The Weaponisation of the Internet – effect models

Policy makers and governments are increasingly fearful of growing efforts by malicious parties to weaponise the Internet. There are currently few tools to detect or measure the threat level, and few methods to either prevent or protect against these threats. One major aspect of the weaponisation of the Internet is to spread misinformation, disinformation and harmful online content through social media and the web. In order to understand how this is done, to be able to assess its effectiveness and most importantly to assist in designing mitigation techniques, it is necessary to be able to model threats. In particular to understand the origin of threats, their spread, virality, and their effects on both their targets and others. This paper presents a framework to model the weaponisation of the internet in a large scale statistical sense. It considers threat actors who create a range of threats which are propagated to a susceptible target population, and caters to the varied effectiveness of those threat actors, the varied susceptibility of the population to different threats, and the varied responses, including turning or radicalisation. This model is developed, discussed and explored through a time-based simulation to understand and visualise the propagation and effects of such threats.