Thread by @peterwsinger

This tweet illustrates an ongoing problem in how the public finds out (or not) about foreign threats to our election.
A thread:

https://twitter.com/SenBlumenthal/status/1290801643777392640

Social media has become not just an essential communication space, but also a new kind of conflict space (eg #likewar). And, despite increased attention, organized disinformation campaigns have proliferated, targeting everything from elections to corporations to public health

Indeed, in the last several months, the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest in America saw a surge in foreign and domestic extremist disinformation campaigns that sought to spread false information, foment distrust, and destabilize the U.S.

Their efforts continue to be successful and come with a real cost in everything from national to health security. As the chairs of the bipartisan US @CyberSolarium Commission summed, the battle against disinformation is now of "truly life or death importance."

Data also suggests three added challenges have recently emerged: 1) the entry of significant Chinese CCP activities into this space, learning from the successes of actors like Russia

2) increasing cohesion among different foreign threat actors, amplifying each other and 3) tactical shifts in this foreign activity reflecting lessons learned, including increasing alignment with and amplification of domestic disinformation and extremism campaigns.

These campaigns will not just hit the run up to the election, but will also likely strike at crucial period afterward, targeting confidence in election results, as well as seeking to scuttle any transition.

Through both direct and indirect effect, there is a strong potential that they will also stoke violence.

At very least you should view it through lens of stochastic terrorism.

Unfortunately, our response still has major gaps, years into this. The illumination of these campaigns, all the more so in the public setting, is far behind their scale.

The public reporting and research on the problem tends to be:
•reporting of social media firms’ limited, intermittent efforts to eject only a subset of the campaigns from their networks. That effort is then is only reported after the fact.

•broad, non-specific assessments from the intelligence community, often, like with Blumenthal here, only made known through veiled leaks,

•tracking by non-profits, valiantly trying to fill the gap, but tend to be limited in scale, such as drawn from following a limited number of already identified threat accounts

•academic studies, that are larger in scale, refined in technique, but usually delivered in formats that are not user-friendly, limited in their visibility and utility beyond the academy, and here again mostly delivering well data after the fact

•few connecting detection to impact, in the way that digital marketing on the commercial side evaluates
(IE, if the disinformation tree falls in the forest, does no one hear it, or does it fall on a voter and kill our democracy? That matters)

•Nor are they broken down to evaluate at not just overall internet, but state and local level, which will be key battlegrounds in election defense

Thus, it is more urgent than ever to establish a public mechanism to expose and visualize foreign and extremist attempts to undermine our political process through disinformation and to do it in a manner designed to maximize awareness and impact.

It is technically possible to do so.

But will we instead continue to admire the problem (and just fund more white papers and panel discussions)?

Ask me in about 6 weeks on how a funding effort goes...