Incidental Solutions and Data Sources for Information in PogSec

The Cognitive Crucible is a forum that presents different perspectives and emerging thought leadership related to the information environment. The opinions expressed by guests are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of or endorsement by the Information Professionals Association.

During this episode, Ben Kessler discusses Meltwater’s methodology and models for Owned, Earned, Organic (OEO) measurement of activities within the information environment.

Research Question: Ben Kessler suggests an interested student ask the question: Where is the diaspora of opinion and content going as we mature as a digital society from centralized “town squares” to “closed door” networks? 

Resources:

• Cognitive Crucible Podcast Episodes Mentioned
  • #148 Kalev Leetaru on GDELT
  • #115 Russ Burgos on Information Supply, Demand, and Effect
  • #174 Kara Masick on Assessment Insights from Program Evaluation
• Meltwater
• Carpe Datum
• Cambridge Disinformation Summit
• UK RESIST 2 Framework
• World Economic Forum

Link to full show notes and resources

Guest Bio: 

Ben Kessler is the Head of Enterprise Strategy & Public Sector at Meltwater. He brings 11+ years of experience in the application and adoption of data and insights from the Information Environment.  Ben has supported Civilian, DoD, IC, and Joint Forces / Coalitions in leveraging Meltwater's world-leading media intelligence suite to enable contextualized mission decisions - from risk assessments to strategic communications, public affairs, mis/dis/malinformation, narrative analysis, and real-time critical workflows.  Over the past decade, Ben has seen first-hand the evolution of the Media Intelligence space to a critical decision making capability with direct impact to senior leadership.     

Meltwater’s goal is to harness PAI to deliver a unique capability measuring the impact of narratives, missions, audience cohorts, campaigns, and/or outbound efforts.  We provide access to the world’s largest corpus of PAI data across the global information environment, tracking over 300,000+ news sources (including online, print, broadcast, and podcasts), and over 300 million social media data points including Reddit, Meta (Facebook + Instagram), Twitter/X, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Forums, Deep Web, Message Boards, Comments, Review Sites, and blogs.

Meltwater’s datalake spans Western and non-Western platforms, in over 100+ languages including character-based languages, and local in-market content. We process approx. 1.5B documents / day, each enriched with over 170+ AI and LLM powered metadata points for sophisticated analysis, detection algorithms, alerting workflows, network visualizations, and more. Meltwater has a commercial in-market presence in over 120+ countries that drives local requirements to support a global customer base.

About: The Information Professionals Association (IPA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring the role of information activities, such as influence and cognitive security, within the national security sector and helping to bridge the divide between operations and research. Its goal is to increase interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars and practitioners and policymakers with an interest in this domain.

For more information, please contact us at communications@information-professionals.org.

Or, connect directly with The Cognitive Crucible podcast host, John Bicknell, on LinkedIn.

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