Look What You Made Me Do: How Coordinated Narratives Engineer Outrage
It All Begins Here
Part 1: Information Integrity in Cultural Spaces
Watch this space
Monetising Misogyny: Engagement Farming and the Tactics Behind Incendiary Online Content
It All Begins Here
I recently contributed to a new article for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) as part of its Gender and Online Violent Extremism series, published in alignment with the UN’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence.
The piece examines how misogynistic influencers and online extremist actors exploit commercial digital systems that reward hostility, outrage, and rapid engagement. These dynamics are not incidental. Platform incentives often amplify deliberately incendiary content, creating pathways that can move users from general hostility towards more explicit ideological narratives and, in some cases, violent extremism.
Our analysis focuses on engagement farming and monetisation strategies, exploring how misogyny and violence against women are leveraged to generate visibility, profit, and influence at scale. These practices expose users to increasingly extreme content while obscuring the economic drivers that sustain it.
Understanding these mechanisms is critical for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners working on online safety, extremism, and information risk. Without clearer insight into how commercial incentives intersect with ideological mobilisation, responses will continue to address symptoms rather than underlying structures.
The article, co-authored with Fabio Daniele, Laura Bucher, and Giampaolo Servida, reflects ongoing work to better understand how gendered harms operate within contemporary digital ecosystems.
📄 Read the full article here
Sensing The Signal Podcast
It All Begins Here
I recently joined Sensing the Signal, a bi-weekly podcast produced by Atreides, for a conversation on disinformation and its implications for national security, technology, and intelligence.
Disinformation is a pervasive and growing threat. Its impacts are often subtle, cumulative, and difficult to detect, yet they shape how societies understand risk, trust information, and make decisions. In the episode, we explored how disinformation operates within complex information environments, why it remains so difficult to analyse at scale, and what this means for analysts and decision-makers working across public and private sectors.
A central theme of our discussion was the need for shared standards and frameworks. Without common approaches to defining, assessing, and investigating disinformation, efforts remain fragmented and complex to compare or scale. Developing structured, evidence-based methodologies is essential if we are to move from reactive responses to more durable forms of resilience.
What gives me optimism is the growing community of practitioners, researchers, and policymakers working collaboratively to bridge these gaps. While the challenge is significant, there is real momentum to build a more coherent knowledge base and to improve how we understand and respond to information risk.
I’m grateful to Terry Pattar for a thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation, and to the team at Atreides for creating space for these discussions.
🎧 Listen to the episode here