Graphika has been featured by news outlets all over the world. Here is a selection of coverage:
June 16, 2020
WIRED
Dubbed Secondary Infektion, the campaign came on the radar of researchers last year. Today, the social media analysis firm Graphika is publishing the first comprehensive review of the group's activity, which seems to have begun all the way back in January 2014.
Read the Full Story HereApril 21, 2020
TechCrunch
In new research led by its cyber intelligence analyst Melanie Smith, the social analytics AI company Graphika compared snapshots of the coronavirus conversation on Twitter in January, February and March, creating a bird’s eye view of misinformation about the virus from its earliest online mentions.
Read the Full Story HereFebruary 9, 2020
The New York Times
Last year, Mr. Nimmo became the head of investigations for the social-media monitoring company Graphika. “He was there well before this was a trendy thing to do,” said Alex Stamos, who is conducting similar disinformation research work at Stanford University and was previously Facebook’s chief security officer. Both Graphika and the Digital Forensic Research Lab have received funding from Facebook.
Read the Full Story HereNovember 13, 2019
TIME
Camille François was one of those brilliant researchers who ultimately helped us uncover a vast assault on our democracy. She and her colleagues at Graphika utilize innovative tools to track and combat online disinformation. Her work for the committee showed how Russia and other adversaries continue to manipulate our social-media feeds and divide us as a nation.
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(Built in NYC, July 16, 2020)
“New model architectures are created almost daily, but often the purported gains of such approaches fail to outweigh the technical debt,” Machine Learning Research Engineer Alex Ruch said. Ruch works at Graphika, which uses AI to map online social landscapes.
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(The Washington Post, June 16, 2020)
Russian operatives used online forgeries, fake blog posts and more than 300 social media platforms to undermine opponents and spin disinformation about perceived enemies throughout the world, including in the United States, according to a new report published Tuesday.
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(WIRED, June 16, 2020)
Dubbed Secondary Infektion, the campaign came on the radar of researchers last year. Today, the social media analysis firm Graphika is publishing the first comprehensive review of the group's activity, which seems to have begun all the way back in January 2014.
Read the Full Story Here
(Daily Beast, June 16, 2020)
Since 2014, a different and more shadowy disinformation crew linked to the Russian government has been spreading forgeries and disinformation across social media. In a report released Tuesday, the social media tracking firm Graphika has uncovered the online trail of Secondary Infektion stretching across half a dozen years, two continents, and thousands of fake articles.
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(Forbes, June 16, 2020)
Some disinformation groups go for low volume, high impact. Others go for the opposite. The latter is the case with Russian-linked operators who, in late 2019, infamously leaked documents on trade discussions between the U.S. and the UK, according to a new report from researchers at Graphika.
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(TechCrunch, April 21, 2020)
In new research led by its cyber intelligence analyst Melanie Smith, the social analytics AI company Graphika compared snapshots of the coronavirus conversation on Twitter in January, February and March, creating a bird’s eye view of misinformation about the virus from its earliest online mentions.
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(The Verge, April 15, 2020)
The International Union of Virtual Media (IUVM) “is a prolific operator” that hosts and creates pro-Iran and pro-Palestinian video reports, news articles, and memes. According to Graphika, this content is linked out over social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In recent weeks, the disinformation operation has pivoted toward blaming the US for creating the coronavirus and critiquing its sanctions against Iran, alleging that they have hurt the nation’s ability to combat the disease.
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(Forbes, April 15, 2020)
On Instagram, Graphika found IUVM created a western persona, @chriistophercarlos3, which appeared to be a personal account, but posted much the same content as appeared on Facebook and other IUVM-linked sources. That included a cartoon depicting Trump as a virus cell and other disinformation tracked on iuvmarchive.com. The Instagram account is no longer accessible.
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(TechCrunch, April 15, 2020)
In previous research on 5G-related conspiracies, social analytics company Graphika found that the majority of the online conversation around 5G focused on its health effects. Accounts sharing those kinds of conspiracies overlapped with accounts pushing anti-vaccine, flat Earth and chemtrail misinformation.
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(Cyberscoop, April 15, 2020)
The Iranian propaganda group known as the International Union of Virtual Media, or IUVM, is behind a series of headlines and animated cartoons reporting, for instance, that COVID-19 is part of “a biological war led by Trump to strike at China’s economy,” according to a report published Wednesday by Graphika.
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(BBC, February 14, 2020)
The Russian network used dozens of fake personas to post pro-Kremlin and anti-Western messages on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news websites. It focused primarily on Ukraine, but some of Russia's neighbouring countries, such as Moldova, the Baltic states and Turkey, were also targeted. A few accounts also focused on Germany and the UK, but "left little trace of online activity", according to Graphika, a social media analytics firm.
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(TechCrunch (Japan), February 14, 2020)
Camille Francois, Chief Innovation Officer for Graphika, said that Russia-based activities used Ghana-based NGOs as a kind of agent, and at least some of the staff involved were involved in the original work. She points out that they are likely to be unaware of its purpose.
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(Cyberscoop, February 12, 2020)
The GRU was behind much of the effort, according to Graphika’s analysis. The intelligence agency authored long articles on blogging platforms which often criticized lawmakers who argued for stronger relationships with the West. Then, after cloaking the identity of the author, they would post the article on Facebook and try to create divisive material.
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(The New York Times, February 9, 2020)
Last year, Mr. Nimmo became the head of investigations for the social-media monitoring company Graphika. “He was there well before this was a trendy thing to do,” said Alex Stamos, who is conducting similar disinformation research work at Stanford University and was previously Facebook’s chief security officer. Both Graphika and the Digital Forensic Research Lab have received funding from Facebook.
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(The New York Times, December 20, 2019)
The Atlantic Council’s lab and another company, Graphika, which also studies disinformation, released a joint report analyzing the Facebook takedown.
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(Politico, December 17, 2019)
“The ‘known Russian operation,’ as Graphika called it, involved doctored visuals and sought to cover its tracks using single-use accounts on discussion forums and other crowdsourced websites, as well as on the news aggregation site Reddit.
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(The Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2019)
Deepfake videos—manipulated using AI to look realistic—are certainly a concern, said Camille François, chief innovation officer at social-media analytics firm Graphika Inc., speaking Tuesday at the WSJ Pro Cybersecurity Executive Forum in New York. But Ms. François said a bigger threat comes from fabricated news articles, websites or other text content created by AI, which she called “read-fakes.
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(Financial Times, December 2, 2019)
Graphika, a company that has analysed the document leak alongside the Washington-based Atlantic Council think-tank, published a report on Monday, seen by the Financial Times, suggesting the incident could point to potential foreign interference in the upcoming UK election.
(SC Magazine, November 14, 2019)
Camille Francois remembers the day she learned that the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was granting her the extraordinary opportunity to research the extent of Russia’s influence operations during 2016 presidential election campaign.
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(The Washington Post, November 13, 2019)
“These operations are surgically precise, targeting influential people and organizations in the veteran community,” Vlad Barash, science director at the research firm Graphika, will tell members of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee at a hearing about online scams impacting veterans, according to prepared testimony.
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(TIME, November 13, 2019)
Camille François was one of those brilliant researchers who ultimately helped us uncover a vast assault on our democracy. She and her colleagues at Graphika utilize innovative tools to track and combat online disinformation. Her work for the committee showed how Russia and other adversaries continue to manipulate our social-media feeds and divide us as a nation.
Read the Full Story Here
(The New York Times, November 10, 2019)
Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media, agreed with the conclusion that much of the activity around the Kentucky vote was domestic and not likely to have been pushed by any foreign power. Graphika said the tweets about electoral fraud appeared to land in what it calls a “Trump core” — a large number of highly interconnected social media accounts, many run by real people, that are typically reactive and loud and can keep a conversation going for days at a time.
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(Nextgov, November 6, 2019)
The witnesses for the Nov. 13 hearing—entitled “Hijacking our Heroes: Exploiting Veterans through Disinformation on Social Media"—will include Facebook’s Head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher, Twitter’s Public Policy Manager Kevin Kane, Graphika’s Science Director Vladimir Barash and Vietnam Veterans of America’s Chief Investigator and Associate Director of Policy and Government Affairs Kristofer Goldsmith.
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(CNN International, October 24, 2019)
Chief Innovation Officer, Camille Francois visits Quest Means Business to discuss Graphika's latest findings as FB reveals efforts by Russia to sway 2020 elections.
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(Reuters, October 24, 2019)
Those efforts included sharing memes and screenshots of other users' social media posts instead of producing original content in English, likely to avoid making language errors typical of non-native speakers, according to a report here by social media analytics firm Graphika. This technique “gave each asset less of a discernible personality and therefore may have reduced the (campaign’s) ability to build audiences,” Graphika said.
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(CNN, October 22, 2019)
Although the accounts posed as Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, many were united in their opposition to the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Graphika, a social media investigations company that Facebook asked to analyze the accounts.
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(The New York Times, October 21, 2019)
One of the campaigns focused more on the 2020 election. In that campaign, 50 accounts linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a Kremlin-backed professional troll farm — targeted candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, according to an analysis from Graphika, a social media research firm. Roughly half of those accounts claimed to be based in swing states.
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(The Guardian, October 21, 2019)
The accounts adopted various political identities, such as pro-Donald Trump, anti-police violence, pro-Bernie Sanders, LGBTQ, feminist, pro-police and pro-Confederate, according to Graphika’s analysis. Most posts were not explicitly related to electoral politics, Graphika said, but were focused on general political commentary for “persona development and branding”
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(The Washington Post, October 21, 2019)
The network appeared still to be in an audience-building phase when it was removed by Facebook: 246,000 accounts followed one or more of the inauthentic Russian accounts, which had collectively made just fewer than 75,000 posts, according to a report from Graphika, a social media analysis firm that examined the operation for Facebook. Only one account, which addressed environmental themes, had more than 20,000 followers.
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(The Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2019)
The Houston Rockets general manager’s account was flooded with comments from pro-Chinese-government accounts that mentioned him more than 16,000 times, according to an analysis by Ben Nimmo, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and head of investigations at Graphika Inc., a social-media analytics firm.
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(Marie Claire, October 7, 2019)
Camille François’s colleagues like to say she’s the most optimistic person looking at the darkest corners of the Internet. François is chief innovation officer at Graphika, a New York–based company that uses artificial intelligence and other technologies to map out social-media interactions.
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(CBS News, October 5, 2019)
Panelists from organizations like RAND, Graphika and the Alliance for Securing Democracy urged lawmakers that Russia's attacks on the democratic process are far greater than a single election, pointing to disinformation campaigns that seek to weaken western institutions as well as target world industries.
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(NPR Politics, October 5, 2019)
"That is real power. It's not about fake news. It's about gaining power in the 21st century, whether it's doing this internally so that your team wins an election or during this on the world stage so that your enemies' alliances come apart at the seams without you having to fire a shot." That's John Kelly, founder and CEO of Graphika, a top social media analysis firm.
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(AXIOS, September 26, 2019)
Researchers at Graphika uncovered an amateurish social media campaign targeting the Hong Kong protests that spanned across hundreds of accounts on several mainstream Western platforms.
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(U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, September 26, 2019)
Camille Francois, Chief Innovation Officer provided Graphika's testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Hearing on Online Imposters and Disinformation.
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(The New York Times, September 26, 2019)
Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media, said the growing use of internet disinformation is concerning for the 2020 United States election. A mix of domestic and foreign groups, operating autonomously or with loose ties to a government, are building from the methods used by Russia in the last presidential election, making it difficult for the platforms to police, he said.
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(The Washington Post, July 26, 2019)
“This is what disinformation will look like in the U.S. in 2020,” said Camille François, chief innovation officer at the New York-based social network analysis company Graphika. Political manipulation, she said, does not need to come from an ill-intentioned enemy state. It can originate with those who have cut their teeth in the competitive worlds of advertising, media and marketing.
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(The Washington Post, July 25, 2019)
“The Iranian operations were a wake-up call to remind us that the Russians were not the only ones doing information operations,” said Camille François, chief innovation officer for Graphika, a network analysis firm based in New York that studies online disinformation.
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(MIT Technology Review, June 25, 2019)
Their innovations are leading the way to smarter AI, better brain treatments, and a safer internet. Camille Francois uses data science to detect disinformation and organized harassment campaigns.
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(Wired, June 12, 2019)
“It is much easier for people to find that kind of information and find it compelling, and more importantly, find a community around it that makes them feel like they belong to a group of people that have figured out the truth,” says John Kelly, CEO of Graphika.
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(Built in NYC, June 7, 2019)
Our rapidly growing team was featured on Built In NYC's Insider Spotlight. Showcasing a day in the life of three unique employees, this in-depth piece gives curious readers and job seekers the chance to explore what it's like to work at Graphika.
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(The New York Times, May 12, 2019)
“RT successfully feeds the conspiracy-oriented ecosystem,” said John Kelly, chief executive of Graphika, a network analytics firm. “This effort is having a real impact. It’s bearing fruit.”
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(Inc., May 1, 2019)
A co-author of a recent report on Russian propaganda tactics for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Kelly has become one of the world's foremost experts on the subject.
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(Rappler, April 29, 2019)
While Facebook conducts its own investigations, they also rely on outside help from the intelligence community, journalists and other technical experts. In the Gabunada case, US-based Graphika was tasked with an independent analysis of the takedown to provide more details and share insights.
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(The Washington Post, April 29, 2019)
In a new opinion essay for the Washington Post, Graphika's CEO, Dr. John Kelly advocates for online authenticity as a foundation for preventing foreign and domestic political manipulation.
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(Gizmodo, April 29, 2019)
Gizmodo spoke extensively with one of that study’s co-authors, Camille Francois, who confirmed Graphika’s work had not examined the follow relationships between journalists of varying political appetites on Twitter. She could not recall any public academic study that had.
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(MSNBC, April 14, 2019)
A Russian troll farm in St Petersburg latched onto wedge issues in America—race, immigration, gun control—and spread disinformation around them online to sow discord in America. The goal was to get Americans off their computers and onto the streets.
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(The Moscow Times, February 27, 2019)
A report, by an Oxford University team working with analytical firm Graphika, said Russian trolls urged African-Americans to boycott the 2016 election or to follow wrong voting procedures, while also encouraging right-wing voters to be more confrontational.
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(The Washington Post, January 18, 2019)
John Kelly of the data-analysis firm Graphika insists that the Russians were sophisticated enough to tailor their messages to key groups — such as African Americans, who were bombarded with social media posts designed to demotivate them from voting.
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(Forbes, January 18, 2019)
According to Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, which prepared a new report, “this strategy is not an invention for politics and foreign intrigue, it is consistent with techniques used in digital marketing.”
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(USA Today, December 19, 2018)
A Russian company with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin used the biggest names in American technology to spread disinformation, poison the electorate and enrage voters.
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(Voice of America, December 18, 2018)
The size and scope of Russia's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election was far more extensive and thorough than previously understood, according to two newly released reports.
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(Axios, December 18, 2018)
In the United States, Russia's social media disinformation campaigns are often seen as an election-tampering issue. There's a good chance we'll spend 2019 talking about propaganda as something we have to prepare for before the 2020 election.
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(The Hill, December 18, 2018)
Russia's online disinformation campaign included messaging that supported 2016 Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, according to a new report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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(Slate, December 18, 2018)
The Senate Intelligence Committee has just released two new reports on Russian disinformation, revealing in unusually rich detail the scope of Russia’s interference not only in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but also in our day-to-day democratic dialogue since.
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(AdWeek, December 18, 2018)
The Russian troll farm responsible for running disinformation campaigns intended to influence the 2016 presidential election reached more people on Instagram than on Facebook, and Russian-government-linked accounts are still spreading disinformation on both of the platforms at even higher rates than before the 2016 presidential election.
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(Axios, December 17, 2018)
Two outside research groups used data obtained from Silicon Valley giants by the Senate Intelligence Committee to paint a sweeping picture of Russia’s online disinformation efforts both before and after the 2016 presidential election in reports released Monday.
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(The New York Times, December 17, 2018)
A report submitted to a Senate committee about Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election says that social media companies made misleading or evasive claims about whether the efforts tried to discourage voting or targeted African-Americans on their platforms.
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(MotherJones, December 17, 2018)
Russian internet trolls helped expand the reach of conservative media outlets as part of a Kremlin campaign to influence US politics and sow social discord, according to a new report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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(The New York Times, December 17, 2018)
The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of activity on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its posts on Facebook
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(Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2018)
Two studies released by the Senate Intelligence Committee provide shocking specifics about the scope and sophistication of the effort by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian business linked to the Kremlin, to spread manipulative content online.
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(ARS Technica, December 17, 2018)
A report prepared for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) concludes that the activities of Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) leading up to and following the 2016 US presidential election were crafted to specifically help the Republican Party and Donald Trump.
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(Foreign Policy, December 17, 2018)
In June 2017, some eight months after the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, Kremlin operatives running a digital interference campaign in American politics scored a viral success with a post on Instagram.
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(Fox Business, December 17, 2018)
Russians seeking to influence U.S. elections through social media had their eyes on Instagram and the black community. These were among the findings in two reports released Monday by the Senate intelligence committee.
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(Quartz, December 17, 2018)
Two reports produced by independent researchers for the US Senate Intelligence Committee show that Instagram was a much more significant tool in the hands of Russian operatives trying to influence US politics than previously thought—and was at times potentially more powerful than Facebook.
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(CNN, December 17, 2018)
The Senate Intelligence Committee has been advised that social media companies might have provided the "bare minimum" amount of data to aid the panel's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, according to a person familiar with a report commissioned by the committee.
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(Esquire, December 17, 2018)
A new report states very plainly that the Russian government designed this sweeping program specifically to help the Trump campaign, and that it was based on a thoroughgoing analysis of how easily Americans can be duped when it comes to electing a president.
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(Vox, December 17, 2018)
More than two years after the 2016 elections, media outlets and academics are still discovering the extent of Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at American voters.
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(Seeking Alpha, December 17, 2018)
A new report prepared for the Senate highlights the "belated and uncoordinated response" of tech companies to the Russian disinformation campaign during the 2016 election.
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(The Week, December 17, 2018)
The study by Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and network analysis firm Graphika found that Russians working at the Internet Research Agency separated Americans into key interest groups and targeted them with messages.
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(Gizmodo, December 17, 2018)
Two new independent studies commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee were made public, providing the most in-depth look at online Russian interference in the 2016 election to date.
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(The New York Times, December 17, 2018)
Russian propaganda had about 187 million engagements on Instagram, reaching at least 20 million users, and 76.5 million engagements on Facebook, reaching 126 million people. Approximately 1.4 million people engaged with tweets associated with the Internet Research Agency.
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(The New York Times, October 9, 2018)
John Kelly, Ph.D, Graphika’s founder and CEO contributed analysis and expertise for this New York Times piece revealing the consistent nature of Russian social media manipulation strategy across different social network platforms.
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(Wired, September 27, 2018)
Graphika’s John Kelly, Ph.D contributed expert opinion about ongoing Russian disinformation campaigns that helped to amplify the anti-Nike sentiment during the boycott of the brand following the announcement of Colin Kaepernick as the face of a major Nike advertising campaign.
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(MSNBC, August 2, 2018)
After delivering his testimony on Russian foreign influence on social media to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, Graphika CEO and founder, John Kelly, Ph.D visited Andrea Mitchell Reports (MSNBC) in Washington, D.C. on August 2nd, 2018.
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(C-SPAN, August 1, 2018)
Graphika Founder and CEO, John Kelly, Ph.D was invited to provide his expert testimony on foreign interference in the U.S. presidential election before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Watch the broadcast here.
(Bloomberg, July 19, 2018)
Graphika founder and CEO, John Kelly, Ph.D contributed analysis and expert perspective for this piece from Bloomberg exploring the global rise of government sponsored interference in elections by means of online manipulation and disinformation.
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(The Guardian, February 2, 2018)
Graphika discovered over 513,000 Twitter accounts tweeted links to one or more YouTube-recommended videos that were boosted by vigorous social media campaigns leading up to the 2016 election, involving thousands of accounts controlled by political operatives, including a large number of bots.
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(CNBC, January 19, 2018)
Camille François, Graphika’s Chief Innovation Officer, shared first hand accounts of the stories of real troll farm workers and her own experience co-authoring a landmark report on Russian electoral influence operations for the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.
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(ESPN, February 16, 2017)
Graphika sifted through more than 5 million tweets on behalf of ESPN, revealing a number of interesting findings about NBA All-Star voting, including 10 hyperactive bot accounts voting for Kawhi Leonard about 1,000 times per day.
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