The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab works with social networks like Facebook to curb the spread of disinformation.
Marta Franco/CNET
This story is part of Elections 2020, CNET's coverage of the run-up to voting in November.
Graham Brookie's phone buzzed, jolting him from a deep sleep. It was too early for his morning alarm, and his apartment was pitch black. He fumbled out of bed and silenced his phone as it buzzed over and over. The screen was an infinite scroll of menacing messages, offensive memes and conspiracy-laden tweets. Most people would be shocked at the torrent of vitriolic social media content, but Brookie just rolled his eyes. He was all too familiar with this type of attack and knew exactly what was coming next.
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The notifications lighting up Brookie's phone were part of a Russian disinformation campaign that his employer, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, was monitoring in collaboration with Facebook and the US State Department. To the layperson, the posts are designed to look authentic and are sent from real-looking accounts with convincing user avatars and bios. However, the accounts are controlled by an army of trolls and bots engaged in influence operations, publishing "fake news" and spreading
In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, technology firms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been forced to reckon with the realities of bad actors manipulating social media for nefarious purposes. Famously, the firm that the virus can be cured by drinking bleach or snorting cocaine.
"Social media platforms are the battlegrounds of an information war that is being waged all day, every day online," says Brookie. "Basic facts are under attack." The goal is to snatch and divert attention toward divisive topics. Because it's inexpensive and relatively easy to exploit social media, the bad actors are diverse and the .
For example, though used Facebook data to aid Republican candidate Donald Trump in 2016, the following year Democratic strategists allegedly used a to help Doug Jones in an Alabama special election for Senate (apparently ).
To fight the spread of harmful false information, many social media firms have adjusted their content policies. Twitter recently rolled out features to help users
Analysis of Russian protests by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab found that Moscow downplayed the size.
Atlantic Council
In response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in 2018 Facebook partnered with , including Brookie's employer, the Atlantic Council. Based in Washington, DC, the Atlantic Council is a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank founded in 1961 with a mission to strengthen diplomatic and economic cooperation between North America and Europe. The Atlantic Council hosts attended by global leaders, publishes and encourages on contentious issues like . The group operates independently but from over 25 governments. Its benefactors include the US State Department, NGOs and private firms.
Like most think tanks, the Atlantic Council is not without controversy and is occasionally dogged by that nation-states and corporations try to purchase influence in the organization through . A 2014 report about the , a proposed trade partnership between the EU and the United States, produced in collaboration with FedEx, drew criticism because the company was concurrently to reduce trade tariffs.
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Facebook's relationship with UK data firm Cambridge Analytica pushed the company to partner with the Atlantic Council.
Getty Images
Concerned about the growing influence of social media, Brookie, a former National Security Council advisor under President Barack Obama, founded the Digital Forensic Research Lab in 2016. It rapidly grew to become one of the Atlantic Council's largest groups. Its mission, he says, is to promote objective fact as a foundation of government. "Our team members work to protect democratic institutions and norms from those who would undermine them online and to identify, expose and explain disinformation when and where it occurs," he explains. Since its launch, the DFRL has published over 800 case studies, most of which are available on , on events like the . Earlier this year, CNET News and the DFLR collaborated on an investigation into .
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A link alleging that cocaine kills the coronavirus was viewed thousands of times on Facebook.
Screenshot by CBS
Though "fake news," misinformation and disinformation are often used interchangeably, for the DFRL team language matters. The phrase "fake news" has been nearly unavoidable since the 2016 election, but the team avoids using the term because it's been co-opted by "authoritarians across the globe to curb dissent and put real journalists at risk," says Brookie.
As a result, the DFRL prioritizes transparency in its research and often tries to use "" data in its reports. Open data is information that's available to the public -- Street View or publicly posted images of military installations, for example -- that might provide useful clues for research analysts.
"Bad actors are almost always opaque. We're the opposite. Our work should be open to scrutiny. The whole point of open-source research is just that, to make our work, including our sources, our method and our conclusions, open and transparent," Brookie says.
The DFRL is perhaps best-known for its 2015 report , which used , including selfies taken by Russian troops and posted on social media, to prove that Russia was occupying eastern Ukraine, an allegation President Vladimir Putin at the time.
The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab has identified thousands of instances of disinformation on most major social media platforms.
Breaking Aleppo that documented human rights abuses, including war crimes, during the Assad regime's assault on the Syrian city."Much of this initial open-source research was focused on closed information environments, in which we had to put pieces together to have a broader assessment and in which the open-source community is still thinking through evidentiary standards for using online material in things like investigations into war crimes," Brookie explains.
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Atlantic Council's Graham Brookie
Misinformation, explains Brookie, is the spread of false information without intent: "It is more passive and more pervasive," like a joke or a rumor. Disinformation is the dissemination of false information with intent to achieve a political, social or financial goal.
Analysts on the DFRL team carefully log patterns and instances of disinformation in spreadsheets, then provide the data to companies like Facebook, which combine the open data with the firm's private logs and by removing fake profiles, pages and groups.
These coordinated disinformation campaigns thrive when they go unnoticed and unchecked. To help the public better understand the pervasive nature of these campaigns, the DFRL published hundreds of examples of disinformation on GitHub and worked with Google's Jigsaw to create a data visualization called Dichotomies of Disinformation. The interactive map allows users to drill down and view specific targets and platforms, as well as download spreadsheets of source material.
Political unrest in Bolivia was stoked by coordinated inauthentic activity, bots and memes that denied a political coup occurred, according to researchers at the Digital Forensic Research Lab.
World Economic Forum and the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, believe there will always be bad actors who exploit social networks to propagate disinformation. But there's a consensus that the best way to curb its influence is through education and public awareness. Brookie believes that by collaborating with companies like Facebook and Jigsaw, the DFRL has been able to scale with the problem in a sustainable way."Disinformation is a collective challenge, and it requires a collective response that includes government, media, social media platforms and -- most importantly -- every one of us," Brookie says. "The work of identifying, exposing and explaining disinformation is collaborative and often iterative. And we truly believe that more people doing this work is better than less people. That's why we are working with our team to grow the international community of [our investigators] committed to the fight for facts."
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