Learning From Taiwan to Tap into NATO’s Largest Arsenal: The Meme Vanguard
By: Blair Maddock-Ferrie, Royal Military College
Internet disinformation is designed to be palpable and easily spread by those who consume it. This is part of what makes it difficult to counter, as official refutations can take time, resources, and may not be well-accepted in the wake of an attack. While NATO has been struggling to find an effective measure to counter disinformation, an approach pioneered by Taiwan may hold the answer. As defined by the Oxford Living Dictionary and validated by Lonnberg et al., a meme is “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations”. The term “meme warfare”, created by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is an approach that fights fire with fire, bringing the same palpability and speed to refutations of disinformation. Chinese disinformation operations are continuously undermining Taiwan’s legitimacy as a nation, yet Chinese operations progressively increase in numbers. Taiwan’s application of meme warfare against Chinese disinformation effectively targets the mechanism of disinformation in a way NATO currently does not. From this, it seems evident that Taiwan’s model could, with some modification, work well for NATO.
Internet content can be modeled as a disease, and popular content is sometimes called “viral”. If disinformation is a form of viral infection, then its most effective counter is a vaccine. Using the epidemiological model presented by Lonnberg et al, opposing disinformation needs to improve rate of host (or target) recovery, which determines how fast an infected individual stops spreading “bad” internet content. NATO has struggled in the past to contain disinformation because the existing systems are too slow and lack alliance wide cohesion. In short, this is equivalent of trying to use antibiotics on a virus; resulting in ineffective treatments. For NATO, the key to mitigating the damage of disinformation is to begin actively working on a vaccine: Taiwanese-model meme warfare.
Taiwanese meme warfare uses tailored memes to disempower Chinese disinformation and propaganda, typically by using the humorous nature of memes to spin, or depict, Chinese operations as petty acts carried out by a weak state. Memes operate within the same epidemiological paradigm to neutralize disinformation, meaning they can work where NATO systems would not succeed. In short, the memes work to dissipate the anger that disinformation seeks to create, and makes those who perpetuate the Chinese disinformation equally laughable. Like any vaccine, these memes contain an attenuated form of the virus they combat. Pro-Taiwan memes are designed for and spread to the same target demographic as the original disinformation, with the dual purpose of stopping the nascent deception from being accepted and allowing the Taiwanese government to directly acknowledge its own flaws through humor. The power of these self-satirizing memes is that they can work to eliminate the social conditions that make disinformation effective in the first place, namely dissatisfaction with the government and a perception that the system cannot change. These memes improve disinformation recovery rates and dramatically slow the spread of Chinese falsehoods. This allows time for the Taiwanese government, including intelligence agencies, to thoroughly investigate the attack and its perpetrators without scrambling to control the effects of disinformation. What makes the Taiwanese meme warfare strategy applicable to NATO is its ability to take advantage of existing resources, its strategic flexibility, and its ability to be used in advance of oppositional information activities.
The Taiwanese model of meme warfare is cheap, easily implemented using existing information infrastructure, and naturally propagating. Taiwan uses their existing staff and technology in meme warfare by employing existing government staff as “memers”, people who design and make anti-disinformation memes. In the same way, NATO has an untapped arsenal of tens of thousands of “memers” speaking every language of the Alliance, ready to counter any kind of disinformation with no additional resources required. Looking at memes themselves using a viral model shows they have the ability to replicate and spread throughout the population. As a form of entertainment, memes are popularly consumed and disseminated by both young people and disenfranchised groups, the same elements most susceptible to disinformation. Unlike complex refutations that are unlikely to receive in-depth reading and analysis, memes are made by the same demographic targeted by this disinformation, which can be spread through social media. In the viral model, each meme consumed by a susceptible individual improves their rate of recovery and sharing a meme within their social circle equally improves their contacts’ recovery rate. Through this mechanism, meme warfare both slows the spread of disinformation and can even work preemptively to inoculate the target, as an individual might see a meme before any related disinformation.
A striking part of Taiwanese meme policy is that they not only allow but encourage all levels of government being targeted by disinformation to create their own individual memes. Suppose NATO could do the same? Seeing the infectious effects of Russian disinformation on NATO calls for a functional system that can work mechanistically to uphold Alliance values. The Taiwanese meme warfare model can also give NATO more freedom to officially acknowledge its flaws through satire and work to improve the rate of recovery of those most vulnerable to radicalization. Based on the example of Taiwan and the viral nature of memes, it is recommended that NATO provide guidelines that encourage bureaucrats to make use of resources already available within NATO to create memes that counter Russian disinformation. While this is already the case in an ad hoc fashion with Ukraine providing NATO direction, in conjunction with the existing guidelines on Information Warfare, to create and coordinate counter memeing may inoculate the Alliance against Russian disinformation. In this fashion, NATO can effectively support its members in the counter-information struggle at a critical juncture in its existence.
Blair Maddock-Ferrie is an Officer Cadet at the Royal Military College of Canada, double majoring in Political Science and History. Blair is interested in disinformation and South East Asian politics.
