Social manipulationHostile Social Manipulation by Russia and China: A Growing, Poorly Understood Threat

Published 5 September 2019

With the role of information warfare in global strategic competition becoming much more apparent, a new report delves into better defining and understanding the challenge facing the United States by focusing on the hostile social manipulation activities of the two leading users of such techniques: Russia and China.

With the role of information warfare in global strategic competition becoming much more apparent, a new RAND report delves into better defining and understanding the challenge facing the United States by focusing on the hostile social manipulation activities of the two leading users of such techniques: Russia and China.

Today’s practitioners of what this report’s authors term hostile social manipulation employ targeted social media campaigns, sophisticated forgeries, cyberbullying and harassment of individuals, distribution of rumors and conspiracy theories, and other tools and approaches to cause damage to the target state. These emerging tools and techniques represent a potentially significant threat to U.S. and allied national interests.

RAND researchers recommend that democracies urgently undertake rigorous research on social manipulation to gain a better understanding of its dynamics.

“We found a growing commitment to tools of social manipulation by leading U.S. competitors such as Russia and China,” said Michael Mazarr, lead author on the report and a senior political scientist at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. “The findings are sufficient to suggest that the U.S. government should take several immediate steps, including developing a more formal and concrete framework for understanding the issue and funding additional research to understand the scope of the challenge.”

The report argues that leading autocratic states have begun to employ information channels for competitive advantage. Russia and China believe themselves to be engaged in an information war with the West and have begun to invest significant resources in such tools, according to the report. Yet the research also finds that social manipulation campaigns are effective to the degree that vulnerabilities in a society allow them to be effective. Such techniques can seldom create from whole cloth the situations that allow an aggressor to manipulate political life.