The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab works with social networks like Facebook to curb the spread of disinformation.

The notifications lighting up Brookie's phone were part of a Russian disinformation campaign that his employer, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, was monitoring in collaboration with Facebook and the US State Department.

Tracking and exposing disinformationIn the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, technology firms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been forced to reckon with the realities of bad actors manipulating social media for nefarious purposes.

For example, though Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to aid Republican candidate Donald Trump in 2016, the following year Democratic strategists allegedly used a similar social media strategy to help Doug Jones in an Alabama special election for Senate (apparently without Jones' knowledge).

Enlarge ImageAnalysis of Russian protests by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab found that Moscow downplayed the size. .

In response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in 2018 Facebook partnered with third-party fact-checkers, including Brookie's employer, the Atlantic Council.

The Atlantic Council hosts events attended by global leaders, publishes research papers and encourages policy consensus on contentious issues like cyber-conflict.

Like most think tanks, the Atlantic Council is not without controversy and is occasionally dogged by accusations that nation-states and corporations try to purchase influence in the organization through donations.

Facebook's relationship with UK data firm Cambridge Analytica pushed the company to partner with the Atlantic Council.

Concerned about the growing influence of social media, Brookie, a former National Security Council advisor under President Barack Obama, founded the Digital Forensic Research Lab in 2016.

As a result, the DFRL prioritizes transparency in its research and often tries to use "open" data in its reports.

Open data is information that's available to the public -- Google Street View or publicly posted images of military installations, for example -- that might provide useful clues for research analysts. .

The DFRL is perhaps best-known for its 2015 report Hiding in Plain Sight: Putin's War in Ukraine, which used open data, including selfies taken by Russian troops and posted on social media, to prove that Russia was occupying eastern Ukraine, an allegation President Vladimir Putin denied at the time. 

Enlarge ImageThe Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab has identified thousands of instances of disinformation on most major social media platforms

Brookie's team of investigators apply transparent open data research techniques with their own own proprietary information

The DFRL team pulls publicly available data from social networks using open-source and commercial tech products like Google Docs to identify and label inauthentic internet content as either "misinformation" or "disinformation." 

Analysts on the DFRL team carefully log patterns and instances of disinformation in spreadsheets, then provide the data to companies like Facebook, which combine the open data with the firm's private logs and take action by removing fake profiles, pages and groups. 

Enlarge ImagePolitical unrest in Bolivia was stoked by coordinated inauthentic activity, bots and memes that denied a political coup occurred, according to researchers at the Digital Forensic Research Lab