LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

Singer and Brooking were among the first to articulate with precision what had become intuitively apparent to practitioners: that social media platforms had become battlespaces, and that the logic of virality was itself a weapon. LikeWar maps the full spectrum of how information operations are conducted across digital platforms — from ISIS's sophisticated use of Twitter to recruit and terrorise, to state actors running coordinated bot networks, to the micro-targeting of political advertising. The analysis is empirically grounded and operationally relevant.

The book's particular contribution is its account of the mechanics of attention — how content is made to spread, how algorithms can be gamed, and how the emotional architecture of social media platforms makes populations structurally susceptible to manipulation. Singer is a senior fellow at New America and one of the Pentagon's most cited outside analysts; Brooking was a Council on Foreign Relations research fellow. The combination of policy rigour and narrative clarity makes LikeWar accessible without being superficial. It remains one of the best single-volume introductions to the operational reality of information warfare in the social media age.