Graphika

Graphika (Private intelligence company)
Formation	2013
Founder	John Kelly (Graphika)
Membership	• John Kelly (Graphika) • René Boettcher • Camille François • Guyte McCord • Chris Cotter • Vladimir Barash • Adam Fields • Elizabeth Groenneman Walls • Sarah Braver • Ben Nimmo • C. Shawn Eib • Lea Ronzaud • Rodrigo Ferreira • Chris Hernon • Tim Kostelancik
UK deep state connected analysis company

Graphika is an analysis company which knows how to provide the wanted narrative. It has close ties to the US intelligence services/big tech companies, and the UK deep state's Integrity Initiative. In 2020 it was shown to be working with Amil Khan's Valent Projects.

Deep state ties

There is a staff overlap with the Integrity Initiative, most obviously Ben Nimmo and Chris Hernon. Their methods are the same, where all doubt of Western official narratives in certain subjects are projected as Russian disinformation ("Ukraine as a failed or unreliable state" ..."U.S. and NATO aggression or interference in other countries"..."European divisions and weakness"..."Migration and Islam"..."Russia’s doping scandals in sporting competitions"..."Turkey as an aggressive, destabilizing force"..."Defending Russia and its government"..."Insulting Kremlin critics including Alexei Navalny and the Bellingcat investigative group.) The same goes for newer narratives, such as criticism of the 2020 US election or COVID-19, where the company combats doubt in the safety of vaccines.

Own words

"Graphika is a network analysis firm, founded in 2013 by Ph.D. in Communications John Kelly.... Graphika leverages AI to reveal and study online communities. We are the best in the world at analyzing how online social networks form, evolve, and are manipulated."

In September 2020, Graphika came to corporate media prominence with their warning against the website Peacedata, an allegeded Russian operation to influence the US 2020 presidential election. But even according to Graphika (probably stretching it as well), only about 5 percent of the website's English-language content concerned the American elections, but "this facet of the operation suggests an attempt to build a left-wing audience and steer it away from Biden's campaign". Facebook promptly deleted the site, while pointing out that "only 14,000 people followed one or more of the suspended accounts".

Criticism

“Who funds net nanny Graphika? Their venture capital was raised privately, in two tranches of about three million dollars each, in 2014 and 2019. We do know who they work with. Their current “Innovation Officer” is Camille François, who once worked for Google’s analytics offshoot Jigsaw before quitting to run a secretive project for the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, alongside now Graphika CEO John Kelly (no relation to the Marine.) Their December 2018 reporting helped “prove” how the Russians used social media networks like Facebook and Twitter to influence the 2016 election. Graphika also has ties to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Department’s Minerva Initiative. If you pay to look at their stuff you realize they write like spooks, talk like spooks, and snitch out news sites like spooks. So you can decide if they’re involved in all this again because they are just good at proving Russian stuff or because they are tied to a corporate-quasi government structure alongside the intel community......What is missing from Graphika’s work is any evidence whatsoever of any actual influence on the only thing that matters: how people vote. Graphika offers nothing quantitative, claiming only that by using American freelancers PeaceData was part of the “fabric” of communities and this made them credible.”
Peter Van Buren

The Election Integrity Project

Graphika was part of the 2020 The Election Integrity Project, together with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and "election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, social media platforms, the media, and the research community", to "identify mis- and disinformation" for further processing (banning and more) by its partners. The positions to be identified included content from "domestic actors" (i.e. American voters)...aiming to delegitimize election results on the basis of false or misleading claims" such as pointing out how postal votes are liable to fraud in a “stolen election”, which according to EIP did not happen.

The Virality Project

Graphika is partner to the Virality Project, a coalition that ultimately intends to "mitigate the impact of narratives which would otherwise undermine the public’s confidence in the safety" in vaccines (Note that the wording implies that this "mitigation" the mission, regardless of whether the information in the narrative is true or not). It would also "mitigate" against those "who object to vaccination requirements as government overreach". The project is funded through the normal shell game of foundations and grants.

 

Known members

3 of the 15 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
Camille François	French expert on digital disinformation and cyber security
Chris Hernon	Integrity Initiative
Ben Nimmo	"Nimmo is a former spokesperson for NATO, who has essentially dedicated his career to fear-mongering about Russia."

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