Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

Clint Watts — former FBI Special Agent, US Army officer, and one of the first analysts to systematically document Russian social media influence operations in the United States — brings practitioner-level insight to a field often dominated by academic and journalistic accounts. The book traces his journey from counterterrorism work tracking jihadist networks online to realising, around 2014, that the same social media manipulation techniques were being deployed by Russian state actors with far greater sophistication than most Western analysts recognised. He testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017 and was one of the first people to call out Russian influence operations publicly.

What distinguishes Messing with the Enemy is its operational texture. Watts does not describe Russian influence operations in the abstract — he documents the specific accounts, the specific narratives, the specific communities targeted, and the specific techniques used. For practitioners advising clients on threat assessment, this granularity is valuable. The book also makes a broader argument about the convergence of terrorist information operations and state-sponsored disinformation — a convergence that is increasingly relevant as non-state actors adopt techniques pioneered by state intelligence services. A firsthand account from one of the field's most credible voices.