Appearances:
In Print Media

From the original article:

[…] "Once something gets traction, it creates a snowball effect. They post more of what gets engagement, and that engagement draws more attention - until the cycle exhausts itself," Sohan Dsouza, an open-source intelligence researcher told Prime Time. […] Now a consultant, Mr Dsouza previously worked with Massachusetts Institute of the Technology in the US, and is currently a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany. Behind the nationalistic branding of accounts like Radio Europe is a murky network of monetised outrage, according to Mr Dsouza, whose work focuses on inauthentic social media networks that push disinformation across Europe. He has previously traced the history of the Radio Europe account, linking it to a Turkish-language profile that previously posted sexually explicit content and personal solicitations. "It was a Turkish-language 'thirst’ account - inviting sexual attention," Mr Dsouza said. Archived posts show that the account once operated under the name "Zelişş" and described itself as a married couple seeking casual encounters. "There were responses in Turkish, lewd comments, even images. Then it was scrubbed and flipped to become Radio Europe," Mr Dsouza said. "It's part of a general economy where there's a farming operation to create accounts and pump them up with fake authenticity - crypto information, adult content, inspirational pabulum. And then when time comes these accounts - which have been farmed in that way to give it a history which looks authentic - will be flipped over," he added. […] "Many of these accounts have tip jars activated. They have platform monetisation features activated. People can directly subscribe to them and pay them a little bit every now and then," Mr Dsouza said. […] Researchers like Mr Dsouza have also documented their use of AI-generated imagery and paid cross-boosting networks designed to amplify specific posts into trending topics. "Often, it’s just two or three accounts cross-boosting each other. One exists just to push another. They repost the same content with slightly different captions. Some even embed their own posts in replies to bigger accounts to farm engagement," Mr Dsouza said. […] Like Mr Dsouza, Mr Jones believes that many of these accounts are motivated by money, but he adds that ideology and political influence are often also central to their operation. […]

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

From the original article:

[…] C’est grâce à ces différents rapports que nous avons pu trouver des campagnes de désinformations ou de dénigrement liées au Vietnam et aux outils que nous avions identifiés : c’est notamment le cas du Qatar Plot. Nous avons ensuite consulté le rapport très complet de Sohan Dsouza et Marc Owen Jones sorti en juillet 2024. Cette campagne orchestrée sur Facebook, Instagram et X ciblait le Qatar en adaptant son discours selon les pays visé (Des campagnes anti-PSG en France ou anti-Harrods au Royaume-Uni, deux possessions du Qatar). […] Le rapport “The Qatar Plot” rédigé par Marc Owen Jones et Sohan Dsouza constitue une archive précieuse d’une campagne de dénigrement ayant eu recours à une entreprise vietnamienne […]

Translated to English:

[…] It is thanks to these various reports that we were able to find disinformation or smear campaigns linked to Vietnam and the tools we had identified: this is notably the case of the Qatar Plot.  We then consulted the very comprehensive report by Sohan Dsouza and Marc Owen Jones released in July 2024. This campaign, orchestrated on Facebook, Instagram, and X, targeted Qatar by adapting its discourse according to the targeted countries (anti-PSG campaigns in France or anti-Harrods in the United Kingdom, two possessions of Qatar). […] The report “The Qatar Plot” by Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza is a valuable archive of a smear campaign that used a Vietnamese company […]

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

From the original article:

[…] Sohan Dsouza forskar på desinformation, har tidigare granskat kontona och har fått ta del av SVT:s fynd.

– Syftet verkar vara att driva upp engagemang med den här typen av innehåll. Det här är sannolikt något som kan vara inkomstbringande, kanske i kombination med en ideologisk målsättning, säger han. […]

Translated to English:

[…] Sohan Dsouza is researching disinformation, has previously reviewed the accounts and has had access to SVT's findings.

- The purpose seems to be to drive engagement with this type of content. This is probably something that can be income-generating, perhaps in combination with an ideological goal, he says. […]

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

From the original article:

[…] Facebook’s parent company mentioned the offensive, spread mainly via social media ads, in its second quarterly Adversarial Threat report for 2024, but it was uncovered by Dr Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza of the open source intelligence community (OSINT). […] Dsouza has said this “has got to be one of the largest – if not one of the top five ever influence operations in Meta’s history”. […] However, it did not offer further information or identify those behind the campaign which Dsouza describes as “alarming, especially given the actual spend”. […]

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

From the original article:

[…] Çevrim içi manipülasyonları ortaya çıkaran açık kaynaklı istihbarat (OSINT) uygulayıcısı olan teknoloji ve sosyal bilimler uzmanı Sohan Dsouza, AA muhabirine, ay başında İngiltere genelinde etkili olan ve sosyal medya üzerinden yayılan aşırı sağcı öfkenin ardından bu platformların taşıdığı potansiyel risklere ilişkin değerlendirmelerde bulundu. […]

Translated to English:

[…] Sohan Dsouza, a technology and social science expert and practitioner of open-source intelligence (OSINT) that uncovers online manipulations, made assessments to AA correspondent regarding the potential risks posed by these platforms following the far-right anger that spread across England and on social media at the beginning of the month. […]

(and much more – the article consists almost entirely of my observations)

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

From the original article:

[…] Disinformation analyst Sohan Dsouza tracked the spread of the false claims to two "superspreader accounts" on the social media platform X that have a history of publishing and promoting inflammatory anti-immigration content. "Oftentimes when an incident happens, and especially something really violent and shocking, there will be opportunists waiting to take advantage of an information void that emerges," Mr Dsouza said. "These opportunists are waiting to pounce on something that they can use to legitimise their hatreds and to direct the fury of people that they've been building up for a long time into an incident and into specific targets, which is what they did here. "It was really a tinderbox being filled and waiting for a spark to light it, to ignite it, and that happened with the Southport stabbing." […] "This name was circulated along with supposedly an MI6 watchlist and all these other things about the assailant being an asylum seeker who recently arrived in the UK, all nonsensical, but this really took off and began spreading virally," Mr Dsouza said. "In this case, and in the case of the Bondi stabbing, we didn't know who exactly the attacker was for a while and there were a lot of accounts saying 'we want answers right now', and if you start demanding something impatiently like that, then you will get bad answers." […]

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

From the original article:

[…] Together with fellow researcher Sohan Dsouza, we uncovered a massive shadowy social media operation funded by dark money spreading far-right narratives on immigration, Islam and Israel’s war on Gaza all across the globe but particularly in Europe. […]

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

From the original article:

[…] Komployu, ABD’deki MIT Medya Laboratuvarı’ndan Sohan Dsouza ve Katar’daki Hamad Bin Khalifa Üniversitesi’nden Marc Owen Jones birlikte ortaya çıkardı. […] Dsouza ve Jones’a göre, 2023 sonlarında başlayan ve bu güne kadar istikrarlı bir şekilde devam eden Katar karşıtı bir algı operasyonuyla karşı karşıyayız. […] Dsouza ve Jones’un ihtiyatlı tahminine göre, sadece Facebook reklamların maliyeti 270 bin dolara kadar çıkıyor. Toplamını, varın siz düşünün. […] Temel hedef Dsouza'nın ifadesiyle "Katar ile herhangi bir kurumsal ilişkiyi radyoaktif hâle getirmek” gibi gözükse de komployla bir taşla pek çok kuş vurulmuş oluyor. […]

Translated to English:

[…] The plot was jointly uncovered by Sohan Dsouza from the MIT Media Lab [sic] in the US and Marc Owen Jones from Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. […] According to Dsouza and Jones, we are faced with an anti-Qatar perception operation that began in late 2023 and has continued steadily to this day. […] According to Dsouza and Jones’ conservative estimates, the cost of Facebook ads alone is up to $270,000. Just imagine the total. […] While the main goal seems to be, as Dsouza puts it, “to radioactively render any institutional relationship with Qatar,” the plot kills many birds with one stone. […]

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

From the original article:

[…] الباحثان المتخصصان في مجال المعلومات المضللة ومتابعة الحملات الدعائية المشبوهة سوهان دسوزا ومارك جونز نشرا يوم الأحد الماضي تقريرًا متعمقًا بعنوان “مؤامرة قطر”، كشفا فيه تفاصيل مثيرة بشأن حملات مضللة واسعة النطاق استهدفت المسلمين وقطر على وجه الخصوص، إضافة لعرض الباحثين التكتيكات المستخدمة لخداع ملايين الأشخاص من الجمهور المحلي والدولي في سبيل فرض أيديولوجية ووجهات نظره معينة. […] 

Translated to English:

[…] On Sunday, disinformation researchers and disinformation campaign monitors Sohan Dsouza and Mark Jones published an in-depth report titled “The Qatar Conspiracy,” in which they revealed fascinating details about widespread disinformation campaigns targeting Muslims and Qatar in particular, in addition to the researchers’ presentation of the tactics used to deceive millions of people from local and international audiences in order to impose a certain ideology and viewpoints. […]

Relevant Project: The Qatar Plot

From the original article:

[…] The apparent goal is to make any "institutional relationship with Qatar radioactive," said Sohan Dsouza, a London-based researcher formerly with the MIT Media Lab. It could be taking advantage of the Israel-Hamas conflict to "advance a latent anti-Qatar agenda." […] The billboard that featured the ad belongs to New York ad giant Outfront Media, according to separate open-source analyses by Dsouza and Doha-based disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones. […] The ads -- in multiple languages including English, French, and Arabic –- cost up to $270,000, according to a conservative estimate by Jones and Dsouza. […]

(En français dans le journal La Presse)

Relevant Project: The Moral Machine

From the original article:

[…] I decided to focus on this distinction by administering a poll within Stuyvesant, created thanks to the help of researcher Sohan Dsouza, to see the most striking differences between the student body and the average American. The questions focused on the gender, age, and legality of the pedestrians. […]

Relevant Project: The Moral Machine

From the original article:

[…] Created by researchers Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Jonathan Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon and Iyad Rahwan, the online experimental platform explores the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. […]

Relevant Project: The Moral Machine

From the original article:

[…] According to Sohan Dsouza, incidents like the Gardena crash might end up forcing authorities to put rules in place and limit where self-driving modes can be engaged, in addition to clarifying legal liability. “Potential legal hazards like this could result in re-evaluations by automakers of where drivers are permitted to engage self-driving mode, perhaps calculated to balance maximising driver convenience with minimising manufacturer liability,” Dsouza, a former member of the Moral Machine research team at the MIT Media Lab, told TRT World. However, he argues that limiting the range of self-driving modes could backfire on strengthening safety measures and end up resulting in more crashes. […] Ultimately, Dsouza believes it will require a deliberative approach. “This is a complex, evolving, feedback-riddled problem that will have to be solved with further research on real-world outcomes for road safety as the tech advances, and in parallel conversations among ethicists, lawmakers, industry, consumers, and the public,” he said. […]

Relevant Project: The Moral Machine

From the original article:

[…] Edmond Awad, a research fellow, and Sohan Dsouza, a graduate student working with Rahwan, noticed that the responses could be grouped into three large geographic “clusters”: the Western cluster, including North America and Western Europe; the Eastern cluster, which was a mix of East Asian and Islamic countries; and the Southern cluster, which was composed of Latin-American countries and a smattering of Francophone countries. […]

Relevant Project: The Moral Machine

From the original article:

[…] The authors are Awad; Sohan Dsouza, a doctoral student in the Media Lab; Richard Kim, a research assistant in the Media Lab; Jonathan Schulz, a postdoc at Harvard University; Joseph Henrich, a professor at Harvard; Azim Shariff, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia; Jean-François Bonnefon, a professor at the Toulouse School of Economics; and Iyad Rahwan, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Media Lab, and a faculty affiliate in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. […]

Syndicated out to the World Economic Forum

Relevant Project: The Moral Machine

From the original article:

[…] "Back in 2016, the autonomous vehicle industry was growing and the technology was advancing, but there had not been much of a conversation about the societal impact of AVs," Sohan Dsouza, an author of the study from the MIT Media Lab, told Newsweek. "Our group had already been studying the social dilemma of autonomous vehicle adoption with respect to choosing between passengers and pedestrians." "However, given the number of interacting real-world variables potentially involved, we found available surveying platforms inadequate for full exploration of that variable space," he said. "That's why we built the Moral Machine—so we could get enough data to tease out the relative importance of those different factors." […] Dsouza said it was important to investigate this to help inform the conversation about society's expectations of AV ethics and predict the likely reactions to AV crashes. "Studying this at a global cross-cultural level has enabled us to observe how the relative ethical priorities people expect of AI can vary across cultures, and what might influence these expectations." […] "We also observed correlations between various national metrics—such as rule of law, economic inequality, and cultural distance—and relevant preferences of people in those countries. For example, relatively stronger preference to sacrifice in favor of high-status individuals in countries with higher economic inequality," Dsouza said. The researchers say that acknowledging people's moral preferences could inform the way that the software controlling autonomous vehicles is designed. "First, the research was intended to seed—and has been seeding—the conversation in society about autonomous vehicles and ethics," Dsouza said. "It could help lawmakers and automakers understand what fears they would need to allay in different parts of the world to encourage adoption. And autonomous tech policy makers could have a local ground truth of how AV ethics are perceived, which can help inform their guidelines as to what ethical decision-making factors to specifically prescribe or prohibit for consideration by AI." […]

Relevant Project: The Moral Machine

From the original article:

[…] Sohan Dsouza, a research student in the Scalable Cooperation Group at the MIT Media Lab who is familiar with the Moral Machine, said that the perception of driverless cars depends on where the individual sits in the car. In the case of a potential accident, Dsouza said, the Moral Machine found “while people prefer that driverless cars prioritize minimizing loss of life, they prefer using driverless cars that prioritize passengers’ lives.” […] Boston’s complexity “might also make it a good training ground for refinement of the technology,” Dsouza said. “In any case, it is a step towards safer and more efficient road transport for all.” […]

Relevant Project: The Moral Machine

From the original article:

[…] Sohan Dsouza and Edmond Awad, who developed the Moral Machine, are part of Scalable Cooperation, a research group at the MIT Media Lab […] “We wanted to create discussion of a neglected topic,” Dsouza told the Observer. “We also cover all the complexities of traffic laws, where pedestrians are either jaywalking or following the walk signal. That affects whether you kill more or less people.” […] “Our scenarios for now are death only, which is just to get the conversation going,” Dsouza said. […] To address this issue, Dsouza said the Moral Machine team plans to translate the website into different languages and promote it in foreign countries to get diverse perspectives. […]

Relevant Project: The Moral Machine

From the original article:

[…] "We want to determine how people perceive the morality of machine-made decisions," explained Sohan Dsouza, a graduate student who helped develop the quiz. […] "We have reason to believe that these things might have some impact," Dsouza said. […] One key aspect to its design, Dsouza said, is displaying ethical scenarios from the perspective of a bystander, not that of a passenger or pedestrian. "We are trying to get a general picture of societal ethics, what people think should be held as the ideal and not what they themselves would do," he said. […]

Relevant Project: VehiSys/Cloudthink

From the original article:

[…] Dr. Sid Chi-Kin Chau, Assistant Professor of Computing and Information Science, is leading the development of VehiSys, along with his research engineer Sohan Dsouza and PhD student Chien-Ming Tseng. […] “The VehiSys application will be able to read data from the car using a Bluetooth device that the driver will plug into the car’s computer. The device will send the information about the car, such as speed, RPM, fuel level, engine coolant temperature and air pressure, to a central server, while the phone will send information about the driver’s location. By combining the readings from the car and phone, the data will help determine the amount of fuel consumed on particular routes and determine which driving conditions and routes result in the best fuel economy for any given car,” Dsouza explained. […] “Drivers don’t necessarily realize that slight changes in their driving behavior can make a big impact on their fuel economy. We’re hoping that through this application, we will provide drivers with a smarter method for estimating their fuel consumption, regardless of the type of car they drive,” Dsouza added. […] “We will be able to support more analysis with the data gathered. Right now though, our focus is on estimating distance-to-empty, or the amount of fuel a driver has before he has to fill up again,” Dsouza said. He also added that the app’s information can be applied to both gasoline and electric vehicles. […]

Relevant Project: CrowdScanner

From the original article:

[…] The first author of the paper is Dr Alex Rutherford, post-doctoral fellow at Masdar Institute and mpber [sic] of Dr. Rahwan’s lab. The other co-authors are Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr. Manuel Cebrian, from National ICT Australia, Sohan D’Souza [sic] of Masdar Institute, and Prof. Esteban Moro, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. […]

Relevant Project: CrowdScanner

Relevant Project: CrowdScanner

From the original article:

[…] System architect Sohan Dsouza and one other member also worked out of the United Arab Emirates, with three additional team members in the United Kingdom and one in the United States. […]

Relevant Project: CrowdScanner

From the original article:

[…] Masdar Institute’s computer scientists Dr Iyad Rahwan and Sohan D’Souza [sic] and University of Southampton computational game theorists James McInerney, Dr Victor Naroditskiy and Professor Nick Jennings, will join MIT Professor Sandy Pentland and UCSD Research Scientist Dr Manuel Cebrian, aiming to solve the MyHeartMap Challenge, and they are inviting social networkers to be involved in the activity. […]