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Press: Lisa-Maria Neudert quoted in Washington Post coverage on Russian election interference
11 November 2019
ComProp researcher, Lisa-Maria Neudert, spoke to the Washington Post (short excerpt below) about the rise of visuals in disinformation campaigns:
Facebook’s announcement last week underscored the evolving nature of the threat to campaigns. Although a minority of the Russian posts had explicit election-related content, many of the accounts set their location to swing states that could tip the 2020 contest, according to Graphika, a social media analysis firm that examined the operation for Facebook.
The company revealed that it had removed a network of accounts originating in Russia and targeting the United States, along with three networks of accounts originating in Iran that took aim at the United States and other countries, including several in North Africa and Latin America. The material offered a snapshot of the increasingly visual nature of foreign-backed disinformation, which games Instagram’s algorithm to serve users content on trending topics, analysts said. “GIFs, short videos, memes — that’s the stuff that’s doing really well on social media at the moment,” said Lisa-Maria Neudert, a researcher with Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project.