Truth Decay, the diminishing role of facts in American public life, isn't a problem that any one person can fix. But there are simple steps that individuals can take to help counter it.
Extremist groups have been trolling the internet for decades, and they have learned to temper their words and disguise their intentions. A new scorecard can help users—or parents, or advertisers, or the social media companies themselves—understand when they might be interacting with extremist content.
The authors of this report explore the use of agent-based modeling as a method for studying the effects of information and communications technologies on the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of social movements over time.
The U.S. government should consider offering a public cash bounty to anyone who can crack the new forms of encryption that are being rolled out to defend against quantum computers. If a bounty helps catch a vulnerability before it's deployed, then the modest cost of the bounty could prevent much higher costs down the line.
This weekly recap focuses on abortion misinformation in a post-Roe world, the threat of deepfakes, environmental hazards in historically redlined communities, and more.
Researchers have identified the software and businesses that provide critical information technology products and services and developed a framework to continue this analysis as technology evolves. They assessed both software risk and business risk.
Various AI technologies are ripe for use in disinformation campaigns. Deepfake videos represent an obvious threat, but voice cloning, deepfake images, and generative text also merit concern. And websites now offer access to deepfake services.
This report describes contingency planning for a significant cyber incident, focusing on the importance of planning, the process of developing a plan, and options for operationalizing it. It summarizes a companion how-to guide by the same authors.
Popular portrayals of the Russian disinformation machine imply an organized and well-resourced operation, but evidence suggests that it is neither. Nonetheless, Russian social media activity can be harmful to U.S. interests and is likely to evolve.
This weekly recap focuses on reducing America's unacceptably high rates of gun violence, what would happen if China “quarantines” Taiwan, and Russia's “firehose of falsehood.”
RAND artists-in-residence Juan Delcan and Valentina Izaguirre, known as V+J, created a powerful animated video to show how Russian propaganda spreads—and how it can influence its audience by entertaining, confusing, and overwhelming them.
This weekly recap focuses on the internet's role in stoking extremism and hate, how Russia has failed its military personnel, a research roadmap to help prevent police killings in the United States, and more.
How can technology help ease the transition from jails or prisons back into the community—and ensure better outcomes for individuals who have been incarcerated?
Extremist content can be found in all corners of the internet. How do the characteristics of online spaces contribute to individual radicalization? And how may the internet have helped foster conditions that contributed to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol?
This weekly recap focuses on Russia's use of mercenaries, understanding how extremist movements operate online, trends in the commercial space market, and more.
Extremist groups use internet-based tools for financing, networking and coordination, recruitment and radicalization, inter- and intra-group knowledge transfer, and mobilization to action. How do internet users engage with these efforts? And can the internet be leveraged to counter extremism?
Social media can be collected instantly, can tap into a massive pool of observers, and is remotely accessible. Researchers developed a new approach for analyzing social media data to derive insights about chemical incidents. They used chemical weapons employment in Syria as a test case.
Russia has taken increasingly aggressive actions to restrict access of information about the war in Ukraine. Ensuring that the Russian people know the truth about what their government is doing in Ukraine could bring this war to an end soon rather than later.
Terrorists continue to use the Internet to plan, train, recruit, and execute terrorist attacks. This book chapter examines how terrorist Internet use has changed over time and new social media platforms make terrorism investigations harder to do.
RAND/Google collaboration to improve machine learning models to detect and understand the rhetorical functions of conspiracy theories over social media.
