Information operations

In military doctrine, information operations is the umbrella over several older trades: psychological operations, military deception, operations security, electronic warfare, and the newer computer network operations. The idea behind the umbrella is that the information environment is a domain of conflict in its own right, in which influencing what the adversary knows and believes is as much a part of the campaign as anything done with weapons.

Social media companies borrowed the phrase. When Facebook's security team published its first public account of state-backed manipulation on the platform in 2017, it was titled Information Operations and Facebook, and the term has since been used by platforms and researchers for any organized, deceptive campaign run through accounts and pages, whether by a state, a political consultancy, or a commercial operator. The platforms' narrower enforcement term is coordinated inauthentic behavior: networks of accounts that misrepresent who they are and work together.

The techniques involved are the Digital-era family on this site: Sock Puppets, Bot Amplification, Synthetic Personas, Hashtag Hijacking, and Spoofed Outlets. What the term adds is the planning. An information operation is a campaign with objectives, a budget, and a chain of command, which is what distinguishes it from the ordinary noise of a network.

Compare influence operation and psyop.