Program Summary
The U.S. is engaged with its adversaries in an asymmetric, continual, war of weaponized influence narratives. Adversaries exploit misinformation and true information delivered via influence messaging: blogs, tweets, and other online multimedia content. Analysts require effective tools for continual sensemaking of the vast, noisy, adaptive information environment to identify adversary influence campaigns.
Today, geopolitical influence campaign detection and sensemaking is largely manual and ad hoc. Analysts use social listening tools to formulate complex keyword queries; track trending keywords, hashtags, and topics; and read hundreds to thousands of documents to identify influence themes. New or “low and slow” campaigns are hard to detect early as their message volume may be beneath platform “trending” thresholds and pertinent hashtags may be unknown. With current tools, it is difficult to connect messages over time and across multiple platforms to track evolving campaigns and to assess confidence in analytic conclusions in a rigorous manner. Confidence assessment by analysts is ad hoc, manual, subjective, qualitative, and susceptible to analyst cognitive biases (e.g., confirmation bias). Analyst reports often cover static time ranges, and static reports quickly become stale.
With current tools, analysts must manually sift through a high volume of messages to find those with relevant influence agendas then gauge which ones are gaining traction and with whom. Analysts track population response using digital marketing tools for analyzing audience demographics, interests, and personality. These tools lack explanatory and predictive power for deeper issues of geopolitical influence. Audience analysis is often done using static, demographic segmentation based on online and survey data. This lacks the flexibility, resolution, and timeliness needed for dynamic geopolitical influence campaign detection and sensemaking.
The Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking (INCAS) program will develop techniques and tools that enable analysts to detect, characterize, and track geopolitical influence campaigns with quantified confidence.
For more information, see the INCAS Broad Agency Announcement.