BY ELIAS GROLL
To the casual observer, it’s not immediately evident how Kris Shaffer’s training as a musicologist prepared him for his job as an online detective. Shaffer, an analyst with the company New Knowledge, tracks disinformation campaigns for a living—the kind that Russia waged against the United States during the 2016 presidential election. His title is a mouthful: senior computational disinformation analyst.
But before he took the job, Shaffer was a musicologist who wrote his dissertation on a Hungarian avant-garde composer, Gyorgy Ligeti, whose claims about his music—not unlike the Kremlin’s propaganda—contained some “mistruths and half-truths,” he said.
Ligeti had composed a series of works that drew heavily on the giants of Western classical music—Beethoven and Mozart, among others—all the while insisting that his music remained entirely new, entirely avant-garde.
Shaffer encoded Ligeti’s music as a text file and then analyzed it using natural language processing, a subfield of artificial intelligence. He was able to demonstrate that Ligeti’s assertion of originality was “an easily falsifiable claim.”
These days, Shaffer is one of a growing number of students of disinformation who are using similar tools of data science and artificial intelligence to examine how online propaganda campaigns work.
By working with massive datasets of tweets, Facebook posts, and online articles, he is able to map links between accounts, similarities in the messages they post, and shared computer infrastructure. The data allows him to identify networks of accounts that appear to be acting together to spread messages online.
“It sounds like a big shift from computational musicology to computational disinformation, but I’m finally coming full circle,” Shaffer said in an interview. “As with musicology, when we take something to scale there are new questions that we can ask.”
This method of analysis is in its infancy, remains a fairly blunt instrument, and still requires human intervention. It sometimes mistakes real people who post anti-imperialist arguments about U.S. foreign policy for Kremlin trolls, for example.
But Russian efforts to influence U.S. and global politics is at the core of this growing discipline of computational disinformation analysis.
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