WhoDis is a flagship initiative launched by Justice for Prosperity and developed together with TextGain. It uses Artificial Intelligence, a topical subject in the fight against misinformation and online subversion. By exposing the actors’ tactics of spreading hate conspiracies, WhoDis is one step ahead of them.

WhoDis involves multiple leading stakeholders across the judiciary, politics, and the media to fill a gap in the ever-important fight against online hate and disinformation. By using the same technology but different methods, WhoDis aims to uncover subversion within our democracies by the extreme right, ultra-conservative, and populist parties, who are all actively trying to remove the rights and privileges that we all hold for granted within a democratic system. 

Justice for Prosperity is unique because it investigates and exposes commonly used modi operandi used by anti-democratic actors. It also aims to develop technological advancements to detect early signs of subversive polarisation and retrospectively reconstruct how activities and narratives developed. This will assist CSOs and vulnerable communities in taking the first steps to protect themselves against further online hate.

Disinformation and misinformation are ever-occurring bywords within societal discourse. They devastatingly affect perceptions of political trust and weaken the state of democracy, allowing sinister actors to extort the vulnerability of political trust to operate and launch subversive actions to weaken democracy and the protections it offers. 

While Justice for Prosperity has launched exclusive research findings, which have been featured in The New York Times as well as being presented at the European Parliament, the WhoDis project has come at a time when it is increasingly difficult to disentangle extreme narratives from mainstream political rhetoric at a time when populism is becoming ever-normalised within the political sphere across established democracies across Europe and North America. Here, you can find our WhoDis Report, our most recent publication, released at the European Parliament, which outlines the modi operandi used in subversive actions to undermine the human and democratic rights available to us in our democratic systems. 

WhoDis Report

Unveiling subversive power: Shedding light on the slow erosion of our democracies

Current social media monitoring only highlights ‘False Negatives,’ which produces a large number of results. However, the percentage of the true value of these results is low. This is because existing forms of detection avoid labeling text as not interesting in the context of toxicity when, in actual fact, it is, as the sinister intention is masked upon initial inspection due to the context surrounding the message being excluded, implying the message has a positive nature. An additional factor of subversion is the disguising of hate speech using positive language. The ability to detect positive toxicity through its use of natural language processing (NLP) makes the WhoDis Project unique, which is why NLP is so important. Coupled with background contextual information, NLP allows for the detection of the context and structure of the language used, helping us  find the origins of hate campaigns and conspiracy theories.

Following the Justice for Prosperity project, we aim to uncover subversion, expose silent polarisation, and use intelligence and security for good, untangling the web that has blinded those who have been trying to protect our society’s most vulnerable from hate.  

The outcomes of the WhoDis Visualisation Tool will result in a complementary process of academic contextualisation and subsequent reporting based on these. 

Subsequent reporting will be carried out on the associations that have occurred between different polarising groups and actors that have appeared within our research. Within the use of aggregated data obtained, various publications published with Justice for Prosperity in coordination with its partners will be available, illustrating the important linkages between the proximity of actors involved in the spread of hate speech, as well as exposing the various levels of both political, legal and financial support they have received, to understand the cause and effects of the intentional subversion and polarisation caused by these different actors.