Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News | 
America sucks at information warfare...This isn‘t necessarily a bad thing. Democracies are marketplaces of ideas. We stand for freedom, liberty, human rights, and peaceful protest, so stopping one thing, like the violent views of terrorists or nefarious Russian influence of homegrown Americans, gets tricky. American values..are their greatest strength when shared and promoted—and a major vulnerability in the eyes of those who seek to exploit them.
The hecklers weren‘t hacking people‘s computers; they were hacking their minds, in two ways. (1) they sought to change a target audience‘s perception on issues, nudging audiences toward preferred foreign policy positions and influencing experts, politicians, and media personalities toward a pro-Assad or pro-Russia stance....(2) hecklers sought to batter adversaries off social media platforms through either endless harassment or compromise.
pickWatts, former student of West Point & Army officer, has been combatting terrorism and studying terrorists as part of the FBI and beyond. He is such an interesting character with a deep understanding of how the internet, and, more specifically, how social media has allowed recruitment across borders, hacking into government databases/emails, the swaying of national elections, and the spread of conspiracies and Fake Newsâ„¢. Quite an informative read.
