Resources TE Home About Remarks Technology Solutions Programs Defeat Disinfo Resources Events Contact Us HomeTechnology Engagement Division...Resources – Technology Engagement Division hide Resources A number of significant counter-disinfo resources are available online. The following resources offer commercial, non-profit, think tank, and academic technology solutions, dashboards, and research to consider. We do not advocate for any of these groups and welcome suggestions for additional resources. WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION The Global Engagement Center’s TE commissioned the study Weapons of Mass Distraction: Foreign State-Sponsored Disinformation in the Digital Age This study supports the development of TE’s Tech Testbed by describing human vulnerabilities to disinformation, identifying corollary technological solutions, and an overview of several countries notable for such operations, including Russia and China. Adtac (Center for Advanced Tactics to Counter Disinformation) Adtac (Center for Advanced Tactics to Counter Disinformation) is an international counter-disinformation innovation lab based in the Netherlands. It is a project of DROG, an innovation platform that offers public-private solutions to counter online harms like disinformation. Adtac conducts weekly multi-stakeholder “Black Boxing” sessions with government representatives, tech company policy experts, forensic journalists, security experts, data analysts, academics, and others to map disinformation techniques. This framework is used to chart the features of disinformation campaigns and is updated when new disinformation tactics, techniques, and procedures are identified. A key benefit of the weekly Black Boxing sessions is that patterns emerge when analyzing multiple campaigns by the same actor. Adtac works to ensure that cases selected for Black Boxing sessions represent the most pressing disinformation campaigns as well as regional cases in which disinformation is employed. Adtac is also working in partnership with the CogSec Collaborative to ensure that EU, North American, and other analysts are using the same methodologies to analyze campaigns so that results are mutually intelligible. Read the Disinfo Cloud blog post . The Project on Computational Propaganda This effort from the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute offers “an online resource guide for civil society groups looking to better deal with the problem of disinformation,” noting “the rise of digital technologies and social media platforms have brought new dimensions” to the practice of creating a spreading propaganda. Alliance for Security Democracy The Alliance for Security Democracy is a bipartisan initiative housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. It develops comprehensive strategies to deter, defend against, and raise the costs on authoritarian efforts to undermine and interfere in democratic institutions. The Alliance brings together experts on disinformation, malign finance, emerging technologies, elections integrity, economic coercion, and cybersecurity, as well as regional experts, to collaborate across traditional stovepipes and develop cross-cutting frameworks. Digital Forensic Research Lab The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab’s mission is “to identify, expose, and explain disinformation where and when it occurs using open source research; to promote objective truth as a foundation of government for and by people; to protect democratic institutions and norms from those who would seek to undermine them in the digital engagement space.” Foreign Influence Elections 2020 The Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Foreign Influence Elections 2020 “conduct[s] a persistent and consistent review of state-sponsored media outlets to understand their foreign influence goals and anticipate their interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.” EU DisinfoLab EU Disinfo Lab is an “independent NGO focused on researching and tackling sophisticated disinformation campaigns targeting the EU, its member states, core institutions, and core values.” Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency An agency of the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “is responsible for protecting the [United States’] critical infrastructure from physical and cyber threats,” including election security. U.S. Agency for Global Media The U.S. Agency for Global Media is an independent federal agency overseeing public service media networks that provide unbiased news and information in countries where the press is restricted. CredCatalog The Credibility Coalition’s CredCatalog compiles “projects and initiatives that aim to improve information quality.” It collects “information on fact-checking groups, technology tools, academic research institutions” and more. Users can explore entries by geography, language, funders, and solutions categories. Fighting Disinformation Online RAND’s Fighting Disinformation Online database identifies and characterizes “the universe of online tools developed by nonprofits and civil society organizations to target online disinformation.” The database is intended “to help information consumers, researchers, and journalists navigate today’s challenging information environment.” MediaWell The Social Science Research Council’s MediaWell system is academically focused and “curates research and news on digital disinformation and misinformation.” MediaWell’s research reviews “present the latest scholarship from the social sciences, and we aggregate news content and events from around the web.” Misinformation Review The Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review is a new format of peer-reviewed, scholarly publication. Content is produced and “fast-reviewed” by misinformation scientists and scholars, released under open access licensing, and geared towards emphasizing real-world implications. All content is targeted towards a specialized audience of researchers, journalists, fact-checkers, educators, policy makers, and other practitioners working in the information, media, and platform landscape. The Trust Project “The Trust Project is an international consortium of news organizations building standards of transparency and working with technology platforms to affirm and amplify journalism’s commitment to transparency, accuracy, inclusion, and fairness so that the public can make informed choices … Search engines and social media platform are participating as external partners.” The materials produced by The Trust Project’s members’ collaboration are available to all legitimate news companies that agree to abide by the group’s commitments and Trust Protocol. Cat Park In the noir cityscape of Cat Park, players take on the role of a disinformation agent recruited into a shadowy social media pressure campaign. They train with a group of eccentric activists with different media manipulation skillsets – creating sensational headlines, memes, and synthetic media – but a common cause: to bring down an outrageous public works project, a park for cats! Cat Park is based on “active inoculation” theory, pioneered by the University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab. Much as vaccinations work by exposing subjects to an innocuous strain of a virus in order to trigger an immune response, empirical studies indicate that the controlled experience of disinformation through a game can build cognitive resistance to disinformation in the real world. This concept is also known as “prebunking.” Rather than simply waiting for lies to spread and then debunking them with a fact-check, the goal of Cat Park is to proactively educate about common disinformation techniques so that players are better prepared to spot fake news no matter what form it takes. Cat Park is a free-to-play, web browser-based game, that plays equally well on either a computer or smart phone. Released in October 2022, the game is currently playable in English, French, Dutch, or Russian. Harmony Square In Harmony Square, players take on the role of Chief Disinformation Officer, abusing social media to spread disinformation, using trolling, emotional language, rage amplification, conspiracy theories, and polarization to magnify inter-group differences. Players “win” by sowing discord and preventing consensus building. Harmony Square is a mobile-friendly game designed to educate players ages 15-and-up about common disinformation tactics that malign actors use to undermine democratic institutions and societal trust. Harmony Square is playable in 18 languages, including: Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latvian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Tagalog, traditional Chinese, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. In a study conducted by the University of Cambridge and published in the Harvard University Kennedy School Misinformation Review , researchers found that “people who play the game find misinformation significantly less reliable after playing, are significantly more confident in their assessment, and are significantly less likely to report sharing misinformation, supporting Harmony Square’s effectiveness as a tool to inoculate people against online manipulation.”
