Disinformation that can cause public unrest
After an incident in the city centre, where people were caught fighting, two people were seriously injured, while three were arrested. This triggered the interest of social media, with videos from the fight being widely spread. These videos show that the two people that suffered the attack are probably immigrants.
Police Officers immediately perceived the possible implications of such a social media rise and used VIGILANT to collect information about online posts, using terms such as “fight”, “injury” and “immigrants”. The tool retrieves and organises the most relevant posts in the web, focusing on the posts that appeared after the attack.
An hour after the incident first appeared in social media, VIGILANT identifies a rapid rise in the popularity of tweets that falsely claim one of the injured persons has died. A few minutes later, the hashtag #crushfacism became very popular on Twitter, while many other posts getting significantly high numbers of likes and shares urge people to start gathering outside the local Police Station where the attackers are held.
The PA debunks the false claims, disseminates this using their (social) media channels and decides to move the retained persons from the Police Station to a safe location and deploy appropriate police forces to preserve public safety. The cross-platform and network analysis in VIGILANT identify the most influential users regarding the subject, highlighting to the Officers the posts most likely to have initiated the false rumour. A particular public Facebook group is identified as the most likely first spreader and VIGILANT can identify similarities in the accounts in this group and the highest spreaders on Twitter. This information is analysed and retained for studying and devising potential countermeasures.
Disinformation with impact on national security
Two countries with border issues found themselves in a delicate situation involving economic and political aspects. A wanted person from country A is found guilty in a corruption case and flees to country B asking for asylum. While country B is assessing the application, the person is kidnapped and their whereabouts are unknown.
There are rumours that Officers in ‘Country A’ are behind the kidnapping and, since country A is the main provider of oil to country B, unreliable media sources start a false rumour that country A is threatening to stop the oil supply if country B does not drop the investigation towards the kidnapping case.
Police Authorities in both countries can monitor this news with the help of VIGILANT, aiming to identify whether or not this can cause unrest in their borders. Shortly after the first publication of the false claim, extremist groups call for action on a Facebook group threatening to force the government of country B to drop the case, since the impact of lack of oil in their country will be devastating. They try to instigate the public to invade the parliament building.
Since VIGILANT flagged these problematic narratives to the PA in country B, the Officers can employ timely pre-bunking steps to minimise the reach of the extremists’ message to the public and coordinate their steps with strategic communication experts in other governmental agencies to mitigate the crisis. In addition, they can act on time to preventively move MPs to a safe place and deploy police forces to guarantee the safety of the public.
Due to the serious nature of the situation, PAs can quickly generate detailed reports via VIGILANT’s disinformation reporting interface with all the relevant data to share with the security policy unit in the Ministry of the Interior.
Disinformation that can lead to public/private financial loss
During the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple false narratives have risen, some of them leading to health, economic and societal issues. Detecting these, VIGILANT flags to a PA in city C that multiple Facebook and Twitter posts are mentioning an act against the recently installed 5G towers, due to a false narrative saying that 5G causes COVID-19.
Officers are able to identify a thread in Reddit that is calling volunteers to take the towers down at a specific date and time. They are able to intervene and disperse the people before the vandalism happens. The Officers also implement appropriate countermeasures to debunk the false narratives. Due to a non-negligible probability of the same situation happening in other countries, Officers can create a report of this incident so that it may be shared, while respecting data protection and ethical standards with other PAs involved in VIGILANT’s network.