Welcome to the DigIntel Blog

Welcome to the official blog for the Digital Intelligence Lab (DigIntel) at Institute for the Future (IFTF). DigIntel is a digital rights think tank based in the heart of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California. Our mission is to produce public-facing research that illuminates the problems occurring at the intersection of technology and society, with the hope of both understanding current and future quandaries and informing solutions to these issues.

In this blog, we will regularly publish writing that explores disinformation and digital rights issues. Our blog will host posts from DigIntel staff, fellows, and partners, as well as host content from leading thinkers in academia, government, civil society and industry. Our aim is to give you a deeper understanding of the ways technology is used and abused in the social realm, potential solutions to these problems, and how technologists can benefit from keeping an ethical framework in mind when building tools.

We’ll feature regular blog posts on several topics at the intersection of technology and society, these include:

• Disinformation and election integrity — understanding the impact of disinformation on political discourse and election integrity, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methods. We will also explore the evolution of strategies and tactics nefarious actors use to manipulate political discourse.
• Digital rights — understanding the new social contract emerging between citizens and their governments in the digital realm, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and corporations in this environment.
• Surveillance — exploring the pervasive nature of surveillance technologies, including both governmental and private surveillance. Our interests in this domain include using surveillance tech as a soft-power tactic, cheap proliferation of surveillance technologies affordable for the average citizen, the incentivization of corporate surveillance, and the interplay between digital privacy and disinformation campaigns.
• Social impacts of AI and machine learning — investigating the social and political impacts of artificial intelligence, such as those emanating from use of autonomous weapons, facial recognition technology, and algorithmic bias in policing, sentencing, and hiring.

In the past year, much of our work has already explored these themes. In our most recent research series, the Human Consequences of Computational Propaganda, we produced 9 case studies examining issue publics and social groups targeted by disinformation around the 2018 US midterm elections. In the report, State-Sponsored Trolling: How Governments are Deploying Disinformation as part of Broader Harassment Campaigns, we published the results of a collaborative research effort with Camille François, the International Press Institute, and Global Voices that examined the chilling influence of targeted harassment campaigns aimed at silencing activists and journalists around the world. Our lab has also produced reports examining the influence of disinformation on journalism and reporting, exploring the biology of disinformation, and, in tandem with the Omidyar network, developed EthicalOS — a toolkit of ethical guidelines relevant for developers building new technologies.

As technology continues to embed itself into our daily lives, we become more exposed to the unintended negative consequences and vulnerabilities it introduces. These vulnerabilities are both social and technological, and require rigorous research to form nuanced solutions. We hope to shed light on these issues in this blog. Thanks for visiting, and enjoy the blog!

The Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future is a non-profit, 501(c)(3), research entity. The lab is primarily funded through grants and donations. Our work has been supported by: the Open Society Foundations, the Hewlett Foundation, the New Venture Fund for Communications, the Ford Foundation and others. For questions about the lab, including inquires about collaboration or giving, email the lab’s program coordinator Ashley Hemstreet — ahemstreet@iftf.org.