I was an intelligence analyst before I left government. After the intelligence failures that led to Iraq, the IC restructured its analytic tradecraft to emphasize standard evidentiary requirements, confidence language, peer review and alternative analysis 1/
This was especially important because it let the community adapt into new areas of study - without a systemic way to identify bias and groupthink, any analytic community is bound to make bad conclusions when faced with new data 2/
As the disinfo research space grows, we need to think about ways to build industry-wide analytic standards before our Iraq War moment hits. 3/
We've already seen nation state proxies leverage the perception of widespread infoOps to try to cast doubt on an election and label opponents as Russian trolls (kudos to @josh_emerson for the writeup on this) medium.com/@josh_emerson/…
And more here from @DFRLab medium.com/dfrlab/trolltr…
Our community isn't just responsible for finding and disrupting these operations - we're also the expert voices that are responsible for tamping down speculation and drawing the lines that will govern this space going forward.
