Combating Digital Threats with AI-Driven Narrative Intelligence: Platform Essentials

Executive Summary

• Cybersecurity threats are evolving and becoming more dangerous, especially AI-fueled narrative attacks. 
• For the second year in a row, the World Economic Forum has named AI-enabled narrative attacks the #1 global threat.
• Narrative intelligence platforms are necessary for online narrative monitoring, brand reputation management, strategic corporate crisis planning, and greater cyber resiliency. 
• Organizations should look for AI-driven narrative intelligence platforms with specific core capabilities, including dark web monitoring, actor, threat and impact intelligence, and deepfake and bot detection. 

The Rise of AI-Fueled Narrative Attacks: A Growing Risk for Organizations

Digital attacks are on the rise, particularly sophisticated, AI-fueled narrative attacks. This industry-agnostic threat causes severe reputational, financial, operational, and even physical harm to organizations and, potentially, their executives. 

The extent of the threat is so severe that the World Economic Forum named AI-enabled narrative attacks the #1 global threat for the second year in a row. A narrative attack is a matter of when, not if, and organizations must prepare by leveraging real-time narrative intelligence to detect and mitigate these risks before they escalate into crises.

Why Organizations Need AI-Driven Narrative Intelligence

What is Narrative Intelligence?

Narrative intelligence provides actionable insights about current and emergent narrative threats to help organizations prevent, detect, and respond to attacks more effectively. Specifically, valuable narrative intelligence identifies:

• Key narratives that impact your organization, executives, and industry – especially those that pose risk and present opportunities
• The influence behind them
• The campaign or coordinated behavior that scales them
• The cohorts and communities that connect them 

Narrative intelligence provides broader and deeper insights than traditional threat intelligence and social listening tools, detecting harmful narratives as they emerge and scale across social media, the news, and relevant apps.

In short, narrative intelligence answers the following questions:

• What are the most harmful narratives that are targeting your executives and company?
• Am I aware of the contagion effect of the narrative across networks?
• Who are the hyper-agenda-driven threat actors, nation-states, cohorts, and communities behind the narratives?
• What is the bot-driven manipulation that scales them?

Organizations increasingly adopt AI-powered narrative intelligence platforms to gain deeper insight into narrative threats and cyber-influence operations. Gartner predicts that the narrative intelligence market will exceed $30 billion globally by 2028.

Key Features of an Effective Narrative Intelligence Platform

A comprehensive narrative intelligence platform fills the gap between social listening and threat intelligence tools by offering:

• Multi-modal Analysis: Monitor various content types, including text, images, memes, and deepfake videos
• Multi-platform Intelligence: Track narrative threats across social media, news sites, and other digital platforms (including dark web threat monitoring)
• Multi-lingual Capabilities: Detect threats across global narratives, ensuring accurate translations for language-specific idioms and expressions
• Network visualizations: Clearly show narrative propagation over time and highlight key narrative drivers and influencers. 

Three Critical Components of Narrative Intelligence:

1. Actor Intelligence: Maps influential digital threat actors and their coalitions to reveal the source of false narratives
2. Threat Intelligence: Scores narrative threats based on elements such as toxicity, polarization, hate speech, and automated activity
3. Impact Intelligence: Predicts the consequences of narrative threats and assesses the effectiveness of mitigation efforts

Essential Narrative Intelligence Tools 

Real-Time Narrative Feed

A real-time narrative intelligence feed provides insights through advanced online threat monitoring, enhancing threat detection and crisis response by enabling teams to:

• Gain instant insights into emerging threats and harmful narrative campaigns
• Analyze and contextualize risks, identifying bot-driven manipulations and coordinated influence campaigns
• Prioritize narrative threats using AI-powered risk intelligence for proactive brand and cybersecurity protection

Context Checking Tools

A real-time context-checking tool enhances narrative threat detection by providing:

• Instant clarity and informed context on any online claim, news article, or social media post
• AI-powered context-checking, cross-referencing thousands of sources
• Accurate, evidence-backed insights with citations and footnotes

Deepfake Detection and Threat Monitoring

AI-generated deepfake images and videos are weaponized to fuel harmful narrative campaigns, damage brand reputation, and erode public trust. AI-driven deepfake detection tools help organizations:

• Identify manipulated media before it spreads
• Analyze and assess digital threat impact
• Strengthen brand protection and cybersecurity strategies

Strengthening Digital Threat Intelligence and Cyber Resilience with AI-powered Narrative Intelligence: Blackbird.AI’s  Constellation Narrative Intelligence Platform

Knowing the narrative is controlling the narrative, and Blackbird.AI’s Constellation Dashboard helps organizations do just that, eliminating the digital blind spots and filling the cyber risk gaps that are left by traditional digital threat intelligence and social listening tools. The multi-modal, multi-lingual, and multi-platform dashboard helps teams analyze narrative threats from all angles, uncovering emerging narratives while delivering actor, threat, and impact intelligence. Additional platform features include:

• A robust narrative feed helps teams save time by continuously summarizing harmful narratives as they emerge and scale, delivering automated risk scoring and summarization. Your custom view highlights cohort activities, bot activity, and key influencers. 
• Compass Context verifies and contextualizes the information being spread online by processing claims across thousands of sources in real-time, ensuring clarity around narrative threats. 
• Compass Vision, a powerful deepfake detection tool, helps organizations combat harmful narratives and the manipulated media that fuels them. 

Narrative Intelligence for Cyber Risk Protection: The Future of Cybersecurity

AI-driven narrative intelligence is critical to modern digital threat intelligence, defense against cyber risk, and effective (proactive) corporate crisis management. Organizations can proactively detect, analyze, and neutralize emerging threats before they escalate into full-blown crises by leveraging an AI-driven platform that covers the digital threat landscape (including dark web threat monitoring).

Traditional threat intelligence and social listening tools fall short when it comes to proactive detection of AI-manipulated media and harmful narrative campaigns. An AI-based solution is no longer optional for digital threat protection or corporate crisis management—it’s a necessity.

Start preparing for tomorrow’s threats today – KNOW THE NARRATIVE.

Download our Narrative Intelligence Buyer’s Guide to learn more, or schedule a digital risk assessment now. 

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About Blackbird.AI

BLACKBIRD.AI protects organizations and executives from narrative attacks that cause financial, reputational, and physical harm. Our AI-driven Narrative Intelligence Platform identifies key narratives that impact your executives, organization, and industry, the influence behind them, the networks they touch, the anomalous behavior that scales them, and the cohorts and communities that connect them. This information enables organizations to proactively understand narrative threats as they scale and become harmful for better strategic decision-making. A diverse team of AI experts, threat intelligence analysts, and national security professionals founded Blackbird.AI to defend information integrity and fight a new class of narrative threats. Learn more at Blackbird.AI.