Hybrid Event: Disinformation in Practice – Tips and Tools

SPEAKER

Sohan Dsouza

AGENDA

18:30 - Hybrid event starts

20:00 - Presentation ends with networking and refreshments for those attending at the BCS London office

21:00 - Event close

SYNOPSIS

In February 2024, open-source intelligence investigator Sohan Dsouza spotted unusual-looking Facebook ads targeting Qatar, leading him to eventually uncover a vast, high-budget, genAI-augmented influence operation. Run through Vietnamese “phone farms” and active across Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, Telegram, and other platforms, it used farmed and hacked digital assets to covertly push political propaganda and anti-Muslim/anti-immigrant tropes into the UK, the EU, and beyond, exposing serious gaps in platform countermeasures, transparency, and accountability.

Just weeks after Sohan’s public exposure of this operation, the Southport child-stabbing tragedy in England triggered UK-wide riots, fueled and focused by misinformation. His investigation of the spread of this misinformation revealed an influential ecosystem of inauthentic online presences, including many farmed and operated from abroad, among its vectors and amplifiers.

In this presentation, Sohan will outline both investigations, sharing lessons for platforms, policymakers, and regulators. He will also present a walkthrough of a basic kit of investigative tools, empowering anyone to take a deeper look at material they encounter online, for signs of techniques designed to manipulate and deceive.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Sohan Dsouza is a London-based consultant specialising in the investigation of disinformation and covert influence operations. Having trained extensively in open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques, including as a “Digital Sherlock” with the Digital Forensics Research Lab, Sohan applies them to detect and expose malign or otherwise inauthentic activity online.

He has been a public voice on the issues of transparency and accountability in social media platforms and online services. He engages on these topics as a visiting researcher with the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Sohan also brings years of experience in academia, primarily in computational social science research, along with years of experience in industry as a software engineer.

His academic research background includes studies and high-impact publications in crowdsourcing, social mobilisation, AI ethics, and computer-mediated negotiation. He was awarded an SM in computational social science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; an MSc in informatics from the British University in Dubai’s program with the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics; an MBA+PGDM in IT management from the SP Jain Institute of Management & Research’s School of Global Management; and a BS in computer information systems from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

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THIS EVENT IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

BCS London Central, London North and London South branches

Please visit:

London Central branch | BCS

London North branch | BCS

London South branch | BCS

Image credit: Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.