The Power of Location Intelligence in the Fight Against Disinformation

In the age of social media, disinformation campaigns have become rampant and pose a threat to public health and safety. Disinformation actors use social media to spread false information, often targeting specific audiences, which can erode public trust, create political instability and battlefield confusion. To counteract such threats, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is using location intelligence, or research that uses open data to understand places and the factors that influence human activity in them.

In the past, location intelligence has informed decision-making in areas such as emergency response, urban planning, transportation planning, and energy conservation. But now, location intelligence at ORNL is also helping to identify disinformation and its impacts. According to Gautam Thakur, leader of ORNL’s Location Intelligence Group, “By bridging a gap between the virtual world and the physical world, we can now provide insights that agencies and organizations can use to counteract such threats.”

Disinformation campaigns spread quickly and deeply, often using bots, or computer algorithms that emulate human behavior online, to amplify false messages. Few false narratives need to catch on to create vulnerability in societies, to build cohesion among extremist groups, or to erode civil trust. Hence, disinformation campaigns are hard to track and contain.

To overcome these challenges, ORNL’s multidisciplinary team is testing a new approach on 4.7 million COVID-19-related tweets from more than 14,000 users. The team is quantifying the intent of all social media users with the help of computational data engineers and data science researchers. The team is now able to correlate breaking news notifications with disinformation actors’ online responses, incorporating information such as the unique spatial patterns of information spread and methods used by social media users to intensify this spread. ORNL’s work on disinformation was captured in the group’s latest conference paper published in September 2022.

The team’s approach is enabled by PlanetSense, a digital platform developed by ORNL in 2015. PlanetSense is used to analyze online crowd-sourced data in real time, enabling researchers to study human activity through the lenses of economy, culture, and social ties. It has since underpinned the development of other digital tools at ORNL used in human dynamics research. According to Thakur, “It is really understanding the cultural and social ties that allow us to better understand human activities. In order to help agencies and organizations respond to certain events, we need to be able to make sense of the data, which means we must be ready to narrate certain activities as they are happening.”

In conclusion, ORNL is using location intelligence to shine a light on disinformation and to provide insights to agencies and organizations to counteract such threats. Disinformation campaigns are hard to track and contain, but location intelligence offers better tools to combat disinformation, particularly through correlating breaking news notifications with disinformation actors’ online responses, incorporating information such as unique spatial patterns of information spread and methods used by social media users to intensify this spread. It is this technology, which offers a ray of hope in today’s disinformation-ridden world.