Computational Propaganda

I’m finding the Factual Democracy project to be really, really interesting. I’ve posted about it here and here. Today, I listed to a recording of the first conference call, on “Bots and Computational Propaganda.” As Jonathan Morgan, CEO of New Knowledge AI, has pointed out, “I think that’s there a sense on the left that this is a right/left issue, that this is somehow about one political candidate above another. … We now know that Kremlin-backed organizations were specifically inciting anti-immigrant sentiment [which] speaks to the fact that this is more about destabilizing our democracy and pitting us against each other, to limit our participation on the world stage. From a strategic position, this is almost similar to the kinds of activities that terrorist organizations might engage in.” And yet, as the panelists on the call pointed out, we don’t have a policy framework or even a policy department yet to deal with these kinds of national security threats.