Gisela Pérez de Acha
ABOUT
Gisela Pérez de Acha reports on extremism and other topics for UC Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program with a focus on digital forensics and network analysis. She is also a human rights lawyer, an open source researcher at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, and a trainer at Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps, a global network of volunteers who fact-check social media posts about war crimes and human rights violations. Gisela recently won a team Polk Award for her work in Frontline's film American Insurrection and was also part of an Emmy award-winning team at the New York Times for a story about The Siege of Culiacán. She is a cybersecurity expert and a digital safety trainer with PEN America. Born and raised in Mexico, Gisela speaks fluent Spanish, English, French and Portuguese. She has a master’s degree from Berkeley Journalism, where she now teaches cybersecurity and open-source investigations for upcoming journalists.
WRITING
 Reveal | A Strike at the Heart of Roe |  Frontline | American Insurrection |  El País | “Sentí más odio que nada”: la historia de un militar de Estados Unidos que quiso iniciar una guerra civil |
|---|---|---|
 ProPublica | “I Felt Hate More Than Anything”: How an Active Duty Airman Tried to Start a Civil War |  Human Rights Center | Crisis in Chile: An OSINT Inquiry. |  Washington Post | ‘Control Z’: la serie de Netflix muestra los fallos de la seguridad digital (y los clichés) |
 New York Times | The Plan to Rescue El Chapo’s Son: Chaos, Guns and Fear |  Aristegui Noticias | Faltan pruebas y subestiman número de contagios de Covid-19 en México |  Aristegui Noticias | Los "narcobloqueos" en Culiacán |
 Medium | White Mexican director wins an Oscar for Roma … Mexican feminists debate. |  Amnesty International | Using Digital Verification Before Deployment into the Field: The Advantages from Libya |  Medium | My brother came to visit me this Día de Muertos |
 Vice | Mexico Hacking and Spying on Its Citizens Is a 'Human Rights Crisis' |  Vice | La Muerte de Charlie Hebdo |  Vice | Protestas en Buenos Aires por la Muerte de Nisman |
TV, VIDEO & LECTURES
ACADEMIA
RESEARCH PAPER: An analysis of Twitter political bots’ tactics in targeting the immigration debate before the 2018 U.S. midterm election
2022
Our findings reveal that the 10 most influential bots in our dataset all presented an anti-immigration viewpoint, and both posted original tweets and retweeted other bot accounts’ tweets to give a false sense of authenticity and anti-immigration consensus.
INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE: Online freedom of association and internet infrastructure
2018
A socio-technical investigation on the relationship between the Internet architecture and the human right to freedom of association.
RESEARCH PAPER: Digital Gender Gap in Mexico.
2018
Technology is much more than technical knowledge: it is a political space. Disconnecting has social and economic
implications for everyone in the information society. In this paper, the World Wide Web Foundation researches the digital gender gap in Mexico as well as some of its roots and causes.
UPCOMING PUBLICATIONS
Using Artificial Intelligence and Satellite Imagery to Find Mass Graves in Mexico.
Algorithmic Burying: the role of Facebook and Archiving Human Rights Abuses in Syria. The White Helmets Facebook page and challenge that human rights researchers face when trying to retrieve past content.