How does cognitive warfare work in favor of the hegemonic narrative? (1)

Published at: 07/08/2026 05:08 PM

Cognitive warfare is a military and geopolitical strategy that uses psychological manipulation, disinformation, social media and artificial intelligence to alter the way people think, feel and make decisions.

Its objective is not to destroy physical infrastructures, but to weaken the human mind, polarize societies and destroy institutional trust from within; which makes the human mind the main battlefield, where the objective is not to conquer physical territories, but to alter how we think, feel and interpret the world.

This type of soft war combines the strategic use of technology, psychology and neuroscience to modify the way people process information, destroying their capacity for critical thinking. Unlike traditional psychological warfare, which seeks to influence emotions, and one of its objectives is to implement narrative hegemony: to impose a definitive conceptual framework where the population adopts the attacker's ideas voluntarily, automatically and unconsciously.

It is currently considered to be the sixth domain of war (in addition to land, sea, air, space and cyberspace), which operates directly on the human factor, so understanding this form of attack is the first step in developing critical thinking and evaluating our capacity to respond to invisible attacks and highly destructive.

Nowadays, the first bastion of this type of war is directed by social networks; we see on different platforms how commentators and influencers talk about issues that need a more responsible explanation so that users can have a real and unbiased idea in less than a minute.

This is how the construction of the hegemony of thought is no longer based on censoring information, but on saturating the digital ecosystem to generate confusion and distrust.

In 1988, the philosopher Noam Chomsky and the journalist Edward S. Herman published a book called The Guardians of Freedom, in which they described how the propaganda model of the media is introduced, they explained that “the control of public opinion is not necessarily intentional or directed, but is a cooperative and emerging phenomenon, associated with discrimination of publicable information from information that is not, thus affecting the public interest”.

The American journalist and intellectual, Walter Lippmann, also explained in one of his essays on democracy, that “decision-making should be reserved for the elite of responsible men”.

Digital platforms operate under the logic of “manufactured consent” proposed by Chomsky . By controlling communication channels, concentrated in global corporations, it delimits which political or social alternatives are viable, marginalizing any idea that threatens the established order.

Chomsky explained that traditional media, such as the press and television, act as filters to shape public opinion, making the population voluntarily accept the agendas of political and economic elites, without the need to use brute force. Today, digital platforms have perfected this model of social control through algorithmic and commercial mechanisms. When the philosopher explained that “the mass media selected what news to show and which to hide to establish the allowed debate”; today the algorithms of Meta, TikTok or Google act as the definitive filter in the following way: “By customizing your home section, they subtly decide what part of reality you see and which becomes invisible, in this way the user believes that they consume information freely, but its menu of options has been strictly prefabricated by a machine that seeks profitability”.

Chomsky also explained that “the system allows debate, but only within a very narrow spectrum of opinions approved by the elites.” This debate is currently explained by how social networks simulate total freedom of expression under the premise that “anyone can publish”. However, the algorithm controls visibility: a dissenting opinion or one that does not generate commercial interactions is buried by the code. Consent is manufactured by making the user feel free while operating within a filter designed to maintain the economic order of the platform.

How do social media algorithms act within cognitive warfare?

Social media algorithms are the technological engine that makes cognitive warfare so effective, cheap and massive. Foreign powers don't need to hack a platform's servers; they just need to understand and exploit the design of their algorithms to manipulate the opinion of the population.

To consolidate control over what society considers “real” or “logical”, cognitive warfare strategists exploit specific psychological vulnerabilities using digital tools such as:

Maintain confirmation bias: Algorithms expose the user only to data that validates their previous biases.

Illusion of belonging to the majority: The massive use of bots simulates false consensus, making dissenting positions feel isolated. These fake accounts massively interact with each other to deceive the social network's algorithm. The algorithm, believing it to be a genuine human debate, projects the false narrative at the start of millions of real users, altering a nation's public agenda in a matter of hours.

On this new form of advanced manipulation, the American sociologist and writer Shoshana Zuboff, developed the concept called Surveillance Capitalism; which is “a defined economic and social order where private human experience is extracted and converted into free raw material. This information is processed using algorithms to predict and modify human behavior for profit.”

Zuboff explained that “platforms know each individual's fears, desires and biases. Consent is no longer manufactured on a large scale, but rather surgically and individually. They show you exactly the plot, meme or news that your brain needs to see to accept a specific narrative, making manipulation invisible and infinitely more effective z”.

According to this, while in the 20th century consent was manufactured from the top down through television, today digital platforms make users themselves actively participate in an unconscious way in the manufacture of their own control, trapped in a loop of interactions designed by technological corporations.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team