Many countries, including the United States, are ongoing targets of election interference, but it’s difficult to know how to respond to this threat. In this talk, disinformation and social media data researcher Dave Troy offers some new ideas about how we are likely to be manipulated — and what we might be able to do about it. He posits that cult dynamics may affect how we perceive our democratic processes, and that cognitive security is at least as important a factor as protecting our voting infrastructure and social media environment. Dave Troy is a serial entrepreneur and data activist in Baltimore, Maryland. He is currently CEO and product architect at 410 Labs, maker of the popular e-mail management tools Mailstrom.co and Chuck. He has been acknowledged by the founding team at Twitter as the first developer to utilize the Twitter API, with his project “Twittervision,” which was featured in the 2008 MoMA exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind,” curated by Paola Antonelli. His current projects use social network data to map cities and analyze disinformation campaigns. He is also organizer of TEDxMidAtlantic in Washington, DC, and lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at
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