The next war does not need to start with a bang.
It can start with a notification.
A seemingly spontaneous video. A capture without context. A headline designed to provoke an immediate reaction. An account that seems real. Hundreds of comments repeating the same interpretation. An algorithm that discovers what outrages you, what you fear and what you are willing to share before you check it.
The goal is not always to convince you of a lie.
Sometimes it’s enough to make you stop knowing what to trust.
This brings us closer to an idea that in recent years has gained importance in military, technological and academic circles: Cognitive Warfare, or cognitive warfare.
It is not simply propaganda with a new name. The difference is in the scale, speed and technological capacity to intervene in human perception.
And for those of us who live in Latin America, the issue is neither distant nor abstract.
It is entering through the same screen from which we work, vote, buy, discuss, inform ourselves and organize ourselves.
The battlefield is interpretation
When we think about cybersecurity we imagine servers, passwords, vulnerabilities and compromised networks.
Cognitive warfare targets another infrastructure.
The human mind.
NATO Allied Command Transformation describes cognitive warfare as an environment in which you attempt to affect behaviors, beliefs and decisions by leveraging hyperconnectivity, data, psychology and cognitive science. It is not limited to distributing false information: it seeks to alter what we think, how we think and how we act.
That difference matters.
A traditional cyber attack can try to get into your system.
A cognitive operation may attempt to enter your decision process.
It does not need to install malware on your computer.
It may try to install a narrative in your head.
And a sufficiently repeated narrative can change decisions without the person feeling like someone is attacking them.
Therein lies one of its most disturbing features: the target can voluntarily participate in the distribution of the attack.
We share the content. We discuss it. We defend it. We transform it into identity.
Misinformation is just one piece
Reducing Cognitive Warfare to “fake news” would be an understatement.
False information matters, but there are much more subtle mechanisms.
An operation can use true information presented out of context. You can select only the facts that favor an interpretation. It can flood a conversation with contradictory versions until it becomes impossible to know what happened. It can amplify a small conflict into a sign that an entire society is fractured.
You may also try to destroy trust.
Trust in institutions.
Trust in journalists.
Trust in scientists.
Confidence in elections.
Trust in companies.
Trust even between people who belong to the same community.
A society that cannot agree on what information it considers minimally verifiable becomes much easier to manipulate.
That is precisely what makes Latin America a particularly sensitive terrain.
Latin America already lives within this battle
Our region combines several factors that make the cognitive environment especially explosive: high penetration of social networks, constant cycles of political crisis, inequality, low institutional trust, insecurity, migration, violence, informal economies and a public conversation that often occurs first on private platforms rather than in traditional media.
Electoral misinformation is already an institutional concern in much of Latin America and the Caribbean. UNESCO, the OAS and International IDEA have developed guides, workshops and observation mechanisms specifically for this problem.
It’s not theory.
In Ecuador, the OAS held workshops with the National Electoral Council to strengthen capacities against disinformation. He has done similar work with Peru, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. UNESCO maintains a regional toolbox on electoral disinformation together with Chequeado and the LatamChequea network.
International IDEA, when analyzing the Latin American electoral supercycle, pointed out as common challenges the use of disinformation and polarization as mobilization strategies, the loss of trust in electoral authorities, political violence and the interference of actors external to formal competition, including organized crime.
That set of factors is important because cognitive warfare rarely works alone.
It works best when it finds a fracture that already exists.
It does not necessarily create the conflict from scratch.
It identifies it, measures it, amplifies it and keeps it alive.
The easiest case to understand: the elections
In Latin America, a cognitive operation does not need to falsify millions of votes to alter an election.
It may be enough to convince a significant portion of the population that the electoral system is incapable of producing a reliable result.
That completely changes the objective.
It is no longer just about favoring a candidate.
It is about eroding the legitimacy of the referee, sowing doubts before there is evidence, transforming administrative errors into “evidence” of conspiracy or circulating prepared narratives for whatever the result.
UNESCO identifies patterns that are repeated in electoral processes in the region: false accusations of fraud organized by authorities, supposed votes of deceased people, false information about who can vote, misleading instructions to invalidate votes, invented chaos during election day, false polls or fabricated statements by candidates.
The interesting thing is that none of these tactics need to be sophisticated.
Many times a WhatsApp screenshot that seems to be sent by “someone who works there” works better than a piece of overly professional propaganda.
Because credibility doesn’t always come from design.
It comes from closeness.
WhatsApp is political infrastructure
In much of Latin America, political conversation does not only occur on X, TikTok, Facebook or Instagram.
It occurs in family groups.
Neighborhood groups.
Work communities.
School parent groups.
Migrant chats.
Telegram channels.
Forwarded audios with no visible origin.
That changes the dynamics of influence.
Information that arrives through a traditional medium can be questioned because we clearly identify who publishes it.
An audio that comes from a family member has another layer of trust.
“A friend who works in the government gave it to me.”
“A cousin who is in the hospital says this is true.”
“A soldier told an acquaintance.”
The chain of trust replaces the chain of verification.
And when content comes in through a personal relationship, correcting it becomes more difficult because questioning the message can feel like questioning the person who sent it.
From a cognitive perspective, that detail is huge.
Technology distributes the message, but human trust legitimizes it.
They don’t need you to believe the lie
There is a dangerous idea: thinking that a manipulation campaign fails if people do not fully believe the message.
It doesn’t always work that way.
Imagine receiving twenty different explanations about the same event.
One accuses a government. Another assures that everything was fabricated. Another says the video is fake. Another claims it was a foreign operation. Another maintains that it never happened.
The result may not be a new belief.
It could be exhaustion.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
That state also has strategic value.
Because when uncertainty becomes permanent, our willingness to check information, participate, organize or make decisions decreases.
Noise can become a weapon.
In a region where trust in institutions may already be fragile, saturating the space with incompatible versions may be more effective than imposing a single narrative.
The goal is not always for the audience to think “A is true.”
Sometimes it’s enough to get him to think “everyone lies”.
And when everyone lies, whoever has the most ability to occupy attention wins.
Polarization: the perfect fuel
Cognitive warfare works especially well in societies where political identity becomes personal identity.
When a position stops being an opinion and starts to feel like part of who you are, any contrary information can be perceived as an attack.
That makes checking secondary.
First we defend the group.
Then we look for arguments.
Polarization allows us to construct different messages for different audiences without the need to maintain coherence between them.
You can talk to an audience about security.
To another of corruption.
To another migration.
To another of religion.
To another of economic fear.
To another of patriotism.
It is not necessary for everyone to believe the same story.
It is only necessary for each group to receive the story that best activates their own emotions.
Algorithms changed the scale
Traditional propaganda needed media capable of distributing a message to millions of people.
Digital platforms introduced something much more powerful: the ability to display different messages to different groups.
The same campaign can exploit fear in one audience, resentment in another, patriotism in another, and distrust in a fourth.
It is not necessary to find the perfect message for the entire population.
It is necessary to find the correct stimulus for each segment.
And here appears a direct connection with disciplines that we normally associate with digital marketing: segmentation, behavior, personalization, data analysis, message optimization and experimentation.
The tools are similar.
The intention may be completely different.
The same knowledge that allows you to display a relevant ad can also be used to identify emotional vulnerabilities or amplify social divisions.
International IDEA warns that social networks tend to promote content that generates interaction and that, in political contexts, this can favor polarizing and adversarial narratives.
That does not mean that the algorithm “wants” to destabilize a democracy.
It means that a system optimized for engagement can become an extremely useful machine for those who want to do it.
TikTok and politics turned into stimulus
TikTok deserves a separate conversation.
Not because it is “more dangerous” by definition, but because it very clearly represents how the way we consume information has changed.
Instead of searching for news, the news appears.
Instead of choosing a source, the algorithm chooses a sequence.
Instead of reading an entire argument, we’re given snippets designed to compete for seconds of attention.
Politics begins to adopt the logic of short entertainment: immediate conflict, clear characters, strong sentences and a quick emotional reward.
This benefits content that can be understood without context.
And it harms complex explanations that take time.
A cognitive manipulation does not need to invent an entire false world.
You can simply select the correct fragment of a real video and put text on it that changes its interpretation.
In thirty seconds, the context was lost.
Artificial intelligence accelerates the problem
Generative AI brutally reduces the cost of producing information.
Text.
Images.
Audio.
Video.
Complete profiles.
Automated conversations.
Virtually infinite variations of the same message.
That changes the economics of influence operations.
Previously, producing thousands of convincing pieces required large human teams. Now automated systems can generate versions, test them, translate them and adapt them to different audiences with a speed that was impossible a few years ago.
International IDEA has warned that large models and generative AI can be used to manufacture deepfakes, produce informational noise, and direct hyper-segmented messages.
The IACHR’s Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression has also documented in the region an increase in the use of AI technologies, including deepfakes and other forms of digital manipulation, to spread disinformation, discredit journalists and public actors or alter candidates’ speeches.
The question is no longer just whether an image is fake.
The question is whether we are prepared for an environment where fabricating apparent evidence costs almost nothing.
Organized crime also understands narrative
This point matters especially in Latin America.
When we talk about influence operations we usually imagine governments, political parties or intelligence agencies.
But the regional ecosystem includes other actors with resources, territorial control and strong incentives to manipulate perception.
Organized crime also needs legitimacy, silence, fear and confusion.
It can benefit from narratives that discredit authorities, intimidate journalists, present violence as inevitable or turn an investigation into alleged political persecution.
It is not necessary to call all this “cognitive warfare” to recognize that there is a dispute over the meaning of the facts.
Who is a victim?
Who is enemy?
Who deserves trust?
Who is exaggerating?
Who should keep quiet?
Controlling those questions can be as important as controlling a territory.
The problem is not only technological
We can develop deepfake detectors.
We can verify digital signatures.
We can trace origin of files.
We may use reputation systems and forensic analysis.
All that helps.
But Cognitive Warfare exploits something that can’t be solved with software alone: our own biases.
We want to confirm what we already think.
We share more quickly what gives us strong emotions.
We pay attention to threats.
We trust people we perceive as part of our group.
We reject information that threatens our identity.
These characteristics are not errors of the brain. They are part of how we process a world too complex to analyze everything from scratch.
The problem appears when technological systems learn to systematically exploit them.
The true defense is cognitive
For years we learned basic digital security rules:
Do not reuse passwords.
Activate MFA.
Do not open suspicious files.
Check the domain before entering credentials.
Now we need to develop equivalent habits for our information.
Before sharing something that provokes a strong emotional reaction, stop for a few seconds.
Find the original source.
Separate evidence of interpretation.
Ask ourselves who wins if we believe a certain narrative.
Compare independent versions.
Recognize when we still do not have enough information to conclude anything.
And perhaps the most difficult skill of all:
being able to change our minds without feeling like we lost a battle.
Cognitive defense is not about distrusting everything.
That would be exactly falling into another form of vulnerability.
It consists of learning to assign trust with better criteria.
What this means for Latin American journalists and communicators
Those of us who work with digital communication know all too well the power of a screen.
We know that changing a word can change a conversion.
We know that an image can alter the perception of a brand.
We know that the position of a button changes behavior.
We know that correctly segmenting an audience changes results.
This knowledge has a dimension that goes far beyond selling.
The infrastructure of persuasion that we built over years for advertising can also become infrastructure of political, social or psychological influence.
For journalists, the challenge is no longer just to check if content is true.
You also have to understand why it appears now, who is amplifying it, what emotion it is trying to activate and what conversation it is seeking to displace.
For public communicators, posting a clarification three days later may not work if the false narrative occupied the space first.
For companies, a coordinated campaign can turn into a reputational crisis before the legal team finishes drafting a response.
For citizens, sharing without verification is no longer an innocent individual gesture within a system designed to amplify signals.
We are all nodes.
Care is critical infrastructure
For decades we protected ports, power plants, financial networks, telecommunications and servers because we understood that they were strategic infrastructure.
Maybe we need to start thinking similarly about other infrastructure:
our collective ability to interpret reality.
A society can have servers working perfectly and at the same time suffer a deep crisis of trust.
You may have access to more information than any previous generation and be unable to distinguish which information deserves trust.
It can be completely connected and, paradoxically, deeply fragmented.
That is the terrain where cognitive warfare makes sense.
It does not necessarily seek to turn off the Internet.
It may be more useful to turn the Internet into a space where no one knows what to believe.
The next layer of security
Traditional cybersecurity protects systems.
Cognitive security will have to protect decisions.
It does not mean censoring opinions or building an authority that determines what we should think.
It means improving our ability to detect manipulation, verify provenance, understand incentives, and maintain critical thinking under information pressure.
In Latin America that should mean something very concrete: better electoral communication capabilities, media literacy, journalism with traceability, faster institutional response, transparency before the crisis and citizens less willing to act as automatic amplifiers.
We are not going to eliminate manipulation.
But we can increase its cost.
We can make a lie need more work to survive.
We can get a trusted institution to respond sooner.
We can teach pattern recognition.
We can design more accessible verification systems.
We can stop rewarding every stimulus with our immediate attention.
The most important battle may not be deciding who controls the information.
It will be deciding who controls the process with which we interpret that information.
Because when someone manages to modify how a society perceives reality, they no longer need to win every argument.
It begins to modify the terrain where all discussions occur.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is cognitive warfare? Cognitive Warfare is the strategic use of information, technology, psychology and cognitive science to affect the behaviors, beliefs and decisions of entire populations. It is not limited to misinformation; seeks to alter the way we interpret reality. NATO Allied Command Transformation defines it as an environment where we try to influence what we think, how we think and how we act.
How is it different from traditional propaganda? Traditional propaganda sought to impose a single narrative. Cognitive warfare is more sophisticated: it can use true information out of context, saturate the information space with contradictory versions to the point of exhaustion, or personalize different messages for each audience segment using algorithms and data. The scale, speed and technological capacity are radically different.
How does it directly affect me? Every time you share unverified content, every time an algorithm shows you information designed to provoke an emotional reaction, every time you receive a WhatsApp audio that seems urgent but has no verifiable origin, you are on this battlefield. You don’t need to be targeted by a specific campaign; The simple fact of inhabiting the digital ecosystem exposes you.
How can I protect myself? Develop verification habits before sharing: look for the original source, separate evidence from interpretation, ask who wins with a given narrative, and compare independent versions. If content provokes a strong emotional reaction in you, pause for a few seconds before acting. Pause is the best cognitive defense.
Is it the same as fake news? Disinformation is one piece of cognitive warfare, but it is not the whole story. It also includes the use of true information out of context, the selective amplification of conflicts, the systematic destruction of trust in institutions and the saturation of the information space to generate exhaustion and apathy.
What role does artificial intelligence play? Generative AI dramatically reduces the cost of producing manipulative content: text, images, audio, video, deepfakes and fake profiles can be generated at unprecedented scale and speed. In addition, personalization algorithms allow different messages to be sent to different groups, activating the specific emotions of each segment. The same technology that powers digital marketing can be used for influence operations.
Is Latin America especially vulnerable? Yes. The region combines high penetration of social networks, constant cycles of political crisis, low institutional trust, inequality and a public conversation that frequently occurs on private platforms (WhatsApp, Telegram) where verification is more difficult. Organized crime also uses narratives to manipulate perception, something that other geopolitical contexts do not have to the same magnitude.
What can companies and communicators do? Improve verification capabilities, respond quickly before a false narrative takes hold, design more transparent communication systems, and educate your teams and audiences on digital critical thinking. For companies, a coordinated misinformation campaign can turn into a reputational crisis before the legal team finishes drafting a response.
Does cognitive defense mean distrusting everything? No. Distrusting everything is exactly falling into another form of vulnerability. Cognitive defense consists of learning to assign trust with better criteria: verifying sources, understanding incentives, recognizing patterns of manipulation, and being able to change our mind without feeling like we have lost a battle.
Sources and recommended reading
- NATO Allied Command Transformation — Cognitive Warfare
- NATO ACT — Cognitive Warfare Concept
- UNESCO — Caja de Herramientas sobre desinformación en América Latina y el Caribe
- UNESCO — Los 10 tipos de desinformación electoral más comunes
- International IDEA — Proteger las elecciones frente a las amenazas malignas en línea
- International IDEA — El Super Ciclo Electoral en América Latina y el Caribe
- OEA — Comunicación y desinformación en elecciones