Social media is a powerful tool for people and businesses. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you’d know that digital platforms have been taking over advertising. They provide incredible opportunities for people to interact with each other and also let businesses connect with and sell to customers.
However convenient and fascinating as it may be, social media can also be a treacherous place, with threats lurking at every corner. An example is the spread of disinformation and fake social media profiles used to influence public opinion.
Understanding how disinformation and online threats work is crucial to knowing how you can stop it from happening to you—especially with your company’s reputation at stake. This is where Cyabra comes in.
Defining Cyabra and Social Threat Intelligence
Cyabra is a social search engine that monitors online interactions to protect businesses from disinformation.
As social platforms are vast and barely regulated, it’s easy for social media to be manipulated by bots and trolls. Disinformation and mistrust have spread in spaces of online conversations, affecting not just e-commerce and marketing but the societal and political sectors, too. These malicious threats damage brand reputation and people who use social media.
By filtering communities, pages and platforms hosting online conversations, Cyabra helps keep the Internet safer to foster better public discourse. It has a simple common goal: to protect companies, their products and their employees.
More specifically, Cyabra works by using threat intelligence—in the process of gathering information about potential attacks on organisations. This data is gleaned from several sources and is used to strengthen security and decrease the chances of an attack. It also helps companies in recovering from damage in case of an incident.
Why do you need Social Threat Intelligence?
With threat intelligence at its core, Cyabra protects brands by uncovering risks on social media before they could cause harm.
Threat intelligence has four pain points that it seeks to address:
- Identify new threats on social media
- Collect information from suitable sources
- Leverage human expertise to interpret data
- Measure the value of threat intelligence
To achieve this, Cyabra follows a three-step process to reach its goal of “uncovering the good, bad and fake of online conversations.” The process starts by locating the source, mapping fake information in communities, and measuring sentiment.
Step 1: Filtering through data. The first step is to use publicly available data from machine learning and NLP analysers.
Step 2: Uncover authenticity. Next, bad and fake actors will be detected alongside manipulated images and videos, contributing to disinformation.
Step 3: Measure impact. Lastly, Cyabra will map the spread of disinformation, understand snowball effects, and define campaign sources.
With Cyabra, businesses can collect, analyse and identify real-time emerging threats.
Threat intelligence is crucial because it protects companies from cyber criminals, insider threats, and Internet trolls. When left unchecked, these could cause massive damage to your online reputation, leading to lost leads, sales and opportunities. It could even affect your people.
Social Analysis In the real-world
Social platforms earn $32.5B from viral and fake propagation. Among the popular social media networks, spam accounts are the most prevalent on X (formerly Twitter).
Before Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter, there was a mishap that involved court proceedings between him and Twitter. More specifically, Twitter sued Musk, who had initially wanted to back out of the deal due to the prevalence of spam bots on the platform. Twitter had claimed that less than 5% of existing accounts were spam. Musk disagreed, arguing that bot account prevalence was more than double that percentage. All is well and done now, and both parties have decided to move forward with the acquisition, but there are still some questions left from the considerable dispute.
Notably, there’s a growing inquiry about the number of Twitter fake accounts. Cyabra was the company that backed Musk in his claims, and their findings were revealed in court for Musk’s team.
According to Cyabra’s analysis, spam and bot accounts make up 11% of Twitter’s overall active user base—a conclusion they arrived at using data and machine learning algorithms, with a maximum confidence level of 80%. Several factors are built into Cyabra’s algorithm to determine whether an account is fake, such as location, topics tweeted about, frequency and time of posts, languages, and engagement with other profiles.
This scenario shows how powerful data on threats and disinformation can be in the real world. It can inform significant business decisions and strategies.
Bringing Cyabra to Digital Marketing
While Cyabra is most useful for threat intelligence, it also has strong marketing capabilities. Its core competencies focus on the depth of data, enabling the identification of inauthentic profiles and audiences. With this ability, Cyabra can help marketers communicate strategies that safeguard customers’ data (credit card information, home addresses, and more) and boost customer confidence.
Additionally, there’s valuable data that businesses can uncover about consumer behaviour online, which could potentially assist in social media marketing and digital PR.
Cyabra’s threat intelligence brings insights into impersonations and online hacktivism—and it’s this data that could help marketers create more authentic content for their audiences.
Cyabra has tapped into industries like banking and finance, IT, healthcare, and retail (to name a few) and is expected to expand its reach to more sectors.
Bring Performance has been a player in the digital landscape for years, helping brands grow their online market share through data, actionable insights and campaign delivery. Currently, Bring partners with large-scale tools like SimilarWeb to deliver robust digital intelligence strategies. Likewise, these partnerships have made it possible to work hand-in-hand with Cyabra–whose services we now offer to help us protect and foster safe, authentic communities for our clients and their markets.
Are you interested in finding out more about Cyabra and threat intelligence? Bring Performance is here to walk you through it. Send us an email, and let’s talk about your business needs!
Common questions about Cyabra
Cyabra is a social search engine that monitors online interactions to guard against disinformation and other online threats. It aims to protect companies, their products, and employees by filtering through communities, pages, and platforms to foster better public discourse and keep the internet safer.
Social Threat Intelligence is crucial as it helps protect your brand from cyber criminals, insider threats, and internet trolls by uncovering risks on social media before they cause harm. This proactive approach ensures the safety of your online reputation, preventing lost leads, sales, and opportunities and protecting your employees.
Cyabra uses a three-step process involving machine learning and NLP to locate sources of disinformation, uncover authenticity by detecting fake actors and manipulated content, and measure the spread and impact of disinformation to define campaign sources. This helps businesses understand and mitigate the risks associated with online conversations.
Yes, the data and insights provided by Cyabra on threats and disinformation are powerful and can inform significant business decisions and strategies. For example, Cyabra’s analysis supported claims regarding the prevalence of spam and bot accounts on social media platforms, as seen in high-profile cases.
Cyabra’s depth of data analysis not only aids in threat intelligence but also enhances marketing strategies by identifying inauthentic profiles and audiences. This enables marketers to create more authentic content, safeguard customer data, boost customer confidence, and gain insights into consumer behaviour online, potentially assisting in social media marketing and digital PR.
