BY ELIAS GROLL
To the casual observer, it’s non similar a shot evident how Kris Shaffer’s preparation equally a musicologist prepared him for his project equally an online detective. Shaffer, an analyst alongside the society New Knowledge, tracks disinformation campaigns for a living—the variety that Russian Federation waged against the United States during the 2016 presidential election. His championship is a mouthful: senior computational disinformation analyst. But earlier he took the job, Shaffer was a musicologist who wrote his dissertation on a Hungarian avant-garde composer, Gyorgy Ligeti, whose claims almost his music—not dissimilar the Kremlin’s propaganda—contained about “mistruths together with half-truths,” he said.
Ligeti had composed a serial of plant that drew heavily on the giants of Western classical music—Beethoven together with Mozart, amid others—all the piece insisting that his music remained exclusively new, exclusively avant-garde.
Shaffer encoded Ligeti’s music equally a text file together with and hence analyzed it using natural linguistic communication processing, a subfield of artificial intelligence. He was able to demonstrate that Ligeti’s assertion of originality was “an easily falsifiable claim.”
These days, Shaffer is ane of a growing expose of students of disinformation who are using similar tools of information scientific discipline together with artificial intelligence to bear witness how online propaganda campaigns work.
By working alongside massive datasets of tweets, Facebook posts, together with online articles, he is able to map links betwixt accounts, similarities inwards the messages they post, together with shared estimator infrastructure. The information allows him to position networks of accounts that seem to hold out acting together to spread messages online.
“It sounds similar a big shift from computational musicology to computational disinformation, but I’m in conclusion coming amount circle,” Shaffer said inwards an interview. “As alongside musicology, when nosotros conduct maintain something to scale at that spot are novel questions that nosotros tin ask.”
This method of analysis is inwards its infancy, remains a fairly blunt instrument, together with notwithstanding requires human intervention. It sometimes mistakes existent people who postal service anti-imperialist arguments almost United States unusual policy for Kremlin trolls, for example.
But Russian efforts to influence United States together with global politics is at the nub of this growing dependent of computational disinformation analysis.
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