On June 14, the European Commission released a report assessing the efficacy of the Action Plan against Disinformation and Elections Package in the context of the 2019 European Parliamentary elections. The report underscores Europe’s shifting postur [...]
On Thursday, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence will host a panel of experts to discuss the national security challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI), manipulated media, and “deepfake” technology. The committee will examin [...]
Today, representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google, as well as several government officials, will testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. The hearing will serve as an opportunity for congressional leaders to gauge the gove [...]
ASD Social Media Analyst Bret Schafer published an essay in the National Urban League’s State of Black America 2019 report that looks at how the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) manipulated the issue of race and hijacked onli [...]
CNN interviews ASD's Social Media Analyst Brett Schafer on Maffick Media. Three online video channels designed to appeal to millennials have collected tens of millions of views on Facebook since September. But the pages pushing the videos do [...]
Summary The Russian government’s active measures campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election was a watershed moment in the study of modern information operations. Revelations that the Kremlin had purchased divisive political ads on social [...]
ASD's Social Media Analyst and Communications Officer Bret Schafer spoke with Denise Clifton of Mother Jones about lessons learned from a year of monitoring Russian influence operations on social media. Every day, the roughly 600 Kremlin-linked acc [...]
Government officials and tech titans could be excused for breathing a huge, collective sigh of relief if next week’s midterms come to pass without evidence of widespread foreign manipulation. But if recent U.S. elections are any indication, the thre [...]
ASD's Social Media Analyst and Communications Officer Bret Schafer will lead three workshops exploring the use of technology to combat digital disinformation at the DAI Heidelberg (Germany) Cultural Center. Event details are below: In this turbulen [...]
What is disinformation and what can non-state actors do protect open information and promote the truth? Bret Schafer addresses this concern in Moving Beyond Cyber Wars: A Transatlantic Dialogue, a publication from the American Institute for Contempo [...]
ASD Social Media Analyst Bret Schafer joins Ben Adler of California Public Radio to discuss California's newly created Office of Election Cybersecurity. California election officials are launching a new effort to fight the kind of disinform [...]
ASD's Social Media Analyst Bret Schafer joined VOA's Encounter hosted by Carol Castiel. Mark Simakovsky, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center and Bret Schafer, Social Media Analyst at the “Alliance for Securing Democracy” a [...]
Following the Trump-Putin summit, NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks to Bret Schafer, a social media analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, about which hashtags and links are trending among Russia-linked Twitter accounts. The Russian campaign [...]
As the United States, Britain, and France launched targeted airstrikes against suspected chemical weapons sites in Syria on April 13, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis predicted that there would be “a significant disinformation campaign over th [...]
Want to combat disinformation? Borrow a page from the anti-money laundering handbook. Russia’s ability to successfully conduct hybrid warfare is predicated on the creation of a fog of ambiguity between the Kremlin’s actions and the Kremlin itself. [...]
WASHINGTON — Earlier this week, representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary to answer questions about the use of their platforms in the dissemination of Russian disinformation before [...]
The objective of Kremlin influence operations, part of a larger set of tactics and strategies known as active measures, is to make the target population more amenable to Kremlin wants and desires. They achieve this either by gaining a sympathetic he [...]