*This article also appears as a chapter in the 2023 KCIS Conference volume that was published Nov. 2024

Modern hybrid wars are waged by a panoply of actors who use violent and non-violent methods, such as the weaponization of technology, to achieve their ends.[1] These actors, both friendly and hostile, generate competing narratives within the virtual information landscape. The rise of social media and smartphone technology over the past decade, on the one hand, has engendered the rise of citizen journalism by equipping civilians in conflict zones with the tools necessary to document events from the ground. Hostile actors, on the other hand, such as adversarial regimes, hackers, and bots, use these same technologies to manipulate information for nefarious purposes. It enables them to wage disinformation campaigns designed to sway public perception, manipulate political discourse, and distort factual evidence. The malign influence of hostile actors can have serious ramifications on the pursuit of international justice during and after conflict, as the targeted spread of disinformation blurs the distinction between players and makes it difficult to hold perpetrators accountable for war crimes and atrocities. This contribution thus has two aims: to analyze the interaction between citizen journalists and hostile actors who exploit information technology during hybrid war and to highlight potential ways of countering the insidious influence of disinformation in an otherwise polluted information landscape.

Hostile Actors, Citizen Journalists and the Spread of Disinformation

Writing from Nazi Germany in 1935, Jewish-German philosopher Walter Benjamin argued that camera and radio precipitated new modes of “mechanical reproduction”: “In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves.”[2] These observations have proven especially relevant with the rise of smartphone technology. It was only a matter of time before ordinary citizens used smartphones to report their experiences on the ground. Nina Burri calls this process the “civilianisation of the news,” pointing out that it began in the aftermath of a devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004: “This was the moment when tourists and other citizens in the affected countries became a prominent feature of the journalistic landscape by offering their holiday accounts and pictures to media outlets.”[3] Soon thereafter, civilians coupled this technology with social media platforms from war zones, starting with the Arab Spring protests of 2011. Deemed the “first smartphone revolution,” these devices “briefly gave youthful Arab Spring protestors a technological edge that helped topple ageing dictatorships a decade ago as their revolutionary spirit went viral.”[4] With such powerful devices in hand and a means through which to distill their contents, virtually anyone could now assume the role of a “battleground reporter.”[5] In other words, smartphones and social media have facilitated a phenomenon called “citizen journalism” that has fundamentally altered how information is created, circulated, and consumed.

Citizen journalism has taken on a new dimension during hybrid war with the emergence of methods and technologies used to wage disinformation campaigns. In Syria, a country embroiled by civil war since 2011, the subsequent manipulation of information through new technologies has morphed into a phenomenon called “digital authoritarianism” where patriotic hacker groups, such as the Syrian Electronic Army, use social media to control state narratives.[6] These “cyber mercenaries,” Tim Maurer argues, began using technology to influence public opinion in the early months of the war by posting pro-Bashar al-Assad content on social media platforms and news sites before then launching cyberattacks on organizations that were critical of the regime.[7] The weaponization of information technology, although an intangible weapon in and of itself, is a prime example of the covert and indirect methods hostile actors use to wage hybrid wars.[8]

Citizen journalists compete against a torrential influx of disinformation circulated by adversarial states, patriotic hacker groups, and bots that makes it difficult to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate sources of information. One advantage of citizen journalism is that it enables those trapped in conflict zones to expose war crimes in real time. An atrocity in one part of the world is displayed on millions of screens within seconds, often before traditional news outlets can report on it themselves. Such was the case when the Egyptian government censored state broadcasts after protestors occupied the cabinet offices in Cairo, at which point a man began livestreaming the event for an audience of twelve thousand people.[9] “Gone are the days when governments will be able to hide their crimes by prohibiting TV stations and journalists from being on the scene,” a journalism professor at the American University of Cairo commented shortly thereafter: “Everyone on the scene is a citizen journalist, and everyone is documenting while protesting.”[10] This set a precedent for future wars by providing civilians with a means of amplifying their voices. When the world first learned of Bashar al-Assad’s chemical attack on Syrian citizens in Douma on April 7, 2018, for example, they did so through social media. Photographs and videos of the chlorine gas attack that killed 41 people and injured countless others quickly went viral.[11] Despite the regime’s efforts to censor and cover up the atrocity, citizen journalists used their smartphones to provide global audiences with an unfiltered glimpse of the regime’s brutality.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) further pollutes the information landscape, as new technologies make it possible to further distort the truth. Hostile actors have begun turning to the “geopolitical deepfake” to spread disinformation, a term coined by The Washington Post shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[12] It was first used in February 2022 when an AI-generated deepfake video of Volodymyr Zelensky circulated the internet announcing that the war was over and urging Ukrainian citizens to lay down their arms. While experts quickly realized that the video was synthetic, largely because its subject “appeared mostly motionless, his pixelated head larger than his body,” it marked an attempt to influence the outcome of a war that was not going in Vladimir Putin’s favour.[13] The recent “spamouflage” campaign carried out by Chinese government bots in Canada in September 2023 is another example of the weaponization of technology by adversarial regimes.[14] Designed to smear the reputations of Justin Trudeau and a number of Canadian Members of Parliament, the bots left thousands of comments in English and French on politicians’ social media pages.[15] These sophisticated technologies present hostile actors with an infinite number of possibilities and platforms through which to spread disinformation, all the while attempting to cast adversarial regimes in a positive light.

Digital Evidence, Accountability, and a Possible Way Forward

The deluge of disinformation generated by hostile actors poses a challenge for those seeking to hold perpetrators accountable. Nevertheless, the digitization of evidence has begun to change the way justice is pursued. When a citizen uploads proof of a war crime to the internet, they are digitally documenting evidence that can be used to build a case against the alleged perpetrator. Such is the case with the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War, labelled by many as the first “social media war.”[16] Within weeks of the invasion, Ukrainian citizens began capturing footage of Russian war crimes, including a viral video of Russian troops shooting an unarmed man outside his car in the outskirts of Kyiv.[17] Since then, journalists and activists have been “sifting through social media platforms like TikTok and X, formerly Twitter, to gather digital evidence of potential war crimes committed by Russian forces that could land them in international human rights tribunals.”[18] The exponential rise of citizen media over the past decade reflects a growing trend in hybrid war. That non-combatants are now armed with a way of disseminating information from conflict zones reveals that they have become active players in conflict.

An obvious pitfall of citizen media is that its contents do not undergo a fact-checking process. As Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen point out, some journalists value citizen media despite this shortcoming because it democratizes the news while others believe that its lack of accuracy presents “a portent of crisis that threatens to unravel the very integrity of the journalistic craft itself.”[19] This signals a larger need for the continued presence of traditional media. Free press, a central tenet of western democracies since the time of the American and French Revolutions, provides audiences with context. While citizen journalism offers immediate snapshots of situations as they unfold, traditional news organizations rigorously verify sources to ensure that the stories they report are truthful. Both act as a powerful counterweight to hostile actors who manipulate social media and technology for nefarious purposes.

Despite these challenges, legal bodies such as the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have begun to recognize the evolving nature of war crimes and atrocities by establishing new precedents regarding the use of digital evidence. Ronald Niezen argues that technology can aid prosecutors in myriad ways: “Satellite imagery, geolocation analysis, photographs and video from mobile devices, and other digital data sources offer powerful supplements to eyewitness accounts of war crimes.”[20] Social media posts, text messages and live streams are valuable sources, each marked with a time, date, and digital location. A potential pitfall, however, lies not only in tracking down such evidence but in securely obtaining it: “Investigators sometimes find themselves in a race to download and preserve digital content before a content moderator—sometimes a person or more often an AI-enabled tool—deletes it and it disappears.”[21] Once safely in their possession, experts must then ensure that a source is legitimate: “Once a video is safely in their possession, analysts have to authenticate it. Part of this process involves establishing the chain of custody, answering where the evidence came from and where else it has been, from the time and place the video was shot to the point when investigators acquired it.”[22] The indirect methods used to fight hybrid war thus complicate the evidence gathering process and make it difficult to hold hostile actors responsible for their actions, especially when attempts are made to conceal, distort, or erase evidence. “States that are implicated in mass atrocities often resist handing over suspects for trial in international courts,” Eric Stover, Victor Peskin, and Alexa Koenig point out, an issue further compounded by the fact that “the international community is often ambivalent about pursuing indicted heads of state and warlords out of fear that such endeavours will upset quests for peace and regional stability.”[23] This reality becomes even more skewed in the context of the hybrid wars of today, revealing an urgent need to find new ways of verifying facts in a broader effort to buffer against the harmful impact of disinformation.

The virtual ecosystem is riddled with truths and mistruths that pose security challenges to the world at large. Since defence experts and legal practitioners cannot trust much of what they see online, they must explore other means of validating data in order to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions. A possible way forward for the international community is through the following two avenues. First, states invested in promoting global peace and security must increase their presence on the world stage. By strengthening relationships with likeminded partners and allies under the auspices of multilateral organizations such as NATO and the United Nations, they will be better positioned to gather evidence that can be used to hold war criminals accountable. Another means of countering the dangerous spread of disinformation is to champion international humanitarian law. This may take the form of lending expertise to legal institutions, sending impartial observers to at-risk regions and conflict zones, and deploying humanitarian aid and financial assistance to war-torn regions. States committed to fostering global security must collectively pool their efforts to counter the insidious influence of hostile actors who evade accountability by weaponizing technology and spreading disinformation. 

Concluding Thoughts

The current nature of the virtual information landscape makes it challenging to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate sources of information, especially within the context of hybrid war. It will become increasingly difficult to disentangle competing narratives as hostile actors employ sophisticated technologies to distort the truth. The international community must proceed with caution when analyzing digital evidence. Adopting new strategies will help counter the spread of disinformation, such as strengthening partnerships with likeminded allies and upholding the principals of international humanitarian law. Only then will it be possible to interrogate the truth and to expose war crimes in real time.

End Notes:

[1]. Jakub Eberle and Jan Daniel, Politics of Hybrid Warfare: The Remaking of Security in Czechia after 2014 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 2.

[2]. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 251.

[3]. Nina Burri, Bravery or Bravado? The Protection of News Providers in Armed Conflict (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 68.

[4]. “Arab Spring: The first smartphone revolution”, The Economic Times, November 30, 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/saudi-arabia/arab-spring-the-first-smartphone-revolution/articleshow/79487524.cms.

[5]. Peter Suciu, “Social Media Is Impacting Military Performance And Changing The Nature of War”, Forbes, June 7, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/06/07/social-media-is-impacting-military-performance-and-changing-the-nature-of-war/?sh=4dc3dc24e394.

[6]. Dara Conduit, “Digital authoritarianism and the devolution of authoritarian rule: examining Syria’s patriotic hackers”, Democratization (March 2023): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2023.2187781

[7]. Tim Maurer, Cyber Mercenaries: The State, Hackers, and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 89.

[8]. Greg Simons and Iulian Chifu, “Introduction: Waging war in the 21st century”, The Changing Face of Warfare in the 21st Century, Greg Simons and Iulian Chifu, eds. (London: Routledge, 2018), 2.

[9]. David Batty, “Arab spring leads surge in events captured on camera phones”, The Guardian, December 29, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/29/arab-spring-captured-on-cameraphones.

[10]. Batty, “Arab spring leads surge in events captured on camera phones”.

[11]. “‘Reasonable grounds’ to believe Syrian Government was behind deadly chemical gas attack on Douma: OPCW report”, February 7, 2023, UN News: Global perspective Human stories, https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/02/1133252.

[12]. “Opinion: A falsified video of Ukrainian President Zelensky showed how deepfakes can be disarmed”, March 23, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/23/zelensky-geopolitical-deepfake-reaction-disarmed/.

[13]. “Opinion: A falsified video of Ukrainian President Zelensky showed how deepfakes can be disarmed”.

[14]. “Chinese bots targeted Trudeau and others— Canada”, BBC, October 23, 2023, https://bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67201927.

[15]. “Chinese bots targeted Trudeau and others—Canada”.

[16]. Suciu, ibid.

[17]. Jeremy Bowen, “Ukraine war: Gruesome evidence points to war crimes on road outside Kyiv”, BBC, April 1, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60949791.

[18]. Clothilde Goujard, “Digital detectives scour Ukraine social media for evidence of Russian war crimes”, Politico, March 4, 2022. https://www.politico.eu/article/activists-ukraine-social-media-evidence-russia-war-crimes/.

[19]. Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen, “Introduction”, Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen, eds. (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 3-4.

[20]. Ronald Niezen, “Using digital evidence to prosecute war crimes: The ICC’s investigation in Ukraine will rely on a thick trail of images documenting the conflict”, The Canadian Bar Association National, June 8, 2023, https://nationalmagazine.ca/en-ca/articles/law/opinion/2023/using-digital-evidence-to-prosecute-war-crimes#:~:text=ICC%20prosecutors%20relied%20heavily%20on,large%20amount%20of%20self%2Dincrimination.

[21]. Niezen, “Using digital evidence to prosecute war crimes.”

[22]. Ibid.

[23]. Eric Stover, Victor Peskin and Alexa Koenig, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 2–3.