KATE THOMPSON DAVY: Algorithms at the trigger, social media deployed: the war tech of today and tomorrow

Three weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the significance of technology in this war continues to make itself resolutely known — not in diminishing ripples, but rather foreshocks and amplifying impacts, the darkening of the skies as the proverbial and literal bombers loom large on the horizon.

The technology fronts that analysts need to keep abreast of are increasing daily: we have the constant social media and informational skirmishes; the big tech versus nation states escalation; crypto and crowdfunding war efforts; consumer technology infiltration; and the alarming threat of autonomous weaponry.

Two weeks ago I wrote in this column that this is not the first social media war, but it may yet come to define it — for this era at least. Social platforms have been used for years to facilitate citizen reporting and enable collaboration among resistance groups — like during the Arab Spring and Syria’s civil war.

With the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, Facebook was accused of amplifying hate speech — through the way the algorithm works — and failing to moderate and remove calls for targeted violence.

We’ve also seen nations such as Sudan, Turkey and Vietnam choosing to cut their citizens off from social platforms like Facebook during conflict, often with the intent to quell protest and stifle rebellion.

So I acknowledge the obvious, that — viewed piece-by-piece, element-by-element — this isn’t a global first. But as the days and the examples pile up, we must acknowledge that this is becoming something we’ve never seen before.

Most telling, I feel, is how Ukraine lobbied the big tech companies directly for assistance, in the same way they sought support from the US, EU and Nato. This feels like the clearest endorsement of those commentators and watchdog bodies, that have been warning for years that the tech megafirms are now geopolitical players and should be treated as such.

Remember the Ukrainian women who reported that the occupying troops were hitting them up on Tinder? Now Tinder is being used to break through Moscow’s disinformation curtain.

And big tech responded, in a high definition, technicolour demonstration of its clout and reach. The top five leading tech companies (Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft) have all implemented what amounts to voluntary and private sanctions on Russia — variously shutting down sales, closing local offices and stores, cutting off access and limiting services. That means no Russian state media on YouTube, no Apple products available to purchase in Russian stores, and virtually all the on-device payment systems booting Russians out of the club.

Other international companies jumping on the sanctions bandwagon or promising to extricate themselves include Unilever, Shell, Sony, IBM, PayPal, Netflix, Deloitte and Citigroup. The list grows by the hour. Also choosing to cut supply ties to Russia are some of the biggest chip makers, such as Intel, AMD, Taiwan’s TMSC and Samsung Electronics. IT World Canada reports that the cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase blocked thousands of crypto wallet addresses in Russia, and many traditional finance platforms, such as Visa and Mastercard, have withdrawn.

The intention might be censure and pressure, but the effect could be something much larger — such as a Venezuelan-style default, as Morgan Stanley warns, or even a splintering of the web itself.

In the last few days several different sources have reported on leaks from within Russia that appear to show the activation of plans to cut the nation off into its own self-reliant internet bubble. The Kremlin has denied that it is planning to take these isolatory steps, but it certainly would be capable of doing so. In 2019 a sovereign internet project known as Runet was successfully tested that would allow for all internal traffic to be redirected to national, state-controlled servers.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine both military personnel and Regular Joe citizens are repurposing consumer tech to fight back, with personal and hobbyist drones switching to surveillance and even reportedly being used to drop Molotov cocktails and other explosives. Remember the Ukrainian women who reported that the occupying troops were hitting them up on Tinder? Now Tinder is being used by individuals to break through Moscow’s disinformation curtain (such as catfishing Russian Tinder users, just to evangelise about the real action in Ukraine) and even to connect refugees to those offering safe temporary accommodation.

And how about crowdsourcing a military budget? The Ukrainian embassy in Prague launched a crowdsourcing campaign shortly after the Russian invasion began, with a view to supplementing Ukraine’s $6bn defence budget — a tenth the size of Russia’s, according to MIT’s Technology Review (drawing from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute data). Essentially this makes pitching in to buy a rocket launcher or automatic rifle for a militia half a world away as simple as “adopting” a rescued panda at your local zoo or donating to someone’s cancer treatment — both common crowdfunding activities.

Autonomous weapons

Yet none of the above is half as scary as the activation of next-generation military tech, such as nationwide facial recognition for identifying human targets, or — creepiest of all — the enduring debate over autonomous weapons. UN delegates to a specialist committee continue to debate the terms and conventions that ought to apply to the future use of these, but the fact remains that we could turn decisions on — as the Washington Post puts it — “where and when a weapon should fire” over to artificial intelligence. Proponents argue it would remove human error and the “hotheads” concern, but critics fear excluding humans also means excluding any humanity.

Welcome, as every sci-fi fan must be thinking these days, to a brave new world — or whatever hybrid smoothie of dystopian plots the above collectively represents. On days like this it’s easy to think the internet has peaked with cat videos.

• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.