Thread by @ngleicher

1/ This is excellent and much-needed analysis. A 🧵

https://twitter.com/lageneralista/status/1414971926251024384

2/ At FB we look at factors like the length of an op and how many followers it has, but these have their limits -- especially as tactics evolve. An op can be long-lived but unsuccessful, and can reach only a few significant people and still generate significant reaction.

3/ Defining the goal of an IO campaign is the first (and sometimes hardest) step -- hard to measure how well they did if you don't understand their goal.

4/ Good that the report distinguishes between "long-term" & "short-term" ops. I call these "fast-twitch" & "slow-twitch": ops designed to appear shortly before a civic event with fast, significant impact v ops that build for months/years to broadly shift societal perspectives.

5/ A few callouts from the research: (1) We have a 🍩problem. Many CIB campaigns run for months before being shut down, but research focuses only on years-long & days-long campaigns. So there's a gap right where many of the ops we see in the wild operate.

/6 (2) IO is 🌎🌍🌏. Most research focuses on foreign interference from Russia, but they are only one of many gov'ts & non-gov'ts that use IO. Tactics vary across actors and goals almost certainly do as well. Tackling a global, diverse problem space requires global understanding.

/7 (3) Of the research into IO on social media, much "focused solely on FB & Twitter." IO is increasingly multi-platform, & its impact relies on the interplay between mass and social media. Studying ops across multiple platforms & mass media is critical to measuring impact.

8/ (4) While time horizon is important, it's key to also distinguish between ops looking to affect a specific outcome (e.g., an election) v those looking to degrade trust over time. These are very different goals, and so measuring progress toward them will look very different.

9/ It's great to see this draft paper -- it is well done and much needed! Thank you to @lageneralista and @IOpartnership for enabling this, and to @ESoConflict @lacourchesne, Isra Thange, & Jacob N. Shapiro for this excellent work!