On September 27, Chenope CEO Elizabeth Charnock delivered a presentation, “Ambivalent Power of Half-Truth,” on the main stage at the IT Arena 2024 conference in Lviv.
"One needs to differentiate between information, knowledge and wisdom. In the internet era they tend to get mixed up. The more time one spends simply absorbing information, the less time one has to apply wisdom. And then there’s common sense. "
Today’s internet contains vast amounts of information, but sadly only small slivers of knowledge. The rest is a colorful, organic, often raucous, highly dynamic patchwork web of self-promotion, individual streams of consciousness, and rants. But increasingly, there are also groups who hide in the patchwork, working in a coordinated fashion to spin, distort, or suppress.
Chenope makes and sells software components and related services for detecting complex disinformation campaigns. This includes evidence of clandestine coordination, systemic omissions and misquoting, and numerous types of mathematical regularity. In addition, in some instances, we may also license our patents to others to pursue opportunities outside of our areas of strategic interest.
Coordination however is the one objective thing that technology can solve. It has clear, unmistakable mathematical signatures. Furthermore, the very fact of the coordination is by itself problematic, regardless of the message being peddled. Whether it is bots programmed to post content, or human workers who follow prepared scripts and rules, it’s part of an attempted con job.
Before the Internet, we all understood that we needed to take “information” from paid sponsors with a large grain of salt – in other words, that one must always “follow the money.” It was common sense then. It is common sense now. More than that, it is wisdom.
Bots (computer programs of varying degrees of sophistication that post content online with a phony human identity) and trolls (generally low paid or volunteering humans whose behavior follows carefully defined scripts) are expected to be used at an unprecedented level of boldness in the 2024 U.S. federal election.
Why? Because our brains are wired from millennia of evolution to believe things that many, (apparently) unrelated observers tell us are true. Bots in particular are an extraordinarily cost-effective: the incremental cost of each additional bot is essentially zero. Even with limited or no use of humans, a large number of bots can be used to create public impressions about things such as the inevitability of the victory of a particular candidate – or to invent and then validate a “fact.”
Well prior to the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine has been ground zero for the testing of sophisticated Russian disinformation techniques. This is why Chenope has been operating in Kyiv since 2019. Among these techniques are:
For more information, please contact us at: uainfo@chenope.com
During the height of the Islamic State’s activity in France, thousands of “normal” French teenagers and young adults were successfully recruited by a network of highly disciplined and clever recruiters. The recruiters urged their targets to either come to Syria – or else commit terrorist attacks in France. Often, for a time, they were successful.
Chenope collaborated with Dr. Dounia Bouzar to write a position paper on CVE for the benefit of the American IC. (Dr Bouzar’s company at time had the federal French contract to handle deradicalization efforts.) We were invited to present our work at a USASOC Futures Forum. Because Dr. Bouzar’s work was only available in French, we translated some of her work into English where her innovative work based on substantial field experience was greatly appreciated in the CT community. For access to these materials, please contact us at info@chenope.com.
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Lorem ipsum, or lipsum as it is sometimes known, is dummy text used in laying out print, graphic or web designs
Lorem ipsum, or lipsum as it is sometimes known, is dummy text used in laying out print, graphic or web designs
