R&D 100 winner of the day: Reconnaissance of Influence Operations (RIO)

Hostile influence operations that exploit digital communications and social media pose a rising threat to open democracies. MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Reconnaissance of Influence Operations (RIO) allows early indication of influence operation campaigns and has the potential to forecast effects of targeted counter responses. This end-to-end system framework collects contextually relevant data, identifies potential influence operation narratives, classifies accounts based on their behavior and content, constructs a narrative network and estimates the impact of accounts or networks in spreading specific narratives. With the RIO system, disinformation narratives, networks and influential actors can easily and quickly be detected with 96% precision, and then the impact of influence operation accounts spreading specific propaganda narratives can then be quantified. As an effective tool for situational awareness, the framework can alert social media platform providers and the public of influential influence operation accounts and networks, and the propaganda content they spread.