Platform Accountability
Information Manipulation
Computational Social Science

Monitoring of the Doppelgänger Operation

From propaganda ads on Meta, to spoofed news outlet articles relayed on X.

Leveraging the methodology used to detect coordinated inauthentic behaviors, I monitor the Doppelgänger campaign.

  • Ahead of the 2024 EU Parliamentary Election, we identified Doppelgänger ads targeting Italy and Poland, in addition to the historic targets, France and Germany.
  • Doppelgänger ads disseminated propaganda and fake articles supporting far-right candidates in France.
  • Among the ads uploaded by the threat actors, I detected a screenshot of their internal VK Teams, providing valuable insights into their operations.
  • Monitoring and detecting new spoofed outlets: historia.fyi, spektrum.cfd closermag.eu, psychologies.top,
Leaked Sreenshot Read Follow-Up Report

Politoscope: Observatory of French Political Twittersphere

Ahead of the European and French elections, let's take a look at political exchanges on X.

By collecting over a million retweets of French political figures, I depicted the landscape of political exchanges on X. Filtering by topic reveals markedly different landscapes. Emmanuel Macron's party aligns closely with the Ecologists on the discussion of the Russian war in Ukraine but is completely opposed on the issue of the Israel's war on Gaza, where it is closer to the Far-right.

See the landscape

Meta's Ads: Scams & Pro-Russian Propaganda

Analyzing over 200 millions ads approved by Meta reveal majors shortcomings in their moderation.

Thanks to the Digital Services Act Article 39, with AI Forensics, we tens of millions of advertisements run in the EU. By training language models to detect political advertisements, we assessed Meta's moderation, and documented:

  • Widespread Non-compliance: Only a small fraction of undeclared political ads are caught by Meta's moderation system.
  • Ineffective Moderation: 60% of ads moderated by Meta do not adhere to their own guidelines concerning political advertising.
  • Significant Reach: A specific pro-Russian propaganda campaign reached over 38 million users in France and Germany, with most ads not being identified as political in a timely manner.
  • Rapid Adaptation: The influence operation has adeptly adjusted its messaging to major geopolitical events to further its narratives.
Read Full Paper Read the Report

Browsing Amazon’s Book Bubbles

Examination of algorithmic recommendations on Amazon's Belgian and French bookstores.

As a result of a collaboration between AI Forensics and CheckFirst, we reveal that:

  • Amazon's search results fail to provide a pluralism of views and convey misleading information, specifically on public health, immigration, gender, and climate change.
  • Amazon's recommender systems trap users into tight book communities, which are hard to exit, and some of these communities contain books endorsing climate denialism, conspiracy theories, and conservative views.
  • Amazon fails to enforce its policies, resulting in the widespread availability of sexually explicit content without age restrictions.

We urged regulators to ensure that Amazon comprehensively addresses the impact of its systems on the dissemination and amplification of disinformation content.

Read Full Paper Read the Report Network Visualizer

Horus: Crowdsourced Audit of Twitter & Youtube

By collecting what platforms recommend to users, I characterize their inner workings.

To characterize the recommender systems of Facebook, Google Search, YouTube, and Twitter, I developed a browser add-on that collects algorithmically curated content, as well as user interactions. This new, longitudinal study, running since Fall 2022, has enabled numerous studies, such as an audit of Twitter's 'For You' feed and characterizing the differences between YouTube's API and what real users are exposed to.

Read the first paper See the project page

Climatoscope: Observatory of Climate Change Discussions on Twitter

Social macroscope for a better understanding of the circulation of climate change narratives.

In March 2023, prior to the release of the IPCC AR6, we leveraged extensive databases containing over 500 million tweets, curated by the amazing Maziyar Panahi, to analyze the global discussion on climate change.

  • The global climate change debate on Twitter is highly polarized, with about 30% climate denialists among Twitter accounts addressing climate issues from 2019 to 2022, rising to over 50% in Elon Musk's Twitter.
  • The denialist community has 71% more inauthentic accounts compared to pro-climate communities.
Read the Report

Welcome.

I'm Paul Bouchaud

My pronouns are they/them.

I am a researcher conducting adversarial audits of online platforms to decipher their inner workings and detect information manipulation campaigns.

Through crowdsourced data donation, large-scale web scraping, and reverse-engineering of internal APIs, I collect and analyze original datasets to characterize platform and actor behaviors.

Based in Paris, I am completing my PhD at the Complex Systems Institute of Paris and at EHESS. I collaborate with AI Forensics, a European non-profit that investigates influential and opaque algorithms such as those of YouTube, Google, TikTok or Amazon.