Protecting your CX from threat actors.
Fake news and disinformation: these are new terms for age-old ideas. Even back around the turn of the 20th century, marketers were telling half-truths, bending and twisting narratives to influence perception. And believe it or not, it all started with tuna.
The fishing industry had been canning salmon for decades and wanted to build a market for other fish. So, turning to tuna and its mild “chicken of the sea” flavor, a cannery executive came up with a single line that pit tuna against salmon. Though it was a true statement, in just a few words, the executive was able to make canned salmon seem like an inferior product. Though the story is likely apocryphal, it’s an example of the power of disinformation. But you’ll have to listen in to find out what that one line of advertising was.
Now, in our developing media landscape where people have free rein to say whatever they want about your brand, it’s important to have some insurance against disinformation. That’s where Wasim Khaled, CEO of Blackbird.ai, comes in. We’re learning from him about sifting through potential risks to determine which ones are important, building reputational resiliency, and getting ahead of the game to prevent threats in the first place.
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"Executives come to us confused about the conversations they are being dragged into online. They don't understand why they're being targeted. Often, a large organization or a CEO is the perfect medium to spread a message further and faster by a threat actor. And that threat actor could be a nation-state, it could be a competitor, it could be a fringe group or some other entity that's trying to take down that organization.”
“These types of methodologies and hit jobs are mutating daily. When they hit, they really spread like a virus and they can drastically shift the public's perception about an organization, leader, politician, or even policy. And it's really something we think about as a cyber attack on human perception. Leadership today is simply not prepared.”
“The only difference between today's misinformation around anti-vax or any of the misinformation that used to spread around the world in the past is that today the power of social media to move messaging at immense speed and scale has made this instant and global. If there was one thing I could say about disinformation, it's not just about what is true or what is false, it's about narrative manipulation. And it's about manipulating people's beliefs based on their fears.”
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Time Stamps
*[0:03] How canned tuna took over the market
*[2:38] The catch
*[2:59] Intro
*[3:55] The growing sea of disinformation
*[5:49] Enter Wasim Khaled, CEO of Blackbird.ai
*[8:04] A CX leader’s worst nightmare
*[10:48] Getting ahead of the threat
*[14:58] What’s in it for the threat actors?
*[17:05] How misinformation can destroy a reputation
*[19:41] To respond or not to respond?
*[24:17] How Blackbird.ai does CX
*[28:41] Teaming up against disinformation
*[30:37] Outro
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Connect with Wasim on LinkedIn
Narrator: Light glints off the water as fishermen pull in cast after cast, the hull teeming with fish. The men yell to each other, working in twos, to lift each silvery catch on board. They’re tuna. Albacore, to be exact. And once all packed on shaved ice below deck, the ship would be on its way again, several days inland to the cannery.
Around the turn of the 20th century, salmon was popularly canned. But California fisheries were experimenting with another fish - tuna. The Pacific was teeming with them and canneries were seeing dollar signs. The president of the Southern California Fish Company, known only as Mr. Lapham, declared that, when cooked, tuna tasted much like chicken. Spurred on by this discovery, he and the company looked into preserving it.
But the tuna canneries had to compete with the salmon business.
Salmon was flying off the shelves.
Until one savvy executive at a cannery was determined to shift the tide.
They opened a can of pink salmon and compared it to their can of white tuna. A new slogan shot into his mind like a lightning bolt.
“Every modern family has tuna on the table. Freshly caught and nutritious. It’s the finest tuna, the cream of the catch. And it is guaranteed to NOT turn pink in the can!”
Guaranteed to not turn pink in a can. A brilliant stroke.
This was the tuna canning industry’s one-two-punch to the salmon trade. It made it sound like salmon was spoiling in the can, getting discolored, losing its freshness. Of course if you’ve ever had salmon, you know it’s naturally pink, can or no. The phrase preyed on the gullibility of the American public.
Yet it’s true. Tuna won’t turn pink in the can. So it’s not a lie, but it’s a twisted story to influence how the buyers perceive value. It’s a trick as old as time.
In fact, it’s the 20th century version of disinformation, a term we hear a lot today.
And modern disinformation is much more sinister than tuna.
In a world of infinite connectivity and media access, anyone can target you and manipulate your story.
Today we’re talking about how to protect your brand in our modern media landscape.
Oh one more thing. I haven’t told you the best part of our tuna story. This story never actually happened. I just lied to you. Let me tell you why.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about responding to disinformation and media manipulation. We talk about the advent of the tuna canning business and how it marketed its way to the top. In this episode we’ll hear from Wasim Khaled, CEO of Blackbird.ai about how he is pioneering AI technology to give companies peace of mind that they’re steering their own narrative ship.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Learn more at oracle.com/cx.
The tuna-salmon story has been told in a variety of ways over the years, but never confirmed. Per the good people at Snopes, the earliest telling of the story was in the 1940s. Another telling of the story is as follows:
There are two kinds of Alaska salmon: white and pink. The white was advertised as “guaranteed not to turn pink in the can!” Not to be outdone, the pink-salmon folks countered: “Guaranteed: No bleach used in processing!”
It is more of a marketing fable at this point, a clever way to illustrate positioning your product vs. your competition. But how many people believe that the story is true? Does anyone care that it isn’t?
So who knows if canned salmon’s loss of popularity continues even today because of the clever marketing story. We do know that a loss of reputation leaves lasting damage. And that often has financial implications.
We as CX leaders spend billions of dollars working on our brand. Our reputation is arguably the most important thing we have as a company.
And yet, there are people out there who want to destroy it. People who are far more evil than one of your competitors doing a campaign targeting your customers.
There is a new crop of bad actors who will attempt to destroy your company's brand for a variety of reasons - using disinformation. We wanted to learn more about disinformation, who these people are and how you can protect your reputation.
We’re bringing in Wasim Khaled, CEO of Blackbird.ai to help us do just that.
Wasim Khaled: Blackbird is a mission-driven technology startup that helps organizations detect and respond to disinformation and manipulation that very often today causes massive reputational and financial harm.
Narrator: Blackbird is a pioneer in this space, helping these companies understand the danger to their brand name, even as new threats are emerging. You know, our AI-driven disinformation and narrative intelligence platform is currently being used by Fortune 50s and governments to proactively manage what's really an entirely new world of threats and threat actors. And the way we like to kind of think about what we're doing and the technology is really that we provide clarity around what matters and what doesn't to an organization and how this disrupts our customer's story. And ultimately how their, how their audiences feel about them as a, as a company, right. Um, and you know, of course, The problem that we address is actually something we think of as, as quite existential. Um, in that disinformation is something we think of as the problem of our time, that touches upon whole other existential problems, whether you're thinking about climate change or social cohesion or healthcare, and a host of other issues that the world faces today, right. And so, um, you can think about those topics. They're actually really heated issues. And as a result, they can, they can act as a lightning rod of sorts for polarizing and manipulated messaging on, on hot button, digital content, which can influence social perception and consumer behavior. And so we really provide technologies, uh, and even sometimes education to our clients on how to really triage this new kind of threat landscape that exists in the world we all live in today.
Narrator: This problem represents a CX leader’s worst nightmare. Imagine you wake up one morning and thousands of so-called customers are tweeting at your corporate account, your CEO and other leaders that you are cancelled for something that you didn’t do.
Wasim Khaled: Executives come to us confused about the conversations that they're being dragged into online. They don't understand why they're being targeted or they're being pulled in. And one of the things I often tell them, um, is that often a large organization or a CEO is the perfect medium to spread a message further and faster by a threat actor. And that threat actor could be a better nation state. It could be a competitor, it could be a fringe group or some other entity that's trying to take down that organization. Um, and the corporation is the perfect medium, though, to spread any message further and faster. Whether it's, you know, something about anti-vax. Or whether it's something about, um, you know, supply chain issues. I mean, in fact, recently Heineken launched a commercial depicting some senior citizens dancing in a nightclub with the tagline, "The night belongs to the vaccinated," right. And within 24 hours, there were anti-vaxxer groups and partisan groups just piling on to push a Heineken boycott, which started spreading rapidly across Twitter. And so, you know, these types of methodologies and hit jobs are mutating daily. When they hit, they really spread like a virus and they can drastically shift the public's perception about that organization or leader, politician, or even policy. And it's really something we think about as a cyber attack on human perception. And leadership today in these organizations, they're simply not prepared. And have not been preparing for how big this problem has gotten, how big it's going to get in the next two to five to 10 years as these threat actors now start becoming more capable with even better technologies to do their work. And disinformation for hire is starting to become a booming business. And so the problem is just going to get bigger and larger scale. And it's just really recently that leadership is waking up to the fact that they have to address these things proactively.
Narrator: Blackbird doesn’t just work to address disinformation and fake news after the fact. Their threat and perception intelligence platform works in real time and at scale to detect threats before they can do damage. Back around the turn of the 20th century, if Blackbird were around, chances are they would have detected and fought back against the tuna cannery’s ad. But today, Wasim says the state of disinformation is dire. And they have bigger fish to fry.
Wasim Khaled: We're living in a, kind of an information landscape right now that is, um, completely devoid of trust. Um, and, and this is a result of our ecosystem being saturated with so much noise and fabricated false hoods and highly polarized conversations that, um, you know, the notion of truth and the notion of what is reality, um, in terms of what people consume are actually becoming really, really fuzzy. And so we see people essentially either doing one of two things. They kind of check out and say, look, I don't even want to try to figure this out. Or they become, you know, misinformed. And so if there was one thing I could say about disinformation, it's not just about what is true or what is false. It's about narrative manipulation. And it's about manipulating peoples' beliefs based on their fears, and a host of other things. But it's really about stories' digital narratives, which really present the ultimate form of, of asymmetric threat. Uh, meaning it's very low cost it, um, it doesn't have anything to really battle it today. It's fast paced. It's extensive. And what's really scary about the landscape today is it has the power to fundamentally alter our beliefs, right. In the next five years, in the next 10 years, we're going to see AI-powered offensive disinformation weaponry that are going to be operating smarter campaigns, scaled content, will be more humanlike and it'll really become impossible to address these problems without sophisticated defensive technology that is also powered by artificial intelligence and counter measurements to be able to kind of match that threat.
Narrator: So unfortunately things are just getting started.
Wasim Khaled: Many organizations have not yet even begun to understand how bad this problem is or how bad it's going to get, right. Or the fact that they have to kind of utilize significantly better tools to get an understanding of what's actually happening today. Uh, I guess the best thing I could kind of say here is that the current media monitoring tools that were built to support, say, marketing and customer support teams. And you kind of hear things like, uh, the field is really called social listening, and it's exactly that. These systems were built to passively listen, and they were built for marketers and customer support individuals and, and they use these tools to identify key trends and conversations. And, and, and the way they do that is really by just kind of aggregating likes and shares and mentions and comments. Um, and, and these are still important criteria when assessing things like virality or mentions, but they really don't do anything to inform or protect a company or a brand from the new information risks that exist today. Every online attack feels like an emergency and there's no way to identify or prioritize which battle the fight first. And so today we see organizations kind of feeling like they're bringing a knife to a gunfight, right. And we've actually heard an executive use those exact words. And, and many of them now realize they currently lack sufficient tool sets or even knowledge to identify the root sources and drivers of disinformation, uh, based threats.
Narrator: So what do these threat actors want? What’s in it for them?
Wasim Khaled: Well, you know, the goals are pretty diverse, right. Typically what, what drives these types of attacks is that there's usually some sort of financial, political or personal gain to be had by the ones that are, that are pushing out these campaigns. And it's to drive public scrutiny and perception at large against the topic. And it's not always a company. Sometimes it might be an attack on a sector. Sometimes it might be on a ingredient in a supply chain. Sometimes it's coming from fringe networks and websites like 4Chan and 8Chan, which are kind of extremist message boards, where it might be a challenge between a crowdsource group of, you know, kind of anarchists, right. But sometimes it's a nation state that is trying to shift the public's perception against, you know, their local or federal governments. Or against, um, vaccines, right. Some of these things are actually quite long game. It's not about, hey, let's launch a tweet and see if it goes viral about company X. It could very much be tens of thousands of accounts, sometimes hundreds of thousands of accounts that are commenting on each other's posts, that are sharing content that, you know, kind of chips away at the brand or the organization. Um, you know, in a, in a kind of death by a thousand paper cuts, uh, type, um, approach, versus like a nuclear attack.
Narrator: All of this also affects customer perception. Companies might work really hard to build trust with their customer base. If that trust is jeopardized by, say, bots or trolls posting negative reviews, all of that hard work goes out the window.
Wasim Khaled: There's comments, um, you know, on websites and even governments have problems with this when they're trying to like pull public sentiment on, you know, regulation. And, um, you know, this happened, um, around the, uh, net neutrality, um, scenario, when the FCC took public sentiment, it was found later, um, that most of the comments, tens of thousands of comments on their website were actually just bot networks. Um, you know, and at the time they were not aware of this, right. Um, if you, if you want to think about corporate risk through the lens of kind of customer experience, um, you have to look no further than, you know, kind of ESG risk that every organization is looking at environmental, social and governance risks spending literally tens of billions of dollars, uh, what's likely going to be trillion dollar kind of, uh, industry, um, looking at everything from social issues like diversity, diversity, uh, in health and safety or income and inequality, um, to environmental problems like climate change. Resource, you mentioned supply chain. Pollution, right? And you could go beyond that, just general societal cohesion and trust in our institutions, trust in one another, in our neighbors and our families, right. And so all of these areas are impacted in major ways, from the corruption of our information streams. Um, you know, why would you take the risk, um, and the cost of only doing, say, a cyber attack and trying to get to a company or an executive's data. That takes some effort, right, to break in and see if there is any kind of information there you can use, uh, to, say, um, damage them, when you can fabricate it, which costs near nothing. And you can spread it through platforms, um, that essentially can't catch it until it's really too late, right. The amount of damage that can be done through an attack, like this is almost kind of sky-is-the-limit, depending on how creative the organization at the other end creating those campaigns really are.
Narrator: This isn’t just a CX problem. Companies spend billions of dollars to protect sensitive information from cyber security attacks. And yet this new wave of misinformation warfare can render those protections obsolete. The attackers can simply make something up that isn’t true. And the company faces a difficult decision. Do you respond?
Wasim Khaled: Then it's all about how do you react? What is the appropriate response? Do you react to at all? So suppose, you know, you believe, based on, you know, some sort of other system you're using, that, you know, your audiences or the public at large is really riled up against something that your organization is doing. You're going to want to react to that pretty quick. But if you know, like 80% of that are, say, driven by bots, you may not want to react. You may not want to draw attention to this, you know, fabricated story. Um, especially if, um, you know, in some cases you see a narrative that just hasn't gotten the traction. Um, you know, and, and those are the types of things that we really help with, how do you then identify opportunities to kind of create and build content that resonates with your audiences and with your customers, which can also really act as proactive inoculation or further spread of that harmful narrative? And so, you know, one of the things that that Blackbird really wants to enable is for organizations to kind of maintain agency of their own story.
Narrator: So let’s get into the nuts and bolts of how Blackbird.ai works. How do they scorecard the kinds of threats a company faces? How do they determine the most urgent threats?
Wasim Khaled: Blackbird is a disinformation and narrative intelligence software platform that uses AI at scale to process billions of posts from social media, news, and dark web to extract five categories of signal that act as a ranking mechanism for harmful information risk. These five signals are narratives, which are evolving conversations or storylines, networks, which are relationships between users and the concepts they share, cohorts, which are communities of like-minded individuals or tribes, manipulation, which can distinguish between authentic and inauthentic behavior, and deception, which are the active hoaxes that can impact user perceptions. Now we process all five of these signals in tandem and in real time to generate a composite risk index that can detect and even predict harmful narratives before they can damage an organization or manipulate public perception. Now, from a leadership perspective, our platform could output a scorecard report to provide key insights to a board of directors, for example, that are of high interest. For example, if there were manipulation campaigns that were driving public scrutiny around ESG topics or something that had impacted stock price, it would get flagged. From a comms perspective, our dashboard lets analysts explore narrative mapping, network visualizations, bot networks, actor, intelligence, and much more to drill into the details necessary to set up counter messaging and other types of mitigation.
Narrator: Since Blackbird is working in a new space, their customer persona is not clearly defined yet.
Wasim Khaled: So, so we're, we're an early stage tech startup in a, in a pretty early stage sector, right. The, the market really hasn't been defined yet. It's unchartered waters, it's blue ocean. In some ways there's no customer journey mapped yet. And the buyer personas, are somewhat fuzzy in developing. Although it's much sharper than a couple of years ago.
Narrator: And Since Blackbird’s buyer persona is not clearly defined, they need to double down on customer service. In the world of AI filled with jargon, and vaporware....he wants his team to focus on education and empathy.
Wasim Khaled: So we show a lot of empathy to these kind of new organizations for companies that are not used to being this, um, off their game. Um, you know, I do think that if, look at the disinformation space in our general kind of society today. There's not enough empathy. And, uh, and so these problems can be daunting. It's new waters. And so we want to be mindful there, is just be considerate of, of these problems. And we really want to be helpful and help to educate, right? So we want our customers to be able to lean on us, to help them make sense of something that we have spent many, many years learning and researching on.
Narrator: Wasim’s main piece of advice for companies wanting to prevent disinformation is clear.
Wasim Khaled: I think the key thing here is get ahead of it, right? The need to be proactive, I would say organizations must prioritize efforts to understand the new information landscape. Uh, they have to understand that information-driven threats can swiftly impact trust. And, you know, within that trust bucket, I'm talking about things like brand loyalty, company perception, overall reputation. So in particular, executives have to really reevaluate their current approaches to better understand their audiences. And they don't have to blow everything up and throw it away. People get concerned about that kind of thing, but they need to introduce new approaches, new technologies, in addition to what they're doing. To anticipate really mitigative action to identify not only the, the threats, but to try to lean into positive momentum, wherever possible. So, you know, if, if organizations have the ability to challenge these kinds of deeply polarizing and hostile information challenges at their source, it really actually means more opportunity than ever to kind of go from reactive to a proactive state. But at the end of the day, I think they just have to kind of look around, understand that the landscape has changed. That it is still changing. And, and, and focus on these problems. Because they're not going away anytime soon. They're just going to get worse.
Narrator: He says providing a great customer experience is all about hiring the right people who really understand and care about your customer’s pain points.
Wasim Khaled: I really believe that there's just not enough empathy in the world today. And so one of my pillars of customer service is empathy-driven education. We deal with difficult, often toxic problems that cause significant amounts of stress for our clients. So in addition to providing world-class technology, it helps that our team cares deeply about solving these types of problems in a very personal way. And helping our customers in understanding and demystifying the mechanisms in what would otherwise seem like a hopeless situation, I think this approach can make all the difference.
Narrator: So Blackbird has built a diverse team to combat even a single tweet. Because, like canned salmon, it could be a single message that sinks a product or company or even an idea. And their varied backgrounds bring different experiences, expertises and approaches to this complex problem.
Wasim Khaled: There's really two key things we look for in our team members, passion and perspective. Passion is really about the mission. It's about really caring about this daunting problem and going all out to help solve it. And we're very fortunate to have a very dedicated and passionate group of team members at Blackbird. Perspective is the other key. And that's really about diversity of perspective than anything else. So disinformation is not just a technology problem or a problem that only affects, say, Americans. It's a societal problem. It's a global problem. So you need broad, diverse perspective. Our founding team was made up of experts from AI, behavioral psychology and national security. But what's been really funny is we seem to keep attracting people that have been mashing up things like journalism and data science or foreign policy and analytics. And it's almost like they were subconsciously training to be team Blackbird all their lives. And, uh, and now they're finding us. And, uh, at the end of the day, we don't really provide our customers with AI. We provide them with peace of mind and insurance. And we've had to develop as a team a foundational understanding on what customer experience really means to our clients so that we can safeguard them against coordinated perception attacks that can destroy decades of goodwill with a single tweet.
Narrator: The effects of disinformation can potentially resonate for decades afterward. What we learn from Wasim is bad actors are taking advantage of vulnerable companies and it’s only getting worse.
So it’s important to not just be aware of this, but to come up with a crisis plan, a process to follow if your organization is targeted. Like Wasim said, get ahead of the threats and be proactive. Don’t wait until lies are being spread and your reputation is at stake. Or you can end up like our fabled salmon cannery, sitting on top of a mountain of delicious pink salmon that everyone thinks has spoiled in the can.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell a friend or leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison and produced by Meredith O’Neil, Ezra Bakker Trupiano, and Ben Wilson. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Learn more at oracle.com/cx