China Develops AI-Powered Strategy for Information Warfare

On 21 Novem­ber 2024, the Spe­cial Com­pet­i­tive Stud­ies Project (SCSP) report­ed that Chi­na’s mil­i­tary is devel­op­ing AI-pow­ered “algo­rith­mic cog­ni­tive war­fare” to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly influ­ence and manip­u­late indi­vid­u­als through social media algo­rithms. The arti­cle begins:

What if a war hap­pened all in your head – or at least par­tial­ly? This is the cen­tral premise that under­pins China’s People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army’s (PLA) con­cept of “cog­ni­tive war­fare.” In the eyes of PLA strate­gists and nation­al secu­ri­ty thought lead­ers, the thoughts, infor­ma­tion, and beliefs that reside in each individual’s “cog­ni­tive domain” shape the deci­sions we make and even have the pow­er to turn the tides of bat­tle. Fol­low­ing Russia’s full-scale inva­sion of Ukraine in 2022, Chi­nese mil­i­tary and nation­al secu­ri­ty schol­ars have begun push­ing an updat­ed con­cept of cog­ni­tive war­fare – what they call “algo­rith­mic cog­ni­tive war­fare” – that empha­sizes the capa­bil­i­ties pow­er­ful arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) algo­rithms offer to tar­get and influ­ence indi­vid­u­als at increas­ing­ly gran­u­lar lev­els. This newslet­ter and accom­pa­ny­ing white paper breaks down the phas­es, tac­tics, and goals of algo­rith­mic cog­ni­tive war­fare while also pro­vid­ing con­crete actions the U.S. gov­ern­ment can take to bet­ter pro­tect the hearts and minds of U.S. cit­i­zens. The key to China’s vision of algo­rith­mic cog­ni­tive war­fare is the mas­sive amounts of data need­ed to pow­er algo­rithms that can ana­lyze indi­vid­u­als and under­stand their pref­er­ences, men­tal state, and relationships.

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Key Points:

1. Chi­na’s strat­e­gy com­bines mass data col­lec­tion and social media algo­rithms to cre­ate detailed psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­files for tar­get­ed influ­ence operations.
2. PLA schol­ars envi­sion using AI to gen­er­ate per­son­al­ized con­tent at scale, exploit­ing rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithms to ensure max­i­mum impact on targets.
3. Recent Chi­nese influ­ence oper­a­tions show a shift toward more engag­ing, less ide­o­log­i­cal con­tent, achiev­ing mil­lions of views on plat­forms like TikTok.
4. SCSP rec­om­mends enhanced mon­i­tor­ing, rapid warn­ing sys­tems, and stronger data pro­tec­tion laws to counter Chi­na’s cog­ni­tive war­fare capabilities.