51. Carl Miller - On Information Warfare, Social Media and pro-Russian influence campaigns in BRICS

My guest today is Carl Miller who is the co-founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos. For the past nine years, he's been building new machine learning-driven approaches to robustly study online life and has written over 20 major studies spanning online electoral interference, radicalisation, digital politics, conspiracy theories, cyber-crime, and internet governance. 

His debut book, The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab was published in 2018 and won the 2019 Transmission Prize. He presents programmes for the BBC's flagship technology show, Click and has written for Wired, New Scientist, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian.

He joined me to discuss Information Warfare, cyber-attacks, weaponisation of social media and other challenges, and to do so with a particular focus on the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Some of the topics we discussed are:

• Carl’s entry into this field
• Terrorists as conspiracy theorists
• Profiling a conspiracy theorist
• Understanding data
• On the ‘Death of Gods’
• The power of open-source intelligence
• Emergence of information warfare
• Frictionless engagement and the Attention Economy
• TikTok and censoring of data
• Has Ukraine really won the Information War against Russia?
• Suspicious Pro-Russian influence operations in BRICS countries
• Background and methodology of the BRICS research
• Assessment of pro-Russian campaigns in BRICS countries
• Cost of attacking vs defending against information operations
• Risk of hubris

You can find out more about Carl and his work here, and you can see his recent research on pro-Russian influence operations in BRICS countries here.