Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace, Hardcover

A frontline account of the social media battles raging between red and blue Americans - and how to find moral clarity in the chaos of digital civil war.

Are rural white Christians the real Americans? Should teachers be armed or should the Second Amendment be repealed? Is abortion murder or an ethically sound choice for women? Should migrant babies be caged or should ICE be abolished? Should billionaires exist while children go hungry?

These are some of the bitter ideological disputes that have turned social media into a political battlefield. In Digital Civil War, Peter Daou, a veteran digital-media adviser to presidential candidates, investigates the underlying value systems and moral arguments of the warring parties, arguing that democracy itself is under assault by an emboldened and empowered Far Right.

Daou shows how the digital civil war is waged with words and images that are designed to inflict psychological harm, to injure through verbal violence, to wreak havoc with rhetoric. And he explains that the relentless toxicity of social media - often treated as an aberration - is a feature, not a bug, of digital warfare.

PETER DAOU is an American raised in Beirut, where he survived the Lebanese Civil War to rise to the top of U.S. politics, serving as a digital-media strategist in two presidential campaign war rooms. He has advised major political figures, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and was described by The New York Times as "one of the most prominent political bloggers in the nation."