Can NATO Weaponize Memes? – Foreign Policy (blog)

Good news. NATO is no longer obsolete, according to President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, during his meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump touted an alliance he once bashed because, after fifteen-odd years of alliance operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the former reality television host just realized now they fight terrorism.

But if the most powerful political-military alliance has the real battlefield on lockdown, some worry its floundering in the battlefield of the internet, where ideas go to clash, Kremlin trolls go to spread half-truths, and ISIS goes to recruit foreign fighters.

The answer, some experts argue, lies in memes those strange jokes and references that come out of the internets woodworks from seemingly nowhere, and seem to end up everywhere at once. A small contingent of academics and experts want NATO to get in on the action to confront pro-Russian, anti-NATO trolls, or to push back against internet jihadists in the cyber space.

Its time to embrace memetic warfare, wrote Jeff Giesea, a widely-known social media and tech guru, in an article in 2015. Trolling, it might be said, is the social media equivalent of guerrilla warfare, and memes are its currency of propaganda. Giesea wasnt writing in Wired orTechCrunch, but rather in Defence Strategic Communications, the journal of NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence (or Stratcom COE, because nothings complete without an onerous acronym).

Daesh is conducting memetic warfare. The Kremlin is doing it. Its inexpensive. The capabilities exist. Why arent we trying it? Giesea asked.

Its a question many military minds have been asking for years. A Marine Corps Major, Michael B. Prosser advocated for the U.S. military to develop a Meme Warfare Center (MWC) in his 2006 study, MemeticsA Growth Industry in U.S. Military Operations (abstract here).

Five years later, a specialized Pentagon unit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a study on Military Memetics, one of several related research programs into what it calls a subset of neuro-cognitive warfare. It argued the war of ideas was fundamental, especially when it comes to fighting terrorists, and the key characteristics of a military meme is that it be information that propagates, has impact, and persists. Like dancing cat videos, in other words, but with sharper claws.

The problem is that NATO, like governments everywhere, are pretty terrible at the internet. Memes arent really part of NATOs arsenal yet, even if the alliance is desperately trying to tap into ideas from the private sector about how best to use social media.

Kremlin-backed trolls and internet-savvy ISIS supporters run circles around government social media programs, often run by stodgy diplomats with no authority to be creative. (The quest for funny memes is particularly tortured: In March, NATOs Stratcom COE published Stratcom Laughs: In Search of an Analytical Framework, which included a chapter on Humor as a Communication Tool: Designing Framework for Analysis.)

And government attempts at weaponizing humor can lead to some awkward moments.

Such as the time NATO instructed its public diplomacy staff to create a viral video (nothing says military bureaucracy like ordering internet virality to be magically conjured up.)

After half a million Euros, heres the result:

What looks to be a horror film shot on an iPhone turns out to be a nice family reunion because of NATO, of course. (The other two videos in this weird PR series are equally strange and, based on the page views, conspicuously un-viral. The project was quietly dropped after it was rolled out.)

Or then theres the State Departments own Think Again, Turn Away program to win the hearts and minds of would-be jihadists with snarky retorts to the America-bashing, pro-ISIS brigades on Twitter. Alas, it turns out an official State Department social media account arguing with jihadist supporters about the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal over Twitter doesnt actually amount to a plan for defeating ISIS.

But if these awkward attempts fail, at least theyre trying. And who knows, now that Trump has discovered what NATO does, maybe he can lend the alliance some of his own social media magic.

Photo credit:WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images

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Can NATO Weaponize Memes? - Foreign Policy (blog)