Bravo Stream Team Summaries

GOGOGOGO FOR IT - William & Mary

We found that today’s problem is twofold, concerning the community and the overall environment. Specifically, we propose one program for each. Our education program first aims at enhancing college students’ abilities of anticipating and discerning disinformation.We develop a web that provides online courses on identification and coping strategies of disinformation and an app for group support and discussion. After targeting college students at first, we will expand our education program to K12 and the general public. On the other hand, we have the tri-collaboration program: incorporating private companies of social media, civic organizations with NATO political experts. Besides, we will have an honor code against disinformation, encouraging and pressuring both private companies and  member countries to participate in our collaboration. Our programs' social benefits outweigh the economic expense, and we will promote cybersecurity in both the short term and long term.

SUper Tar Heels - UNC - Chapel Hill

First, to resolve the problem of disinformation, we encourage politicians and their team members to verify with their real names. For accounts without real-name verification, There would be a restriction for the content which include specific words. 

Secondly,we would build a machine learning model within three months to detect fake news，instead of the traditional way of detecting fake news, it detects real news. If an article is written in a similar way to a real news article, so if the score comes back really low, it might mean the article is fake, an opinion piece, or something other than a straightforward, facts-only news article.

Lastly, by using the TfidfVectorizer, we could identify the Term Frequency or the Inverse Document Frequency. Then we could read the data into a DataFrame and build a model to accurately classify a piece of news as REAL or FAKE.

California Maritime Academy - Cal Maritime

Within the realm of cyberspace, there are various challenges that are present. Within the case, an immediate challenge we identified was how to combat disinformation. Which would make the strategic objective to combat disinformation. As disinformation hinders NATO and its allies’ ability to deal with cyberthreats. 

Within a phased approach, the first phase that we would recommend ad campaigns to be done by NATO and to encourage major social media companies to spread awareness on misinformation. 

Phase two will be the establishment of the Disinformation combat center or DCC (Centre de lutte contre la désinformation). This will be a NATO funded open-source intelligence center tasked with sharing information on disinformation campaigns. DCC will partner with institutions such as the CCDCOE to share intelligence. This is a multi-year objective to develop. It will be the first of other NATO Fusion Centers tackling other aspects of Cyber Conflicts.

DSTCyber - University of Amsterdam; Boston University

goal diggers - University of St Andrews

We present a three-phase plan to play offense in the battle for cybersecurity. One, increase and improve a sustainable, relevant social media presence to engage young voters to support NATO and understand the threat of misinformation. Two, use this heightened social media presence to establish a threat to attackers, and develop a task force composed of member states to make NATO the go-to source for cybersecurity information, as well as publish information for both governments and intelligence agencies in addition to common civilians. Lastly, on a more technical level, NATO should use its member states’ resources to monetarily de-incentivise hacks and collectively develop and apply AI technology to combat future cyberattacks by facilitating partnerships between governments and industries. Ultimately it is NATO’s responsibility to use technology to create a standard across its member states and sense and detect information ahead of time so as to prevent future attacks.

Sparring Partner - George Mason University

NATO first should acknowledge that it has limited options when it comes to counter misinformation through collective action. The answer to this challenge requires national legislation on cyber law, cooperation with the private sector, and domestic public campaigns to promote a healthy civil discourse.

However, NATO can create a special task force to strengthen the resources of member states when defending vulnerable events like elections from outside interference.

An active misinformation campaign can be countered through early detection of trends and similarities. All election related contents, for example, can get labels with links to official sources of information. Experience of the Covid-19 is helpful.

Prevention can also be achieved through deterrence and setting precedent. Non-state actors that facilitate state sponsored misinformation and cyber attacks should be held responsible personally through different mechanisms ranging from law enforcement to sanctions.

Cyber Blazers - Hood College

We want NATO to take action in creating a new branch to manage and control the spread of disinformation on social media platforms. This branch will be modeled off of the already existing approach of NATO’s response to the spread of misinformation regarding Covid-19. We will use the understand and engage functions to analyze information and take action if needed. This committee can be built off of this model and expanded in order to meet the needs of current situations around the world.  Social media plays an extremely large role in how today’s news in perceived. We want to reach out to social media platforms and ensure that they are proactive in flagging misinformation in posts. We also want to be sure that we are not wasting time on posts that have an immensely low following and reach due to the overwhelming spread of false information from larger accounts. 

Belt & Road - Tufts University; University of Oxford; London School of Economics

A platform that provides information on disinformation for the purpose of improving situational awareness and readiness.

We help NATO allies and social media firms: we provide reports and strategies for current and future disinformation 

We help the general public: we provide interesting and attractive content to attract users on social media, including videos, songs, stories.

We collaborate with not only independent NGOs, academics, and think tanks, but also stand-up comedians, artists, singers, and actors to combat disinformation.