Post-Truth and Information Warfare in their Technological Context

Abstract

As citizens are faced with an overabundance of information, their reliance on intuitive sorting strategies and platform-enabled content selection and delivery increases correspondingly. Under such circumstances, political action tends to be based on haphazard encounters with opinion-congruent content than on anything else, giving rise to so-called post-truth condition and, in turn, opening up conditions for manipulating such information encounters as part of information warfare operations. In particular, this novel environment necessitates a rethinking of informational agency, locating it within interactions between humans and technological artefacts, whereby humans as generators of data and algorithms as tools that structure the information domain based on such data co-construct political and social spaces. The impact of digital technologies is further amplified by the advent of synthetic (Artificial Intelligence-generated) media, which is foreseen to bring about epistemic confusion, that is, increasing inability to separate between reality and fiction. Under such conditions, and in any situations of actual or perceived crisis and tension, audiences are inclined to rely on narratives as coping strategies, which is where information warfare operations come to the fore. Either capitalising on the existing fertile ground or having manufactured a condition of crisis and distrust, such operations are geared towards hijacking audience cognitive processes with narratives that suit their perpetrators.