Fake News Challenges for OSINT

1
Fake News Challenges for OSINT

• Fake news dates back centuries and is in no way a
  new phenomenon. It has, however, taken a new turn
  for the worst in its distribution across multiple
  open source online channels, easily accessible in
  our digital age. With the forceful inception and
  use of social media today, spreading messages
  that become viral quickly is simple, and fake
  news is no exception.

2
Fake News Challenges for OSINT

• The repercussions of fake news can be
  severe and can endanger the lives of individuals
  and society at large. Whether used to leverage
  political campaigns, spread propaganda of terror
  groups, gangs, the cyber underworld and other
  assailants, fake news is both illegal and poses
  concerns for intelligence units in national
  security and law enforcement agencies globally.
  Fake news can yield political upheavals, riots,
  anarchy, actual acts of terror, violence, and it
  can instigate other forms of detrimental crime.

3
Fake News Challenges for OSINT

• The core challenge fake news poses to
  intelligence analysts is the process of
  distinguishing fake news from reliable sources in
  efforts to derive qualitative intelligence from
  open source channels. With its potential to
  disrupt democratic and legal order, the major
  setback fake news poses for intelligence agents
  is the complexity of gathering reliable
  intelligence. It poses difficulties in
  identifying, analyzing, and halting its spread to
  prevent escalation of circumstances and events,
  while also hindering investigative progress.
  While some social media users may not initiate
  fakes news, they can unknowingly function as a
  vehicle for its distribution. Herein lays the
  complexity of analysts or agents who rely heavily
  on the extraction of valuable intelligent
  insights from open sources that generate huge
  sums of data.

4
Fake News Challenges for OSINT

• Defining Fake News What Is Fake News Today
  and What Repercussions Does it Pose?Fake news is
  used to pull on its audiences heartstrings, a
  ploy to indirectly brainwash individuals or
  populations to believe something that is not
  true, or has not been proven. It is a mere claim
  thats written with superlatives and
  sensationalist language that triggers an
  emotional response from readers, a form of verbal
  manipulation that infiltrates todays social
  media platforms at an exceedingly fast pace. So
  fast, that human manpower has become inadequate
  in identifying, tracking and obliterating it to
  avoid the risk and damage it may incur. And so
  incredibly fast that analysts and agents struggle
  to decipher reliable news sources from those that
  mimic them in the form of fake news.

5
Fake News Challenges for OSINT

• Whats more, since much of todays fake
  news circulates in obscure open source venues,
  automated collection and analysis of data is
  exponentially more complex and demands new
  technologies that evolve with the trends of fake
  news initiators and distributors. The optimal
  solution is the use and continuous development of
  technologies that employ rich artificial
  intelligence and make our world a better, safer
  and smarter place.For more information on
  osint challenges please visit Cobwebs website