Cognitive Warfare: Understanding the Threat

Abstract

Starting from the premise that you cannot tackle a problem that is poorly understood, the chapter explores a relatively new phenomenon known by many names, such as “information warfare”, “disinformation disorder”, “post-truth”, “computational propaganda”, “network propaganda”, “disinformation 2.0”, “ampliganda”, or “cognitive warfare”. The aim of the chapter is to provide arguments in favor of the idea that the current situation under which the human mind is turned into an international/ transnational battlefield is best captured by the term “cognitive warfare”. This new type of warfare is waged by means of disinformation, propaganda, influence operations and hostile information campaigns all at the same time. Above all, this new type of warfare is waged in a completely changed communication and information ecosystem, where every major issue in a society can be weaponized thanks to the very connectivity of that new ecosystem. Conceptualizing cognitive warfare as a new, technology-driven phenomenon has implications for research and for policy-making. We illustrate these implications especially for endeavors towards documenting the phenomenon by means of a national public opinion survey using an online panel (N=1000), representative of the population of Romania that has access to the Internet and is aged 18 or higher.