Social media has made it easy for adversaries to target and influence the American people, a panel of experts said.

“The primary thing it did was it removed our borders,” said Lydia Snider, a foreign malign influence adviser for Army Cyber Command. “Until the advent of social media, we had the luxury of oceans on either side and allies above and below.”

Citing the campaign in 2016 to influence the presidential election, Snider said, “The Russians were able to get directly into the hearts and minds of our citizens that year. So, for me, what’s what keeps me up at night.”

Speaking on a panel during the Association of the U.S. Army’s Hot Topic on cyber and information advantage, Snider said social media has “created precise, precision targeting of audiences and very quick feedback on how your message landed.”

Charity Wright, a principal threat intelligence consultant with Recorded Future, described social media as a “weapon for psychological warfare.”

“It is probably the best, most utilized tool globally for [psychological operations],” she said. “Consider it from that perspective. China has a long game in mind, and they’re able to use Western social media to influence the rest of the world.”

To keep up, the Army must change the way it views these attacks or influence campaigns, said Dennis Eger, senior open-source intelligence adviser in the office of the deputy Army chief of staff for intelligence, G-2.

“I think if you were to get inside the minds of the Chinese or the Russians, they would view this in the long game, in the long-term, as conflict,” he said. “But we continue to … look at conflict in terms of kinetic rather than what this is in this space. I think if we don’t change, we’re going to look up five to 10 years from now and think, ‘What did we do wrong?’ ”

Today, more than 2 billion people around the world use social media. Each of them has an average of six accounts, and many get their news solely from social media, Eger said.

Additionally, each platform’s algorithms create echo chambers, leading users down a path where they are consuming only information they want to see or that reinforces their beliefs, he said.

“You can weaponize it quickly,” Eger said about social media. “The internet is immediate. It’s very easy for our adversaries to target that and have influence.”

The Army and DoD must do a better job at mapping its audience, Snider said. Of those 2 billion social media users, not all of them are on X, she said. “We need to understand the space,” she said. “We need to be mapping every country. What’s the media landscape for each country? What apps do they use?”

The military also can leverage its public affairs network, Snider said. “If we track what they’re doing, we can get ahead of the story,” she said. “If you’re not telling your story, someone else is, and right now we’re ceding that space. We’re letting them tell our story.”

As the Army transforms and builds new, leap-ahead capabilities such as hypersonic weapons, it also must look to the information space, Eger said.

“In my opinion, the next two wars we’re going to fight are either in space or in this information environment, before we ever fight kinetically,” he said.