Information warfare and its limitations

The best days of information warfare are probably behind us

- AJAY SHAH

The alleged exploits of Sanjay Rai Sherpuria highlight the place of information warfare in the modern world. Technological advances (WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter) have created a whole new world of possibilities for information warfare which many bad actors are exploiting. Authoritarian states are able to meddle in foreign countries through these tools, even without collusion with local actors. These problems are about to get a lot worse owing to improvements in machine learning and large language models (LLM). There are many pathways to do better.

In a recent article in The Print, Ananya Bhardwaj tells the story of Sanjay Rai Sherpuria, who allegedly created a public-domain information set about himself, which could be Googled by the credulous, and then used it to achieve outsized influence.

When miraculous powers in the form of a smartphone first landed in our palm, we were all delighted. Our early communications were with our trusted people, and it was human nature to apply that level of trust to everything that happened through the smartphone. Bad actors rapidly caught on to this, and a new age of information warfare began, aiming to make us believe things that are false.