from classical military warfare to more subversive tactics. The article argues that disinformation, as a form of hybrid warfare, that emphasizes exploiting a target’s societal vulnerabilities, exacerbating them to ultimately weaken the target from the inside-out and destabilizing, eroding, or even destroying, their political systems. Via an analysis of the 2024 United States election disinformation interference, following a recapitulation of its first presence in the 2016 election, this article examines the geopolitical dimensions and draws of disinformation warfare, the motives behind the foreign actors’ interference, and the destabilizing results it fosters within the general public. Additionally, it begins a discussion of how similar disinformation strategies can be and have been utilized across other democracies in Europe, Asia, and beyond, threatening the current global order of liberalism and democratic superiority. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of nations to invest into understanding and countering these new technological warfare tactics in order to properly protect, defend, and safeguard the integrity of their democratic governance. With disinformation and information hybrid warfare, amongst social media in particular, becomes the increasingly preferred method of confrontation with adversaries due to its low-risk, high-reward quality, it poses possibly the largest threat to global stability and threatens to upend the entire system, necessitating direct and immediate attention to address this vulnerability of our global infosphere.
Keywords
disinformation, hybrid warfare, elections, social media, foreign interference
Hrčak ID:
323893
URI
Publication date:
17.12.2024.
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