The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) provides pioneering technology, research, and analysis to identify and forecast cyber-social threats targeting individuals, organizations, and communities. The NCRI is committed to empowering partners to become proactive in protecting themselves against false narratives that create rifts of distrust that impact institutions, capital markets, public health, and safety.
NCRI Featured in News in the
U.S. and Around the World
Relied upon for subject matter expertise, NCRI helps inform public understanding of emerging threats in the cyber social domain.
Resource to the World’s
Leading Universities
The world’s leading colleges and universities benefit from access to NCRI’s proprietary ingest engine to support data-driven social media research initiatives.
Proprietary Platform
NCRI’s proprietary platform intelligently processes and classifies open-source social media data and:
- Generates more than half a billion data queries and more than 1.3 million unique visitors per month
- Is the most comprehensive platform available today for social media pattern recognition and research
- Is used by over 370 universities around the world and is cited in more than one thousand peer-reviewed research articles.
Intelligent People
Our expert team of data scientists, research analysts, social scientists, and global intelligence professionals, skillfully analyze and interpret the data collected to forecast emerging threats and make strategic recommendations for action.
Trusted by America’s
Leading Brands
Companies and organizations around the world trust the NCRI to help them be proactive in protecting their brand equity.
NCRI in the News
Spreading Misinformation About the COVID Vaccines
Joel Finkelstein, NCRI founder appeared on 60 minutes to discuss that QAnon had “rebranded” since President Trump left office and that followers are now doubling down on misinformation about COVID vaccines and masks.
Russian disinformation campaigns are trying to sow distrust of COVID vaccines, study finds
Russian propagandists and Internet trolls are increasingly targeting companies with disinformation campaigns that are intended to damage their corporate reputations and stir public animosity.
That’s according to new research published Friday by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a non-profit that studies the spread of misinformation and deception on social media like Facebook and Twitter. The report’s findings are important because they highlight “a trend that disinformation is now being used as a means of economic warfare,” said NCRI lead intelligence analyst Alex Goldenberg.
Iran Steps up Efforts to Sow Discord Inside the U.S.
Iranian state actors are intensifying their disinformation campaign on social media to spread discord and anti-Semitic tropes inside the U.S., two U.S. intelligence officials say.
Featured NCRI Reports
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11/6/23 – The Corruption of the American Mind: How Foreign Funding in U.S. Higher Education by Authoritarian Regimes, Widely Undisclosed, Predicts Erosion of Democratic Norms and Antisemitic Incidents on Campus
A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.
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11/2/23 – Bots and Inauthentic Coordinated Propaganda Networks Extensively Targets Celebrities and Influencers Online Amidst Ongoing War
As the conflict between Israel and Hamas intensifies, social media platforms are increasingly awash with bots and coordinated propaganda. Celebrities and influencers, given their expansive reach, frequently find themselves caught in these digital campaigns. Orchestrated online tactics—originating potentially from individuals, groups, or state actors—are increasingly seeking to leverage these well known personalities and accounts to…
Introducing Network Contagion Labs
NC Labs partners with major universities to create the nation’s foremost training/internship program for the paradigm of cyber-social threat identification and forecasting.
NC Labs has established a virtual, multidisciplinary, open source intelligence laboratory that trains the next generation to:
- Investigate and identify emerging threats in the social cyber domain in the new field of open source intelligence.
- Deploy data-driven computational methods to forecast emerging threats and procure deeper online threat intelligence.
NC Labs has a dedicated team to fully design, curate and administer coursework as a certified and recognized leader around the world in OSINT training.
