DOJ funds $953K university project on ‘dis/misinformation campaigns’

Clemson University is using federal funds to create technology meant to track what researchers consider to be patterns of “mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM)” by internet users.

Researchers said they are taking steps to ensure their work is unbiased, but two watchdog groups argued the project could be used to silence speech online.

The Clemson project, “Networks and Pathways of Violent Extremism: Effectiveness of Mis/Disinformation Campaigns,” is funded by a $953,203 grant from the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice.

The researchers plan to map the spread of these campaigns “around contentious public events” in real-time, according to an abstract. They will create “an online dashboard with an MDM tracker that allows users to understand real-time campaigns and their diffusion.”

Clemson described a disinformation campaign as “a coherent pattern of sustained false or inauthentic information created with the intent to deceive” in a statement to The College Fix.

“The grant seeks to help policy makers, law enforcement officials, and community stakeholders understand how social media dis/mis information campaigns operate,” the university stated.

“This will include identifying the type of events most likely to be the target of disinformation campaigns and identifying the characteristics, patterns, and methods of the organizations and other actors engaged in these campaigns,” the university told The Fix.

Another term used in the research project, “malinformation” is defined as “information that may be based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate,” according to a Department of Homeland Security report.

Arie Perliger, (pictured) a co-principal investigator for the Clemson project, told The Fix he plans to automate most of the research process to remove potential threats of bias.

“The process of identifying accounts connected to specific campaigns, for instance, will be conducted with off-the-shelf software that identifies and collects information about language, behavior, and interaction between accounts,” Perliger told The Fix in an email.