The Future of Research in Disinformation Targeting Elections

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"We all agreed that it would be quite convenient if we were not all going down the same rabbit holes for the election, and if we could deduplicate a little bit more," he says. "Rigor is extraordinarily important in the ability to check each other's findings." The team also created a gigantic system where they could all talk to one another and investigate incidents together with the ticket system.

Disinformation researchers have been fighting two battles over the last decade: one to combat and contain harmful information, and one to convince the world that these manipulations have an offline impact that requires complex, nuanced solutions. Camille François, Chief Information Officer at the cybersecurity company Graphika and an affiliate of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, believes that our common understanding of the problem has recently reached a new level. In this interview, she catalogues the key changes she observed between studying Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and helping convene and operate the Election Integrity Partnership watchdog group before, during and after the 2020 election. “I'm optimistic, because I think that things that have taken quite a long time to land are finally landing, and because I think that we do have a diverse set of expertise at the table,” she says. Camille and Tristan Harris dissect the challenges and talk about the path forward to a healthy information ecosystem.