If a military force hides amongst civilians, then the death of those civilians is on them. Time to wheel out this post again: Think with your rational brain, not your emotional brain when it comes to emotive photos. The aim of an information campaign is to generate an emotional reaction. Information campaigns are targeted at the limbic system, the area of the brain where the amygdala sits. People think consciously, on purpose and with complete control, *only 5% of the time*. The rest of the time, their thinking is done by the automatic and reactive subconscious. It’s this that informations campaigns want to hit: they want easy, visceral, emotional reactions in their favour; not rational, balanced, critical reactions that might go against them. It’s a fascinating process: under conditions of psychological stress (for example, seeing a traumatic photo of an injured child) the amygdala activates stress pathways in the hypothalamus and brainstem. In doing so, stress actually impairs prefrontal cortex (PFC) regulation: the area of the brain where critical thinking happens. Thinking whilst psychologically stressed means that the brain’s response patterns switch from slow, thoughtful PFC regulation to reflexive, rapid emotional responses of the amygdala and related structures. Whether handling information, misinformation or disinformation, whilst being moved by human tragedy on a personal level, any academic analysis of merit needs to be dispassionate. The prefrontal cortex needs engaging and the amygdala processes need to be suppressed. It’s why I don’t academically study Afghanistan: I can’t get the emotional distance needed from that campaign to analyse it professionally and calmly. In regards to photos of injured children: of course children are likely to be injured in any warfare. Civilians are often the highest proportion of casualties in any given war. By international humanitarian law that isn’t automatically illegal; but legal and moral are two different things. Such pictures present the information warfare equivalent of a minefield. A child might be perfectly legitimate collateral damage from a legal perspective, but no-one with a soul is going to fail to be moved by the sight of it. That reaction hits the amygdala processes and shuts down critical thinking. Anyone sharing such photos, then attempting to tack analysis onto the back of it is either conducting information warfare of a horribly cynical nature, or they’re just providing bad, emotionally-tainted analysis with a logical prefrontal cortex suppressed by stressed, emotional amygdala processes. Effectively, they’re either cynically exploiting the powerful feelings caused in others by the tragedy of a wounded child, or they’re failing to conduct analysis dispassionately and professionally themselves.
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