Seminar: Finding and Losing The Plot: Qatar to Southport

In February 2024, Sohan Dsouza noted peculiar repeat advertisements on Facebook, appearing to shame the emirate of Qatar. Having long been cataloging and tracking inauthentic operations as an open-source intelligence practitioner, and having developed a sense for telltale signs of coordinated inauthentic behavior, he opened a new file, and began archiving and probing for other appearances of similar content online. What he found led him to reach out to fellow counter-disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones, and pulled both of them into a rabbit-hole investigation of numerous campaigns, operated across several websites and platforms, running months prior and thence.

It revealed a super-high-spend, super-high-reach, genAI-augmented, multi-pronged messaging strategy, deployed using black-hat cyber-mercenary proxies in Vietnamese content farms, across Facebook (including ads targeted at the UK, EU countries, and the US during their election years), Twitter/X, Telegram, Wikimedia, YouTube, and TikTok, and occasionally offline too. These were ostensibly aimed at vilifying Qatar, but also advanced other neoconservative geopolitical interests—and, very concerningly, rode atop anti-Muslim/-immigrant tropes. The novel tactics discovered as having been used by the operation revealed gaps in the platforms’ inauthentic conduct detection and countermeasures, as well as shortfalls in platform transparency and accountability.

About three weeks following the exposure of the operation in the press in early July that year, three young children were stabbed in a tragic attack, in the town of Southport in England. Apart from noting the groundwork laid by the xenophobic UK-targeted campaigns of the operation, Sohan observed active misinformation (and likely disinformation) playing a significant role in stoking and targeting the anti-Muslim/-immigrant riots that subsequently erupted across the UK. He also noted specific entities identified in his and Marc’s earlier investigation, and a monetized “Potemkin news” outfit, as having contributed to the spread of the disinformation and misinformation in the information void following the attack.

In this seminar, Sohan Dsouza will present on both the long-haul investigation of the organized campaign “The Qatar Plot”, and on the investigation of the chaotic spread of misinformation during the Southport-spinoff riots, and will discuss lessons from these for those involved in investigation, research, platform design, policy, and regulation.


Sohan Dsouza is working on ways to solve discovery, veracity, and mobilization problems using a combination of technology and social science. His research background includes crowdsourcing, strategic cooperation, incentive mechanisms, social mobilization, AI ethics, and computer-mediated negotiation. He is interested in the intersection between disinformation and political polarization, and in AI-powered deception, and their implications for platform design and policy. His research work has been published in the likes of Nature, PNAS, Transport, IEEE Computer, and IEEE intelligent Systems.

Having trained extensively in open-source intelligence techniques, including as a “Digital Sherlock” with the Digital Forensics Research Lab, Sohan applies them to detect and expose malign or otherwise inauthentic activity on social media platforms. In 2024, he led the investigation of “The Qatar Plot”—one of the largest known influence operations; targeting the UK, EU, US, and other countries across several online platforms and offline; with political and often xenophobic disinformation and propaganda. He has been a public voice on the issues of transparency and accountability for social media platforms and online services, especially in light of the role of misinformation in the Summer 2024 UK anti-immigrant/-Muslim riots.

Sohan brings years of experience in academia, primarily in computational social science research, along with years of experience in industry as a software engineer. He was awarded an SM degree in computational social science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; an MSc in informatics from the British University in Dubai’s program with the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics; an MBA+PGDM in IT management from the SP Jain Institute of Management & Research’s School of Global Management; and a BS in computer information systems from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Website: https://www.sohandsouza.info

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