LikeWar named an Amazon Best Book of the Year, notably in two categories, for NonFiction and Business & Leadership.
Named by Foreign Affairs as one of the “Best Books of 2018”
LikeWar should be required reading for everyone living in a democracy and all who aspire to.—BookList (starred review)
“LikeWar is an engaging and startling work.” —Vice-Motherboard
“Excellent… It is a deeply researched page-turner.”—Foreign Policy
“a fantastic read”—The LoopCast
“Fascinating book”—CBS News
“Fascinating”—MSNBC
“Fascinating”—Project Ploughshares
“Favorite book of 2018”—Munich Security Conference
“an excellent book”—American Bar Association
“…A good reference for the troubled relationship between politics and social media…Entertaining read too… Can’t recommend this book enough…. Put your phones away for a couple days and give it a look” – Seth McFarlane, Emmy Winning Creator of Family Guy, Ted, and The Orville (second tweet)
“Essential reading for anyone interested in how social media has become an important new battlefield in a diverse set of domains and settings.”—O’Reilly Media
“…A compelling anecdotal narrative with short, evocative profiles and vignettes that bring texture and life to their story…It is distinguished by its readability and thorough research. I highly recommend it to policy makers and military officers seeking a better understanding of the information forces that are shaping contemporary and future battles.”—Naval War College Review
“A fascinating and engaging read…If you use social media, you should read this. If you don’t use social media, you should definitely read this. If you are one of
those seniors who dismisses social media, you should seriously, absolutely, read this.”—Official Reading of Royal Air Force (UK)
“LikeWar is a crucial dispatch from the frontier of a world that’s changing radically on an almost daily basis, where the most desperate and powerful actors are the innocent, the opportunistic, and the authoritarian – and the rest of us.”—Open Letters Review
“LikeWar tells an important story, vividly and descriptively, and serves as a reliable accounting of the application of the informational tools in conflicts around the world…this captivating book has far-reaching implications for our future and an urgent message for national security leaders and elected officials.”—Strategy Bridge
“A thematic and insightful overview of the weaponization of social media and the power of narrative in conflict.”—Joint Forces Quarterly
“A terrain-shifting work….Brooking and Singer masterfully accomplish an essential role of good historians: putting their readers in the shoes of those individuals who lived through these experiences, and making how it felt experiencing them relatable to the readers.”—Democracy and Society
“I would recommend this book to just about everyone. Social media is no longer an unobtrusive tool used to talk to your friends. It has been weaponized, and everyone who uses it is involved in the fight whether they know it or not.”—Manhattan Mercury
“Concise and helpful…While LikeWar focuses on the social, political and security-related domains, humanitarians should read the book because it sheds light on how the weaponization of social media and information is shaping conflicts today. The book provides some necessary background knowledge that will help humanitarians to better understand how these issues are impacting conflict affected populations, and from there, to improve and/or create new programmes in order to prevent and/or mitigate the harm such changes inflict on affected populations.”—International Committee of the Red Cross
“A compelling read… LikeWar…is not a warning about tomorrow’s war — it’s a map for those who don’t understand how the battlefield has already changed”—Washington Post
“LikeWar: The Weaponisation of Social Media” is a book that anyone active in social media should read. That is everyone.”—Irish Tech News
“The stories Singer and Brooking tell and the lessons they teach are fundamental for military leaders at the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war…..a blueprint on how to think, operate and survive in this operational environment.”—Army Magazine
“Consider Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media your must-read book of 2019. Informative, insightful, yet also cautionary.”—Chicago Now
“The most important book of 2018 should be required reading for informed citizens”—Named “Best Security, Business, and Technology Book of 2018” by OODA-Loop
“Invigorating…The biggest revelation in Singer and Brooking’s work is that the fog of real data, fake news, manipulated bot wars, expensive hashtag battles, planted blogs and real, visceral human outrage are not describing a world that is coming. They are explaining and detailing the realities of the world we already live in.”— The News (Pakistan)
“…a thorough and well-written book on how social media is being employed in war and politics. It is an absolutely essential read to understand the nature of today’s reality.”—EER
“…Fantastic. LikeWar includes interviews with everyone from Michael Flynn to Spencer Pratt. It doesn’t get better than that for a national security/reality tv-watching nerd like me.”—Just Security
“….Being ignorant of, and worse yet denying, these real threats to our cohesion as a country and to the global community of citizens, is no longer a choice and every individual, every organization, every country has to decide what role they will play in this battlefield and bears responsibility for the ultimate outcome. Reading LikeWar may be, for many, the right first step.”—CipherBrief
“Backed by over 100 pages of notes, LikeWar is sober, deeply researched, and still compulsively readable. Comparisons to On War and The Art of War are apt…”—Amazon Best Book of the Month selection
“Seriously. If you use social media in any capacity, you should read this.”—The Verge
“LikeWar is a magical combination of history, technology, and early warning wrapped in a compelling narrative of how today’s information space can threaten the truth, our polity, and our security. It’s a page turner, too, chock full of deep insights and fascinating detail. Sun Tzu tells us to know ourselves, our enemy and our battle space and LikeWar delivers on all three.”—General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA and NSA, author of The Assault on Intelligence
“Online technology has outrun our social intuitions about its power. In vivid prose, Singer and Brooking offer insight into the ways that social media can be used to manipulate beliefs and attitudes for self-serving purposes.” —Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the internet, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
“Much as Clausewitz did for conventional war, LikeWar lays out the new 21st century principles of war. Mixing fascinating stories and the front edge of research, it explains the twilight battlegrounds of politics and war on social media—a frightening future where truth is the first casualty, and our fundamental values are deeply at danger. I loved it.”—Admiral James Stavridis, US Navy (Ret.), former Supreme Allied Commander, NATO
“Reading LikeWar will help you to avoid being part of this Internet of Idiots…While students of history, strategic studies, political science, and international relations will all find LikeWar on their required reading list, anyone else who wishes to understand the world we live in must add LikeWar to the top of the pile on their nightstand.”—Forbes
“The picture Singer and Booking paint of how social media is being weaponized is compelling, and one that ought to give pause to any practitioner in the field of national security. I am reluctant to be so effusive in my praise, but this is truly a must-read book.”—Lawfare
This timely work provides a fascinating and often frightening portrait of the many ways social media is being weaponized and used to manipulate. Singer (Wired for War) and Brooking, a former research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, present a historical overview of the Internet and trace how social media has been implemented to terrorize and control and to reshape war. They provide specific examples of groups and countries taking advantage of online platforms, from radicalization by ISIS to disinformation campaigns and information throttling conducted by Russia, China, and North Korea, including extensive coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The authors also clearly explain how these campaigns succeed, with in-depth descriptions of the echo chambers and confirmation bias that dominate media and reinforce the goals of this war: dismiss, distort, distract, dismay, and ultimately divide. The last chapter expands upon the culpability and role of those controlling the platforms. This book is extremely well documented. Librarians will be especially heartened by the authors’ assertion that “information literacy is no longer merely an education issue but a national security imperative.” VERDICT An important first purchase for all collections.—Library Journal
“It’s extremely timely and fascinating — reading it in bed with my husband, I kept pulling him away from his book to show him passages.” —Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
“brilliant, gripping, and worrisome”—Protego
“…a gritty, multifaceted, and insightful look into a world of online conflict that many of us are only peripherally aware of.”—The Business Standard
“It’s clear that the information in LikeWar is vital to our national security; however, that’s not the real reason why I enjoyed the book so much. I liked the book just because it was highly readable and entertaining…. It’s a fun read, sure, but best of all is that every time I put down LikeWar, I felt that I had learned something new and important….This book and the information it contains is that vital. I highly recommend it for anyone with an interest in national security, international relations, journalism, or history.”—NewsRep
“LikeWar is the definitive work on the information revolution—its early origins, growth, and many complex implications. It weaves this broad-tapestry in a way that explains, compels, and provokes thought all at once. A fascinating, informative must-read.”—Lt. Gen. James Clapper, USAF (ret.) Former Director of National Intelligence
“…Essential reading if today’s Leaders (both in and out of uniform) are to understand, defend against, and ultimately wield the non-kinetic, yet violently manipulative effects of Social Media.”—US Army Training and Doctrine Command
“A great read…A must read for the intelligence community…A compelling story of the opportunities and risks of social media that every intelligence analyst must appreciate, as publicly available information will increasingly dominate how we read or misread the operational and strategic environment.”—Lieutenant General Robert Ashley, US Army; Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
“A timely, urgent look at a world of electronic sheep—and wolves aplenty, too.”—Kirkus
“LikeWar is an eye-opening literary experience. Most of us access social media in some form on a near-daily basis, but do we really understand the phenomenon?”—Modern War Institute at West Point
“Although the book is titled Like War, it isn’t so much about warfare as about how social media is affecting society broadly: how we consume information, why social media is so addictive, how it has been capitalized on by social movements, celebrities, politicians, terrorists, and states. It’s worth reading for the history of the Internet alone, which bounces along as vignettes about individuals that personalize the story (they clearly apply the elements of effective social media they identify: narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, and inundation)…A valuable primer on where social media came from and how its currently being used. It also has some useful suggestions for taming its effects.”—War on the Rocks
“My films have specialized in realistic horror. LikeWar is scary as hell, as it shows how people can be manipulated online to make our worst fears come true.”—Jason Blum, producer of The Purge and Get Out
“This book deserves a place on the bookshelf of every corporate strategist and government leader.”—OODA-Loop
“…an important read for those in the national security field and anyone who has a smartphone and spends any amount of time during the day checking their social media accounts.”—From the Green
“Through a series of vivid vignettes, LikeWar shows how the internet has become a new battlefield in the 21st century, in ways that blur the line between war and peace and make each of us a potential target of postmodern conflict.”—Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University
“…few grasp the real threat Americans face on their favorite social networks in the course of their daily experiences. Through amusing vignettes and plenty of pop-culture references, the authors take us on a wild ride featuring everything from reality TV stars to Russian missiles. My take? Like and share.”—Task and Purpose
“The internet has fundamentally reshaped the way humans interact; by extension, it has reshaped the way humans wage war. This book is timely, but the takeaways are timeless.”—Ian Bremmer, Founder of the Eurasia Group, and New York Times best-selling author of Us. vs. Them
“In LikeWar, Peter Singer and Emerson Brooking incisively document how the use of social media and information operations are fundamentally changing the dynamics of global conflict and competition, while threatening the foundations of democracy. While the 2016 elections showed the power of social media and its manipulation by our adversaries, Singer and Brooking provide a wakeup call to the wider challenges facing us, requiring that all Americans adapt and respond.”—Senator Mark Warner (VA), Ranking Member-Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
“LikeWar is the best, most comprehensive book to appear on a phenomenon that has turned into the greatest threat to electoral democracy since the 18th Century.”—Toomas Hendrik Ilves, former President of Estonia, co-chair, World Economic Forum Global Futures Council
“Singer and Brooking have produced a compulsively readable and insightful account of what social media is doing to our democracy and to our relations with each other. If it were fiction, their description of the battleground the Internet has become would be scary. As reality, it is terrifying.”—Professor Sir David Omand, former UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator and Director of Government Communications Headquarters
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