Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Influence operations are a complex threat, and the community combating them—academics, social platforms, think tanks, governments—is broad. The goal of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations (PCIO) is to foster evidence-based policymaking to counter threats in the information environment. Key roadblocks as found in our work include the lack of: transparency reporting to inform what data is available for research purposes; rules guiding how data can be shared with researchers and for what purposes; and an international mechanism for fostering research collaboration at-scale.
Major social media and technology companies continue to make algorithmic, user interface, and policy changes to their products to address information integrity challenges on their platforms.
Experts say they need established best practices in order to better counter influence operations. But first they need to agree on those practices.
For nearly seventy years, CERN has been a center of gravity for physics and a model for how to support large-scale research collaboration across numerous different countries. Given the challenges facing democracy today related to the information environment, a similar level of effort is required for research on the information environment.
The field of influence operations investigations is growing rapidly, and researchers need a better grasp of best practices and standards. Here, experienced researchers offer insights ranging from methods to data collection to team development.
Join Carnegie’s Gavin Wilde in a conversation with Dr. Bilyana Lilly to discuss her new book, “Russian Information Warfare: Assault on Democracies in the Cyber Wild West,” examining the role of cyber operations and information warfare in Russia’s geopolitical aspirations.
The range of practical ideas offered by respondents suggests a broad interest in tackling these implementation challenges. But respondents’ ideas often lacked detail and sometimes conflicted with each other, indicating that community dialogue about best practices remains at an early stage.