COA Assessment for Influence Operations (CAFIO)

In the modern Information Environment, adversaries deliver misinformation and exploit misinformation to gain geopolitical power and influence over one another. Adversaries do so by via messaging (e.g., blogs, tweets, and other online multimedia communications). Analysts require tools to make sense of such communications, and, more specifically, tools that can measure the direct and indirect influence of individual messages, messaging campaigns, and specific users/messengers. The objective of this project is to develop, mature, and apply state of the art empirical causal analysis algorithms to measure the effectiveness of courses of action (COAs) within the information operations domain. The project concentrates on measuring the impact of messages (i.e., information COAs) and attributes of messages on the larger population's attitudes and beliefs. Furthermore, the project extends analysis to how such changes in attitudes affect real world offline behavior such as social mobilization, radicalization, protests, and riots.