Exposing Facebook's Failure to Stop Viral Disinformation & Hate Speech

The core challenge ahead of the US 2020 election was to tackle and expose the spread of mis/disinformation and hate speech going viral on social media.

As the investigative lead of the anti-disinformation team at AVAAZ.org, a non-profit with ver 50M members worldwide, Flora developed a sophisticated yet simple OSINT research methodology that could be easily replicated worldwide and managed an incredibly talented and diverse global team that included 20+ professionals such as data analysts, researchers, lawyers, and journalists. The team was tasked with investigating disinformation campaigns, tracking their sources, and publishing compelling investigations. One report mapped that only 100 pieces of disinformation content on Facebook had over 84M views within weeks. 


Allied with strong advocacy and media strategies, the reports made headlines worldwide, pushing the platforms to respond and act upon the findings. Thanks to a worldwide media strategy just one report got coverage worth over USD 15M and covered in over 10 languages, including TIMEPOLITICO, and The New York Times. Such global and massive exposure of several disinformation campaigns meant thousands of harmful content were removed, which helped to protect the integrity of the democratic process. 

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