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What are influence operations and why do they matter? @CarnegieEndow gave @iopartnership a chance to explore that question in this short video. It's a challenge distilling a complex topic down to a two minute clip - and this posits one definition.
There are many terms used to describe attempts to influence audiences and outcomes, as well as many tactics. This lack of a universal language poses many problems for policy development.
To better understand what is currently known about influence ops, our team has been conducting a series of baseline studies looking at definitions used to describe IO, policy proposals, and interventions to counter IO, including by platform policies and government legislation.
There has been a lot of work done in this space - but very little by way of bringing it all together. That shows in the various terms used, and the repetition in policy proposals.
To put it another way, influence operations is a networked problem, if we want to address it we might as a community do better to see ourselves as a network and consciously foster that.
Over the coming months we will be publishing the findings from our baseline research here: http://ceip.org/PCIO
