"The Russian military theory of "reflexive control," defined as "a means of conveying to a partner or an opponent specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action," focuses on the distortion, shaping, and manipulation of information rather than using offensive operations to destroy information systems. All systems of communication and control -- from the human mind to an command and control network -- can be subtly degraded, disabled, or subverted by feeding them false inputs or exploiting weaknesses in how they process, evaluate, and act on information. This can be seen in how easily even advanced artificial intelligence systems can be fooled or otherwise punked by simple tricks. But human social networks also be similarly fooled with with false information and compromised by deception and manipulation.

They have not only successfully intercepted sensitive US governmental communications, but also devised and implemented a political subversion operation that leverages our politics, media, and communication architecture against us. As Joshua Foust observed, Russia's operation "exploits weaknesses in Western journalism itself."

Russia has been learning how social media helps spread stories for years. Adrian Chen followed one early effort Russia undertook on this front in 2014. He researched a Russian "troll farm," where employees of the Russian government flooded social media feeds with dummy content.

We sit at the threshold of an new era characterized by the ubiquity of adaptive, data-hungry systems and a corresponding society characterized more and more by the offloading of its collective memory, cognition, and reasoning to computers."

http://aelkus.github.io/essays/cyberpower.html