CYBER WARRIORS ARE THE NEW MERCENARIES: Information Warfare in the Second Libyan Civil War

Abstract

The advent of social media proliferation across the world has brough communities together and facilitated the spread of information void of existing borders. However, these information age platforms are now largely being used to sow disinformation and propaganda across politically fragmented societies and conflict zones, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. Foreign powers with vested interests in these proxy wars turn towards these platforms as a way of controlling narratives and disseminating disinformation in an attempt to create a virtual “fog of war”. This thesis investigates how Twitter is becoming one of the predominant tools of choice as an unconventional weapon in the Second Libyan Civil War. The work employs large-scale-computer analysis of Twitter data tied to bot networks facilitated by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates to discover the relationship between these countries’ interests in the Libyan outcome and how they use Twitter as a means to that end. After presenting background on the conflict and the role social media has played in the ongoing war in Libya, I propose the argument that Twitter must be recognized as a serious threat to any future peace settlements, being deployed by third party states with vested interests in the regional proxy war. I propose two new strategies that are deployed by countries backing Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar and the Libyan National Army. The first, Event Based Dissemination is the process of utilizing extensive bot networks before, during, and after key moments in the conflict in order to prime local populaces, belittle local forces, and discredit international settlements or peace accords. The second, Total Dissemination, is the strategy of using bot networks to regularly flood a given Twitter geo-stream with high volumes of information across a substantial period of time in order to fragment and subdivide local populations, further exacerbating local grievances. In order to test the overarching hypothesis and show the true effect of disinformation through Twitter, I use a large-scale analysis of over thirty-five million tweets gathered from a period between 2010 and 2019. Each one of these tweets is tied to an account known to be facilitated or funded by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, pinpointed at the conflict in Libya. The data is cleaned and processed using techniques like sentiment analysis, event correlation, word frequency, and other analysis methods in order to analyze how these countries are using bots and spreading falsified information through their extensive virtual networks. What can be seen from the data and the results is that these countries are increasing their use of social media as a vital tactic in their proxy wars, attempting to bolster their side, Khalifa Haftar, and discredit other foreign powers like Turkey and Qatar. As this war continues to move towards the title of another endless war, policy makers must recognize this phenomenon and act accordingly to uphold credited reporting, slowly eroding this virtual “fog of war”.