The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and Alliance for Securing Democracy’s (ASD) new report sheds light on the tactics used to manipulate information online through the case study of a pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Twitter network targeting both Chinese and English-language audiences online.
"Political Monopoly: How Europe’s New Authoritarians Stifle Democracy and Get Away With it" is a new analysis of how Europe’s new authoritarians in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere consolidate power while maintaining a democratic facade. Comparing them to economic monopolies, it proposes a framework of “political anti-trust” to restore competitive politics.
This briefing paper provides an overview of the key trends in activity around the QAnon conspiracy theory from 2017 to 2020. Crucially it points to major spikes in QAnon activity in March 2020, suggesting both an increase in activity to promote the conspiracy theory and the spread of this conspiracy to new audiences.
Institut Montaigne and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue decided to look at the circulation of different narratives and pieces of disinformation in French discussion groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This new investigation from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) delves into the inner workings of a pro-ISIS account network on Facebook, providing a case study of the resilient network dynamics, technological loopholes, and cross-platform activity that allowed a web of accounts to survive and flourish for over three months on a platform which purports to be a hostile environment for terrorist actors.
Following the murder of George Floyd and the protests it has catalysed across the globe, ISD examined Facebook’s ad library for signs of policy violations, in particular content that “exploits crises or controversial political or social issues for commercial purposes”
This report provides a set of recommendations, which seek to inform the continuing efforts to counter disinformation and online harms at the EU level through the upcoming Digital Services Act and European Democracy Action Plan in 2020 and beyond.
This report details the findings of ISD’s research on disinformation activities during the European Parliamentary Elections in 2019. It lays out the tactics and actors involved in covert disinformation campaigns, the targets of their activities, and what that might mean for the future of disinformation around elections and beyond.
For this research, ISD’s digital analysis unit have been monitoring a network of 208 channels distributing white supremacist content on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram. In an analysis of over a million posts, this briefing unpacks how the platform is being used to glorify terrorism, call for violence, spread extremist ideological material and demonise minority groups.
This report presents the findings of an extensive investigation into a network of domains connected to NaturalNews, a US-based commercial enterprise and website promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation. This investigation shines a light on the endurance of coordinated disinformation networks on and off social media platforms, as well as the challenges for and remaining limitations of technological companies’ responses to such threats.
