Cognitive Warfare as a Strategic Dilemma: A Game-Theoretic Model of Censorship and Distrust

Curator note

Cognitive warfare is an area of increased scrutiny and concern worldwide. This paperargues that States that are increasingly employing censorship under the guise ofcombating "misinformation" may inadvertently replicate the cognitive warfare tacticsthey seek to defeat, to their own detriment. An iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma frameworkis proposed here to model such self-defeating strategies, where fear and anger drive societies toward distrust of their own government as well as an irrational acceptance ofnon-aligned information and propaganda. We formalize the role of the discount factor(δ) in determining whether states prioritize short-term control or long-term trust andanalyze how censorship, in practice, fuels conspiracy theories, exempliƱed by theCOVID-19 suppression of lab-leak hypotheses, later suggested by evidence. The modeldemonstrates that pluralistic discourse, not restrictive measures, is the dominantstrategy for increasing δ and, ultimately, democratic resilience