War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century

David Patrikarakos — a journalist who has covered conflicts from Iran to Ukraine to Gaza — argues in this book that social media has fundamentally changed the nature of war. Not through the weapons it enables, but through the narratives it carries. His central concept is the "homo digitalis": the individual social media user who, armed with nothing more than a smartphone and a Twitter account, can now participate in shaping the information environment of a conflict in ways previously reserved for states and media organisations. The book traces this dynamic through the conflict in eastern Ukraine, the rise of ISIS, and the Israel-Gaza information wars.

War in 140 Characters is valuable precisely because it is grounded in specific conflicts rather than abstract theorising. Patrikarakos shows how both state and non-state actors have adapted to the social media battlefield — how ISIS weaponised Twitter for recruitment and terror, how Ukrainian citizens became effective information warriors, and how Russian information operations exploited the openness of Western social media platforms. For practitioners advising clients on conflict-adjacent information risks or narrative strategy, this book provides one of the most readable and empirically grounded accounts of how information warfare actually operates in modern conflict.