is to increase the understanding of cognitive warfare and its effects, which will lead to more effective prevention and mitigation strategies and countermeasures to increase security among nations and within the NATO alliance. The outcome of the work will support addressing the Warfare Development Initiatives stated in the NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept. Cognitive warfare is classified as the sixth warfighting domain beside land, sea, air, space, and cyber.

Cognitive threats through misinformation, disinformation, bots, and artificial intelligence (AI) have already become a key element in conflicts between the U.S., China, Russia, and Ukraine. For example, in the recent conflicts in Ukraine, a current issue is how countries like the U.S. or organizations like NATO fund and support troops on the ground from afar.

Agarwal, who is also the founding director of the Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies () Research Center at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, traveled to Madrid, Spain, to present at the symposium on Nov. 13-14, 2023. His paper is entitled, 鈥淒eveloping Socio-computational Approaches to Mitigate Socio-cognitive Security Threats in a Multi-platform Multimedia-rich Information Environment.鈥�

In his presentation, Agarwal noted that socio-cognitive threats are increasingly becoming a collective phenomenon and central in online information environments utilizing multimedia. His study enhances situation awareness by using real-life datasets from COVID-19, the Indo-Pacific region, and participation in NATO exercises dating back to 2013 to develop algorithms that detect, examine, evaluate, measure, and predict cognitive threats like adversarial information campaigns.

Agarwal鈥檚 research informs policymakers on how NATO and other affiliated countries can effectively combat the effects of these adversarial tactics and new technologies

鈥淧ropaganda disseminated through social media could potentially be used to persuade susceptible targets to disrupt or delay military operations through protests or other 鈥榥on-lethal resistance,鈥欌�� he said. 鈥淣arratives can be easily manipulated and influenced by bots, trolls, and other influence operation tactics, techniques, and procedures.鈥�

Moreover, Agarwal also highlighted the inherent dangers of these adversarial information campaigns, pointing out that 鈥渕ost users of social media cannot or will not differentiate between legitimate and non-legitimate accounts.鈥�

鈥淪ince such influence operation tactics, techniques, and procedures can be employed clandestinely in a low-cost, low-risk context, military leaders can expect to encounter an increased amount of adversary-generated, AI-amplified social media-driven propaganda,鈥� he said.

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The chapter has been published in the new book, “.鈥� The book, edited by Kavita Batra and Manoj Sharma, addresses the growing use and importance of social media in conducting and disseminating research findings and covers an array of issues from cyberbullying to diversity and inclusion.

Written by health educators and practitioners for health educators and practitioners, this book is a timely resource for public health practitioners, professors, students, and researchers.

Kanekar said he became interested in the chapter, 鈥淓thical, privacy, and confidentiality issues in the use and application of social media,鈥� because he was originally going to be a co-editor on the book.

鈥淚 thought this would be an interesting topic because there is always a concern about privacy and confidentiality on social media, but the topic has not been addressed a lot in public health research. There aren’t a lot of guidelines. It鈥檚 been interesting and quite challenging as well. I spoke to Dr. Joseph Otundo, and he also thought it would be nice to write on this subject.鈥�

Kanekar and Otundo conducted much research on what guidelines and rules academic institutions and Institutional Review Boards (IRB) use to govern ethics, privacy, and confidentiality for research conducted using social media as well as privacy rules on social media platforms.

鈥淪ocial media is so dynamic, and more and more people are using social media for research,鈥� Otundo said. 鈥淚f you look at the policies of many universities, they are slightly behind what we are experiencing today in terms of technology. They need to catch up with the realities of social media.鈥�

The 22-page book chapter contains case studies on public health research, review questions, and websites with resources on the topic.

鈥淥ur chapter is on a complex topic, and we try to address as many aspects of that as possible,鈥� Kanekar said. 鈥淲hat is considered public and private information on social media? When do you need permission to use this information in research? More and more people are using social media for research. At the end of this project, we feel there is a need for more guidelines from universities and IRBs to help people navigate how to conduct research using social media.鈥�

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