"Xi claims Taiwan as a province of China and has sworn to annex it, by force if necessary.
"In the interim he has presided over a wide-scale campaign of political,
economic and
cognitive warfare,
and near-daily military intimidation,
in order to persuade Taiwan to accept Chinese rule."
____
Ouch, lay off the cognitive warfare! If you want a pillow fight, fight like a Man, with slaves and long distance germs.
"Ratings agency downgrades China debt outlook over economic uncertainty "
____
"Cognitive warfare—controlling others’ mental states and behaviors by manipulating environmental stimuli—is a significant and ever-evolving issue in global conflict and security, especially during the COVID-19 crisis.
In this article, we aim to contribute to the field by proposing a two-dimensional framework to evaluate China's cognitive warfare and explore promising ways of counteracting it. We first define the problem by clarifying relevant concepts and then present a case study of China's attack on Taiwan.
Next, based on predictive coding theory from the cognitive sciences, we offer a framework to explain how China's cognitive warfare works and to what extent it succeeds.
We argue that this framework helps identify vulnerable targets and better explains some of the conflicting data in the literature. Finally, based on the framework, we predict China's strategy and discuss Taiwan's options in terms of cognitive and structural interventions."
https://academic.oup.com/jogss/article/7/4/ogac016/6647447
"Not only did Russia meddle with the US presidential elections and the United Kingdom's Brexit vote (Silverstein 2019), China has also interfered in Australia and New Zealand (Kelton et al. 2019) and discredited Taiwan's COVID‐19 management (Lin 2021; Lin et al. 2022).
Cognitive warfare is a special threat to democracies;
the freedom of expression is abused and undermined by disinformation (Sloss 2020).
It is thus an emerging issue that needs to be seriously dealt with."
"While cognitive warfare is a significant phenomenon, there is not yet agreement about the concept itself;
moreover, it is often entangled with notions such as information warfare and cyberspace warfare.
For example, Libicki (1995) argues that information warfare consists of seven components (i.e.,
command-and-control warfare,
intelligence-based warfare,
electronic warfare,
psychological warfare,
hacker warfare,
economic information warfare, and cyberwarfare),
in which cognitive manipulation falls under the category of psychological warfare.
Tashev, Purcell, and McLaughlin (2019) argue that the cognitive dimension is the upmost aspect of the information space.
In addition, according to Connell and Vogler's (2017) study of Kremlin's disinformation, cyberwarfare contains cognition manipulation as a key element.
Lewis (2018) also emphasizes the cognitive effect in cyberattacks. However, others hold that cognition control is not limited to information warfare or cyberwarfare.
Siman-Tov (2019) analyzes that many political methods (propaganda, public relations, and public diplomacy) can be utilized to influence cognition.
Rogers (2021, 81) maintains that “the conflation of operational information warfare with cognitive warfare is a category error that must be addressed first.”
Bernal et al. (2020) distinguish cognitive warfare from information warfare;
while the latter focuses on controlling the flow of information, the former aims to control the responses of individuals and groups to the presented information.
That is, there is no consensus about the very concept yet.
To prevent confusion, in this article, we offer a working definition
of cognitive warfare
as activities undertaken to manipulate environmental stimuli to control the mental states and behaviors of enemies as well as followers in both hot and cold wars.
Accordingly, while cyberwarfare can spread disinformation, it mainly attacks an enemy's infrastructure or steals intelligence in practical ways
(e.g., distributed denial-of-service attacks), and web security is a crucial issue in this field (Andress and Winterfeld 2013; Robinson, Jones, and Janicke 2015).
Information warfare targets human decision-makers,
which can be launched via online social media
and offline interpersonal networks
(Ventre 2016; Libicki 2020; Prier 2020; Di Pietro, Caprolu, and Cresci 2021)
as well as distorting voters epistemically and emotionally
(de Buitrago 2019; Serrano-Puche 2021).
Compared to information warfare, cognitive warfare extends from focusing on media control to brain control; it depends more on neurological resources than just mass communication techniques (dit Avocat 2021).
For example, it does not only focus on the input (information flow) alone but also on the cognitive system and its output (behaviors), such as manipulating the brain's system 1 (e.g., nudging) or system 2 (e.g., coercion) to steer enemies’ perception and behaviors.
Its research also involves neuroscientific explanations at the subpersonal level,1 in contrast to personal- and interpersonal-level analyses in information warfare.
Moreover, it can be integrated with other means (e.g., diplomacy, economic warfare, military operations) to enable hybrid warfare (Pocheptsov 2018).
Cognitive warfare also resembles influence warfare in its effects. Therefore, although all of them—cyberwarfare, information warfare, cognitive warfare, and hybrid warfare—contain the element of influence operations and may impact human cognition, only cognitive warfare is specifically dedicated to brain control by incorporating weaponized neuroscience into various practices.
The relationship among the concepts stipulated in this article is illustrated in figure 1.
the recent literature, particularly addressing this issue, dit Avocat (2021) explains how cognitive warfare evolves and why it may fuel future conflicts in our highly connected world.
To counteract it, she calls for technological innovations to
detect deepfakes,
ethical regulation of weaponized neuroscience, and geopolitical solutions for better governance.
2Silverstein (2019), proposing a neuroscientific approach to national security, analyzes psychological factors
(e.g., assimilation,
cognitive dissonance,
and the availability heuristic in belief formation)
and environmental factors (e.g., the effects of liberalism and social networking in the context of globalization) that may augment the harm of cognitive warfare.
She recommends that
the public be skeptical of the information presented
and that governments enact laws regulating tech giants (Silverstein 2019).
Pocheptsov (2018) investigates how cognitive bias is heightened by mass media.
He presents a case study of how Russia uses tailored news and negative images to bewilder Ukraine.
Likewise, Waltzman (2017) warns against cognitive hacking; an audience's mental state can be easily manipulated when the disinformation appeals to existing fears and anxieties.
The fake news that Obama was injured in White House explosions, tweeted by a hijacked Associated Press account in 2013, led to a $136 billion drop in and recovery of equity market value in only five minutes.
Thus, “cognitive security” in the era of weaponized information should be well managed.
In addition, Kania and Wood (2021) argue that China, learning from Russia and the United States, is developing offensive strategies and capabilities for hybrid warfare and has used them in counterterrorism drills in Xinjiang and crackdowns in Hong Kong.
China is also focusing on counterhybrid warfare, reflecting fears of the United States using the same tactics. against it.
Beauchamp-Mustafaga (2019) argues that China, alerted by the Arab Spring, started exploiting social media to influence adversary public opinion.
Although psychological warfare has been prioritized by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), it remains in the early stages of development because of inconsistent terminology and the literature on self-perceived shortcomings. Finally, Burke et al. (2020) review the military theory and strategic guidelines behind Beijing's idea of
information dominance, where big data and artificial intelligence (AI) play important roles in winning the war. By combining cyber data with electromagnetic and space warfare information,
China aims
to steer enemy perception
in the desired direction...
https://academic.oup.com/jogss/article/7/4/ogac016/6647447
.... straight to hell.
_____
You can stare at your cognition crowbar device and bend people like sporks in a furnace in sheer bliss.🌀
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