This week has been wild. SMAT and our work has become very popular in the wake of the assault on the US Capitol. As a result I’ve been interviewed or featured in numerous articles: TechCrunch on P2P: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/twitters-vision-of-decentralization-could-also-be-the-far-rights-internet-endgame/ USA Today re SMAT and antifa conspiracies: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/01/12/how-antifa-conspiracy-theory-traveled-fringe-floor-congress/6620908002/ MIT online investigations: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/14/1015931/how-to-be-an-ethical-online-investigator-activist/ Scholarly pre-print on our paper “An Early Look at the Parler Online Social Network”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03820 More incoming as well!

This article outlines server vulnerability which revealed the email logs of people at the center of qanon, child sexual abuse websites, multiple mass shootings, and ultimately the attempted coup of the US capitol. I also did a thread about it on twitter here.

The SMAT team is excited to announce that it has released an interactive Twitter politicians network graph. The Mozilla article releasing it can be found here and the direct link to the app is here.

My big series with Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right called “How COVID and Syria conspiracies introduce fascism to the left: The red-brown media ecosystem” have been released. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 and a Twitter thread summarizing them.

In coordination with this Mozilla announcement, we have launched version 1 of the Social Media Analysis Toolkit (SMAT)! I also did a thread about the launch on Twitter. Here’s an infographic about general workflows with SMAT.

Very proud to release this in-depth historical and modern day peer-reviewed study entitled: Confronting Eco-Fascism Means Grappling with Complex Systems co-written with Alexander Reid-Ross. Abstract: The white-supremacist Christchurch and El Paso shooter who he influenced both promoted ecological and anti-imperialist tropes in their manifestos. While this appears contradictory to the fascist project they pursued to its ultimate end, this article offers an explanatory framework for the representation of such ideological

We presented at the Cyber-Social Threats workshop at the 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media and had our paper outlining the open-source investigation potential of SMAT for researchers, journalists, and activists published.