The Original Battletrolls: Why and How States Frame the Internet as a Violent Place

It is a banal observation, but no violent act has ever been committed over the internet. Yet terms such as 'cyberwar' and 'cyber-security' persist in official and academic discourse, and they carry an obvious connotation of danger and violence. If states are institutions that monopolize violence over a population in a given territory, their attempts to represent the internet as a violent place, despite its ontological incompatibility with violence, demand explanation. First, we explore the efforts to preserve the conventional meaning of sovereignty. Because the state exists to control violence and the internet is inherently non-violent, the internet threatens the state. Therefore, to prevent themselves from becoming just another institution with a website competing for attention, states must frame the virtual world as a domain of danger that requires a superior power. Second, we trace how states infuse the internet with an ostensible capacity for violence. To this end we use securitization theory, which considers 'threats' to be speech acts with which officials label objects and justify extraordinary measures. This allows us to analyze who is securitizing what to whom and proposing what means to counter it. We examine official statements to survey and compare the metaphors states use to depict the internet as a violent place. 'Normal' internet trolls disrupt discourse with crude and tangential remarks; states are doing something similar, but with grave implications for society and communication within it.