Dispatch from the Alliance for Securing Democracy Our Take:Updates to the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Authoritarian Interference Tracker highlight Russian state-sponsored media outlets’ efforts to discredit adversaries and to manipulate social media using inauthentic accounts. News and Commentary: Federal, state officials ramp up efforts to secure 2020 elections: U.S. officials from the Department of Justice […]Read More

Former Fox News reporter named to lead counter-propaganda efforts at State By Kylie Atwood, Michelle Kosinski, and Jennifer Hansler, CNN, February 7th, 2019 The State Department on Thursday announced that a former Fox News reporter would lead its agency in charge of efforts to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation. Lea Gabrielle will become the special […]Read More

Trends in the Diffusion of Misinformation on Social Media Three researchers, Allcott, Hunt & Gentzkow, Matthew & Yu, Chuan just published this article. The authors took a look at 569 sites previously identified as sources of fake news from January 2015 to July 2018.  They measured the volume of Facebook engagements and Twitter shares for […]Read More

Case Studies of Malicious Social Media Use BBC Monitoring tracks thousands of international media outlets, including hard-to-reach broadcast sources, to report news from and about the world’s media and social media. NATO’s Center for Excellence for Strategic Communication highlights the work of BBC Monitoring (BBCM) in a recently released report. Set up at the outbreak […]Read More

Active Measures #23 – A Newsletter of Political Warfare, Influence, and Information Campaigns Here are the top stories seen this week: Say it with Statues:  Brick-and-Mortar Revisionism in Orban’s Hungary | Vivian S. Walker | War on the Rocks ‘Digital Blackface’: Pro-Trump Trolls Are Impersonating Black People on Twitter | Kelly Weill | Daily Beast […]Read More

CNO Wants More Cyber, IW in Navy’s Wargames Paul McLeary, February 6th, 2019, Breaking Defense The Navy needs to increase both the number and complexity of its wargames, the service’s top admiral said Wednesday, citing rapid advances being made by competitors in cyber and information warfare tactics that will muddy and confuse future battlefields. While […]Read More

Countering the Malicious Use of Social Media NATO’s Center for Excellence for Strategic Communication Read the Report here Around the turn of the decade, when the popularity of social media sites was really beginning to take off, few people noticed a secretly burgeoning trend — some users were artificially inflating the number of followers they […]Read More

Fake news: How Lithuania’s ‘elves’ take on Russian trolls Michael Peel, Financial Times, February 4th, 2019 The article is linked above. Several highlights: – Lithuania’s defence ministry monitors how content is being shared via social media – I believe in the 21st century we have to be ready not only to fight in kinetic wars, […]Read More

Weekly round-up of cognitive security-related articles from the New York Times. Foreign Efforts to Influence 2018 U.S. Elections on Twitter ‘Limited’: Company Reuters in the New York Times, January 31st, 2019 Twitter Inc took down nearly 6,000 tweets during last November’s U.S. congressional elections, most of which were attempting to suppress the vote through intimidation or sharing […]Read More

Weekly round-up of cognitive security-related articles from the Washington Post. Twitter removed some accounts originating in Iran, Russia and Venezuela that targeted U.S. midterm election Tony Romm, Washington Post, January 31st, 2019 Twitter revealed Thursday that it had removed thousands of malicious accounts thought to have originated in Iran, Russia and Venezuela for spreading disinformation online, including […]Read More