Introducing a Guide to Information Warfare Reporting

Canadian communications scholar Marshall McLuhan predicted in his 1970 book Culture Is Our Business that “World War III” would be “a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” Few media predictions seem so likely to be realized — especially not those made over fifty years ago, long before the rise of AI and social media. At the most basic level, “information warfare” involves the use of tactics that exploit the information environment to the detriment of particular societal groups within society, or even against whole populations.

In her 2018 paper “Information Warfare: Issues for Congress,” national security expert Catherine A. Theohary writes that information warfare is conducted “not only in crisis, conflict, and warfare in the operational sense, but is ongoing in peacetime as well.” As she notes, whatever the target (“government agencies, political leadership, or news media”), the goal is “to influence public opinion or to compel decisionmakers to take certain actions” as “ultimately the target of information warfare activities is human cognition.”

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