Misinformation or disinformation: Exploring cyber related risk of social media personas

The project will explore online personas on social media to develop new techniques to mitigate misinformation and disinformation. A problem with existing mitigation tools is that noise is abundant on social media, making it difficult to find those with malicious intent. Using open-source intelligence, we will study this intention by exploring user behaviour across multiple social media platforms, considering consistency and different online personas. The study will focus on a result-orientated analysis to uncover those engaging in misinformation/ disinformation noise. We can then separate this noise from the real threat of targeted disinformation, aiming to influence the opinion of social media users. This technique can extend beyond the exploration of noise, such as looking at the radicalisation from soft content to more extreme content, possibly through different platforms with lesser moderation. It could also lead to developing a weighting scale to categorise influence, considering which users are riskier due to their reach and content.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity will train over 55 experts in multi-disciplinary aspects of cybersecurity, from engineering to crime science and public policy.

Short term impacts are associated with the research outputs of the 55+ research projects that will be undertaken as part of the doctoral studies of CDT students. Each project will tackle an important cybersecurity problem, propose and evaluate solutions, interventions and policy options. Students will publish those in international peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate those through blog posts and material geared towards decision makers and experts in adjacent fields. Through industry placements relating to their projects, all students will have the opportunity to implement and evaluate their ideas within real-world organizations, to achieve short term impact in solving cybersecurity problems.

In the longer term graduates of the CDT will assume leading positions within industry, goverment, law enforcement, the third sector and academia to increase the capacity of the UK in being a leader in cybersecurity. From those leadership positions they will assess options and formulate effective interventions to tackle cybercrime, secure the UK's infrastructure, establish norms of cooperation between industries and government to secure IT systems, and become leading researcher and scholars further increasing the UK's capacity in cybersecurity in the years to come. The last impact is likely to be significant give that currently many higher education training programs do not have capacity to provide cybersecurity training at undergraduate or graduate levels, particularly in non-technical fields.

The full details of our plan to achieve impact can be found in the "Pathways to Impact" document.