“Networked incitement” describes how influential figures organize large-scale political violence via social media, coordinating shifting political factions across multiple communication platforms to mobilize group action during civic unrest. Civil society and truth-telling institutions must experiment with strategies to diminish the impact of disinformation, which is often the precursor to networked incitement via acute incidents of violence or longer harassment and intimidation campaigns. 

CISI’s new research lab detects and documents networked incitement by gathering data and engaging with institutions affected by real-time disruptions. We compile weekly reports and provide direct advisory support to those stakeholders hoping to understand actors, incidents, and trends.

Over the last decade, intimidation tactics like swatting and doxing became popularized online as a way for malicious actors to harass, defame, and threaten women, gender-nonconforming individuals, and journalists. Now, these tactics are used to intimidate election officials and perceived ideological adversaries. Schools, hospitals, election sites, political offices, state capitols, civil society organizations – no public place is safe from threat.

Hoaxes and false news are propagated by a mixed group of actors – political operatives, brands, influencers, social movements, and unaffiliated trolls – who develop and refine new techniques to influence public opinion and profit from it, often coalescing around specific wedge issues and then disappearing after unrest. Such shifting political factions employ media manipulation techniques; circumventing traditional gatekeeping institutions and, if that doesn’t work, impersonating them, while also leveraging algorithmic filtering and recommendation systems to their advantage. 

Because the internet is not a neutral, but a crucial global technology, failure to create regulatory processes and enforce corporate policy about media manipulation on social media threatens the civil liberties of all. CISI researchers track networked incitement to build an evidence base of actors, incidents, and trends while informing stakeholders who need the tools and knowledge to build institutional resilience to novel threats, with or without the support of industry.