#disinformation

#disinformation

People on the island have grown so accustomed to Chinese displays of power that life continues as usual. As China carried out live-fire drills and rehearsed a military blockade in the waters surrounding Taiwan this week, 70-year-old Liao said she wasn't worried about war. She was enjoying life as a retiree, playing mahjong with her friends and keeping an eye on the stock market.

It seems possible that what will ultimately emerge is a clarified sense of principles and a deeper commitment to them (which is why part of the conflict is over American history itself). On one hand, there are the heads of the federal government and their spokespeople, whose lies are part of their disdain for the electorate and the rule of law.

Banning people because you disagree with what they say undermines the free speech the administration claims to seek. We desperately need a wide ranging debate on whether and how social media should be regulated in the interests of the people. Imran Ahmed gave evidence to the select committee's inquiry into social media, algorithms and harmful content, and he was an articulate advocate for greater regulation and accountability.

Toward the end of, X began listing account locations in the "About this account" section of people's (or bots') profiles. X also can list the platform through which users access the social media site, such as the web app or a region-specific app store. With these new transparency features, X exposed that major MAGA influencers are likely operating from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

A source tipped us off to something strange: a campaign called KICLEI was flooding city councillor inboxes across Canada with slick, professional-sounding messages urging municipalities to abandon their climate commitments. It posed as environmental wisdom, but it was a Trojan Horse designed to undermine municipal climate policy. Before, we would have investigated one city and written one story. But we had access to something new: a search engine we'd built in-house covering 617 municipalities and 24,318 council meetings.

As Rolling Stone reports, the theory of Nazi identification was tied to such flimsy evidence as a lightning-bolt necklace that maybe-kinda-sorta looks like an SS symbol, or fixating on an out-of-context use of the word "savage" in the song "Eldest Daughter." The campaign began in places like 4chan but quickly went mainstream, relying on a stan army as well as argumentative normies to give the theory an algorithmic boost.

As we spend more and more time online, we run the risk of encountering larger and larger amounts of online disinformation. This can have a significant impact on politics: at the end of 2024, the U.S. government sanctioned groups based in Iran and Russia over their efforts to mislead voters in the lead-up to that year's election. Darren M. West of the Brookings Institution argued that disinformation efforts "were successful in shaping the campaign narrative" in part due to numerous avenues of online dissemination.

It's a story that requires us to look more closely at how our own instincts, emotions, and digital habits shape the spread of information. This story reveals something both sobering and empowering: falsehood moves faster than truth not merely because of the technologies that transmit it, but because of the psychology that receives it. That insight is no longer just the intuition of intelligence officers or behavioral scientists. It is backed by hard data.

How bot activity fueled the rebrand backlash The most interesting part of this story never made headlines - likely overshadowed by the president's comments that turned the rebrand into a politicized moment. What was largely missing from the uproar was the real source of the rapid outrage: bots. According to the Wall Street Journal, bots posing as real users drove a disproportionate share of the social chatter that media outlets picked up.

The BBC is facing an unprecedented crisis over the controversial editing of a speech by U.S. President Donald Trump in a documentary broadcast a year ago. The incident has profoundly impacted trust in the professional ethics of the prestigious British corporation, as well as journalistic practice in general. The resignation of the BBC's director-general, Tim Davie, and the head of the news division, Deborah Turness,

Back in July, in the wake of Trump's struggles to distract from his own Epstein cover-up and as if in response to Tulsi Gabbard's wild rants about the Intelligence Community Assessment, the FBI Director posted this tweet, RTing an inflammatory tweet from a propagandist who has been central to Kash's disinformation about the Russian investigation. Buried in a back room at the FBI, Kash claimed, was what John Solomon called "the smoking gun evidence ... [i]f it is authenticated."

We in the west used to play dirty and during the cold war, we were good at it. Nowadays, we leave grey-zone tactics and hybrid warfare to Russia, which is winning the disinformation war. Europe's pride in playing by the rules might just be democracy's achilles heel. The Berlin airlift is a good example of what we once did well and have since forgotten.

Now if, like Musk's own children, you're not a member of the Elon fan club, you can probably imagine why Musk took on this project. Here's a man who purchased Twitter a few years ago specifically to refashion it into a neo-Nazi disinformation machine (check), insinuated himself with the second Trump administration so that he could hollow out the federal government (check), and designed electric cars that spontaneously combust, burning their liberal owners to death (check).

The daughter of Brigitte Macron told a French court on Tuesday that unsubstantiated claims about her mother's gender had adversely affected the French first lady's health. Tiphaine Auziere, 41, spoke on the second day of the trial in Paris of 10 people accused of cyberbullying the 72-year-old first lady by amplifying rumours that she was assigned male at birth.