Research-driven technology for organizations working in the public interest.
We help human rights groups, researchers, and journalists across anti-authoritarian civil society uncover hard-to-find evidence and important stories in public social media data, including in closed environments where information is deliberately obscured.
The research behind our technology is led by social scientists, working alongside engineers and platform experts at every stage — from finding the right sources to making sense of the data.
Arendt Labs is a US-based nonprofit named after Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who wrote about how power, judgment, and public visibility shape political life.
PRODUCTS
Aithoscope reads public social media at a scale no human team can: thousands of sources a day, surfacing posts, cases, and trends relevant to each partner’s work — by meaning, not just keywords.
AI
The technology that makes the work possible
ethos
The values and questions of the community using it
scope
A specific, configured field of view tuned to each partner's work
It is a social-media research platform for journalists, researchers, and human rights defenders. Each partner defines what counts as relevant for their work; we use those definitions to tune the system, review early results together, and keep iterating until the alerts are reliably useful. Aithoscope brings potentially important material forward, while partners decide what to review, verify, investigate, and act on.
PARTNERS
PILOT — JOURNALISM
TV Rain
Work with the independent broadcaster helped surface sources for an investigation into the HIV epidemic among Russian frontline troops. The resulting report passed one million views.
TEAM
Co-Founder & Technical Lead
Nadia Polikarpova
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego; builds and maintains our technical infrastructure and ensures the reliability of our data workflows.
Researcher
Malika Talgat
Ph.D. in Political Science; Postdoctoral Researcher at TU Munich's Chair of Digital Governance; specializes in computational social science, content moderation, and authoritarian media environments.
Co-founder & Executive Director
Julia Kuzevanova
Social-media and digital media expert; leads operations, partnerships, source strategy, and project coordination.
Secretary of the Board
Alexandra Forssell
Director at Deloitte; Ph.D. in Information Assurance and Security; CISSP. She brings expertise in cybersecurity governance, information assurance, institutional risk, and nonprofit oversight.
Researcher
Anna Kalinina
PhD candidate at Leuphana University (Lüneburg); background at the intersection of sociology, digital cultures, and media studies.
Treasurer of the Board
Ainsley Morse
Associate Professor of Literature, UC San Diego. Scholar and translator of Russian and Eastern European literature, with deep ties to international communities of writers, artists, translators, and scholars.