Category: Conference Report

The 2023 CREST (Centre for Research & Evidence on Security Threats) BASS (Behavioural and Social Science in Security) conference was a packed three days of very diverse and interesting talks. There were two great keynotes; firstly David Matthews talked about “Intersubjectivity and communicative rationality in defence and national security contexts”. He illustrated how the strategic environment is rapidly changing with what he described as “lessons from the field” from Timor-Leste, Iraq and Afghanistan. This was carried out by deploying a social science team to discover how conflict and Western troops are affecting the local population and create socio-culturally appropriate recommendations and interventions. What looks good in policy terms when briefing and planning remotely may be very different when you are trying to ascertain “ground truth” in the field and may have unintended consequences. Using adversarial approaches risks alienating local communities and can affect creditability. The role of social scientists should be to mobilise empathy for the “other” and avoid using adversarial approaches. Local needs have local priorities and behaviour must be transparent, especially when building a long term relationship. The conference closed with a keynote from Professor Martin Innes, Co-Director of the Security, Crime and Innovation Centre at Cardiff University. He gave us a fascinating talk on the use of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence). OSINT needs a blend of art, craft and science to be successful. Warfare introduces uncertainty, so how do we know what is real? The important issue is to have near real time monitoring, although sometimes having to deal with cold, hard facts; retroactive knowledge can update past events with information to aid future work. Modern war combines brutal kinetic activity with high level intelligence. The problem is we have an ecosystem https://web.stanford.edu/~jgrimmer/tad2.pdf based on publicity of exposure and this gets more attention than original threats. During the three days there was a packed programme across the three themes of Risk Assessment and Management, Gathering Human Intelligence and Deterrence and Disruption. Some highlights were:
Wendy Moncur gave a thought provoking talk on the potential risk and harms of revealing personal data on-line. She covered digital literacy, cyber harms in the context of organisations, identity theft, unwelcome attention e.g. cyber bulling and how even using Strava to record your run can give away valuable personal information. The collection of aggregated data can lead to insight for a malign actor and is relevant for everyone.
Lewys Brace talked to us about his fascinating work on the Con.Cel project which focussed on the Incel (involuntary celibate) community, showcasing the work on extremism, online spaces, ideological contagion and UK based activities on Incels. Analysis of their behaviours and psychological traits is key in discovering the relationship between on-line discussion and offline violence.
Our very own Matt Asher updated us on the work into whether AI can really predict political affiliation. Historically based on physiognomy and although previous research shows a 73% accuracy rating, results in the replicated study (n1,998) never passed 66% accuracy and with biases in terms of who is and isn’t accurately classified. Research is on-going into the implications of AI predicting behaviour.
Link: https://crestresearch.ac.uk/

By G. Mason

The 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science was held in Copenhagen in July and saw 728 delegates from across the world enjoy a day of tutorials and then a further three packed days of key notes and shorter talks.  This was complimented by a huge range of posters which were exhibited each day.

Keynote – Jevin West, University of Washington (US) Information Science:

Jevin kicked off the conference with two questions asking: “Can we muster enough elective energy to take action for ourselves in politics, health etc”.  and “how do we solve a problem like misinformation?”  His answer to both was: basically “you don’t, but you can do things better”.

One myth he wanted to debunk: anti vaccine equals anti-science.  This is not true, people who are anti vaxers look to science to inform their views too.  The public like to think that they can do their own research, but they often depend on the “credentials of experts”, whether they are scientists or lay experts.  He then asked “do journals still matter as credential makers?”  The conclusion was that “yes they do”, however, highly regarded professionals are less likely to publish in journals as they do not see the need to be “published” as their research is readily available and “out there”.

Perceived expertise: what are the prevalence and relative influence of perceived/lay  experts who spread Covid-19 vaccine misinformation?  Data & methods – 4.3m tweets and 5.5 m users that included vaccine discussion during April 2021 were examined and manually labelled.  It was found that anti-vaccine supporters shared lots of perceived expert knowledge, tweets, likes etc.  Perceived experts were more influential in the community than real experts e.g. health professionals.  Perceived experts had a sizeable presence in the anti-vaccine community and are seen as important.

Perceived expertise to perceived consensus around Covid-19: Papers were being discussed in both communities – science based and anti-mask wearing. How papers were referenced had an effect, they could be split into epidemiology and physical experiments in the science community.  In the online community it was separated by mask and non-mask wearing.  The conclusion was that perceived expertise leads to a perceived consensus.

Much laughter was heard when he explained Brandolinis Law, from Wikipedia the definition is: “Easy to create BS, hard to clean it up!”  When asked, ChatGPT produced a definition of Brandolinis law that was complete BS; the irony of it!

For the Future: Jevin stated that we need to find out how to measure the prevalence of and exposure to misinformation.  We need to teach science from an early age with social science, future generations will then understand the bridge between science and social science;  and we need to save the planet from social media so we do not destroy ourselves!       (Anecdote on the next page . Ed)

Take away main message – “We need critical thinking skills more than ever”.

Please note that conference reports reflect the opinions and views of the presenters