[Camille François] When you see a campaign that is live, that's active,
where people are being deceived,
where people are being targeted,
then we try to act as quickly as possible.
It could be understanding the dynamics
of how misinformation propagates
in important health conversations,
like the conversations we're having around coronavirus.
It could also be understanding conspiracy theories
and how they go from the fringes of the internet
to becoming more mainstream.
And of course sometimes, it could be
understanding how some foreign nations
can create fake accounts to target elections
and democracies.
We call ourselves the Cartographers of the Internet.
We make maps to detect attempts
to manipulate online conversations.
It matters to expose this type of activity
and it matters to ensure that this type of activity
can be stopped before creating large scale chaos.
(upbeat music)
My name is Camille François,
I am the Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika
and an affiliate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center
for Internet and Society.
There's a very long history of disinformation.
Why people manipulate one another,
why nations manipulate audiences
and it's interesting because before 2016,
it is not really a mainstream preoccupation.
What's interesting of course is
everybody's very focused on Russia,
but there had been a lot of other countries
that had been running similar operations,
and so by the time we catch up,
people realize that Iran had been running fake accounts
targeting the US since way before Russia.
China is also using these techniques
to influence for instance,
what's happening during the protests in Hong Kong.
And it's not just foreign governments,
We for instance,
saw a PR firm based in India
who was doing a disinformation campaign
focused on soccer and on the World Cup
to defend Qatar's reputation.
When we detect new disinformation campaigns
and expose them,
they tend to look very different.
We see a lot of diversity in these campaigns.
It's an entire ecosystem with a lot of different actors
who are kind of pursuing their own strategies
with their own favorite tactics.
We've seen AI profile pictures
used in a few disinformation campaigns.
It's actually getting increasingly frequent.
So you use a technology which is called GAN,
Generative Adversarial Networks,
and basically you create a picture from someone
that never existed.
The other thing of course that is concerning
is synthetic text.
And so those are technologies like GBT-2, GBT-3
and it's basically able to generate articles
that nobody ever wrote, but it's believable text.
A lot of the campaigns that we detect
is also not very technology savvy.
Sometimes it's simply a bunch of freelancers
that are paid to manually operate a lot of fake accounts.
They're a few different pieces of technology
that we employ in our every day work.
The first one is the mapping technology.
And this takes a complex conversation,
and really just gives you a map
of who are the accounts,
who are participating in this conversation,
how are they structured between themselves
and how are they structured in relationship between one another.
Sometimes we map a conversation
and we see a normal set of communities engaging
with one another and in the middle,
very dense tight set of accounts
that were all created on the same day
and that is forming a tight little ball
and then we investigate and it appears to be a botnet.
Now we also have to understand what's a normal pattern
and what's a suspicious pattern.
It's really important when we do that,
that we start with recognizing
that normal grassroots, spontaneous conversations
can be very bizarre.
You can't just take how many messages does
this account send a day
and just decide that if it sends too many messages
it's suspicious and it can be a troll.
And so when we look at, what is intense political activity,
versus, what is the type of activity
that tries to mimic that,
a troll farm that is trying
to pretend like it's a grassroots protest,
but it's really paid accounts with four freelancers
and 300 accounts,
we look at all the different ways in which the troll farm
will have a hard time replicating the diversity
that makes the organic conversation -
the temporal diversity,
the semantic diversity and the network diversity.
So these are sort of the scientific principles
on which we disambiguate normal political conversation
from attempts to manipulate political conversations.
I'm always cautiously optimistic
and I think I have good reasons for this optimism.
I really still believe that new technology actually
can make the world a better place,
can help democratic societies,
can help democratic uprisings around the world.
I think that I was attracted to understanding
what could make this dream go wrong
and ensuring that I could confront
the darkest corners of the internet
so that we could preserve the potential
of internet for democracy.
(melodious music)