- The Capitol Hill riot on January 6th served as a powerful warning of the danger posed by widespread false narratives about the election result, and what happens when an erosion of public trust in democratic discourse and political communications collide.
- The undermining of important public safety messaging and the COVID vaccination program are also important and timely examples. Low uptake in groups targeted by misinformation about the vaccine threatens the successful rollout and the rebuilding of society post pandemic.
- The challenges posed to national security by both domestic and international actors seeking to sow mistrust and discord, and the signs of increasing radicalization and extremism shown by conspiracy theory followers.
While the problems posed by misinformation and disinformation are easily identified, government bodies have lacked sufficient tools and capabilities to address these problems in time and at scale.
Since we were founded in 2017, Logically’s mission has been to enhance civic discourse, protect democratic debate and process, and provide access to trustworthy information. We do this by combining advanced AI with one of the world’s largest, dedicated fact-checking teams to tackle mis- and disinformation at scale.
We have spent the last few years working with a number of government partners in the US and other democratic nations across the world to support them in both surfacing and disarming problematic content, including during the 2020 U.S. elections. We’ve seen the phenomenon of mis and disinformation take root, evolve and proliferate, and the strategies and networks of the proponents of the information crisis become more complex and dynamic.
The real-world harm posed by this content is increasing. The following graph shows the prevalence of high threat content in the US, with big spikes clear around the presidential election, inauguration and COVID vaccine rollout.
We’ve seen firsthand how the public sector requires sophisticated tools and enhanced capabilities in order to react quickly enough to make a difference. This is why we’ve created Logically Intelligence.
How Logically Intelligence works
Just launched this week, Logically Intelligence is a threat intelligence platform that brings together Logically’s capabilities in at-scale analysis, classification, and detection to help our government partners monitor the online media landscape for the spread of damaging activity and narratives and provide them with the tools to counter them.Built on cutting-edge AI and secure, scalable cloud infrastructure, Logically Intelligence is a powerful tool that can ingest and analyze data from publicly available, multilingual content from digital and social media channels across the world, including major and emerging social platforms, blogs, news sources and areas of the dark web, classifying the content as low, medium, or high-risk threats.
The analytical capabilities of Logically Intelligence provides the ability to map and assess relevant emerging narratives, themes and associations, detecting potential issues before they become widespread. It also provides insight into which demographics or communities are being targeted and reached by coordinated narratives and campaigns, allowing for the crafting and dissemination of effective counter narrative strategies.
The Logically Intelligence dashboard depicting analysis of threats
A data visualization of linked posts and communities as displayed by the Explore function.
Integrated within the platform is a suite of countermeasures that can be deployed to swiftly and effectively mitigate the negative impact of problematic content or campaigns. Countermeasures range from instant fact checks to flagging content to platforms or law enforcement, and detailed OSINT (open-source intelligence) style investigations into campaign origins and key actors.
Logically Intelligence was tested in beta format last year with government agencies and bodies in the U.S. and other regions. For a battleground U.S. state in the 2020 election, Logically Intelligence ingested millions of individual pieces of content, further identifying and analyzing 40,000 threats to election integrity and public safety for review and countermeasures.
We are now working with governments around the world to support their election integrity efforts, and to protect national COVID vaccine rollout programs from misinformation interference.
The challenges posed by the information crisis have never been greater, and it has never been more important to work together to overcome them. We look forward to working with a range of partners in the future to support their efforts and restore citizens’ trust in information once again.
