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The viral appeal of TikTok as a platform for widespread activism was most notable in November 2019 when 17-year-old Feroza Aziz (user @getmefamouspartthree) posted a video that appeared to be a makeup tutorial but quickly switched to highlighting China’s mistreatment of Uighur Muslims. For instance, IST Research conducted a deep-dive analysis into TikTok videos distributed by Cambodian user @manleyfischer873. IST Research downloaded all videos associated with TikTok user @manleyfischer873 and their corresponding metadata. As we are conditioned to evolve concurrent with the digital ecosystem; our team of analysts and data scientists is investigating data collection opportunities across various internet-based programs–to include TikTok, historical Instagram data, WeChat, and Weibo.

We have spent the last 3 years talking about foreign meddling in our elections and the pending battle against bot farms, coordinated adversarial information campaigns, stolen data, email hacks, and all of the goodies we experienced in 2016. At IST Research, we have decided that a very important first step is a robust characterization of the information environment surrounding the election and then flexible and timely detection of anomalies within that environment. In that vein, two weeks ago I decided to take a look at the online state of things surrounding the 2020 Presidential election. In order to bring the volume of information to a reasonable size, I used multi-word Twitter keyword rules (e.g., “Donald Trump Florida 2020” and “ewarren Wisconsin”).

Dr. Sam Blazek, our Director of Research & Development, was honored to speak last week at “Code 8.7: Using Computational Science and AI to End Modern Slavery. Technology is changing the way that researchers and practitioners can both detect and counter modern slavery, and IST’s efforts in this area include new algorithmic approaches to estimating the prevalence of modern slavery as well as providing AI-driven decision support to counter-human trafficking professionals. On top of that, sensors are proliferating at an exponential rate, generating even more data ranging in scope from global geospatial imagery to detailed individual personal health information. Our organizational mission is to build innovative approaches to finding and communicating with the people that we need most urgently to communicate with – the world’s many hard-to-reach populations – and to manage the fusion of large numbers of data streams to provide a comprehensive picture to decision-makers and operators.

If you follow IST Research and the work we do you probably know we have a passion for combining technology, tools, data and tradecraft for the benefit of vulnerable populations around the world. From 2014 – 2017 we were members of a research team that worked on DARPA’s Memex Program where we developed domain specific search technology and pointed our technology development at the problem of human trafficking. As our researchers and software engineers worked to create technologies, a team of analysts conducted tireless investigations of data we began to discover. On Dec 13, 2016, I sent the full investigation on to my friend Rob, who is a special agent at the FBI.