Digital Disinformation: Computational Analysis of Culture and Conspiracy Theories in Russia and Eastern Europe

This book uniquely combines the authors’ personal experiences, deep cultural and professional experience of living and working in Russia and the former USSR, and interest and experience with language and computational analysis, to shed light on a highly contemporary question: what is motivating conflict and unrest in Russia and its surrounding countries? How does Russian government suppression of information manifest in practice today, and how does it fit into the historical cultural pattern for Russia? The authors take a computational look at social and traditional media in the original languages, from Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and the English-speaking world, to glean insights and separate fact from fiction.

This book helps readers interested in Eastern Europe to ‘take the temperature’ of the region today, but it is also of interest to readers in the policy and analysis community, because it offers a template, an analytical ‘how-to’ guide which aims to follow in the footsteps of CIA author Richards Heuer’s ‘Psychology of Intelligence Analysis’, to show how state-of-the-art computational analysis techniques could be applied to similar problems in other topic areas, with the human analyst and computational techniques each working together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Peter Chew is the President and owner of Galisteo Consulting Group, Inc., a consulting company in Albuquerque, New Mexico with a focus on national security. His specialty is in data analytics. Peter has previously worked in a research capacity for the U.S. national laboratories, and as an auditor for Price Waterhouse, where his assignments included field audits of Russian oil and gas companies. Peter’s education is a D.Phil. in Russian computational linguistics at the University of Oxford (where he was a recipient of a British Academy scholarship) and a B.A. in Russian and Polish language and literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (University of London), where he earned distinctions in linguistics. Peter has authored and co-authored many articles, primarily in the field of computational linguistics. In the area of finance, where he has also applied his analytical skills, Peter is also a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Fraud Examiner. Peter is fluent in Russian and competent in Polish.