#disinformation

#disinformation

Within days, multiple independent analyses - including Bellingcat, CNN, and CBS News - found that the weapon used was a Tomahawk cruise missile. Only the United States in this conflict possessed Tomahawk missiles. Israel was not operating in the area. A preliminary U.S. assessment leaked to CBS News concluded the U.S. was "likely responsible", possibly due to outdated intelligence misidentifying the area as an IRGC military site.

In the 48 hours following the operation led by the Mexican army in Jalisco, hundreds of false or unverified posts circulated on various platforms. The attacks unleashed by the drug cartels in several states, with a succession of road blockades, vehicles set on fire, and clashes between federal security forces and armed groups, were magnified through content amplified by bots by the manipulation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and by the influence of the American far right.

Supportive comments generated by fake profiles were predominantly brief, repetitive, and low in semantic complexity, consisting largely of praising keywords and positive hashtags rather than original or substantive engagement. In general, Cyabra found a sustained and coordinated amplification of Minaj's political and cultural posts from November 11 to December 28, something which is rare for a musical artist on social media.

A dozen humanoid robots stand in front of a snow-covered mountain range. They hold machine guns and run across a shooting range, kneeling down to shoot at targets and change magazines, then maneuvering through an obstacle course. The setting for these scenes in a 48-second video currently circulating on social media is supposedly China, with the national flag flying in the background. But is it real? In many languages, such as Turkish shown here, the claim spread that the video shows a real military exercise.

Recent revelations from news agency Reuters that the US is "developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including hate speech and terrorist propaganda," as a method to counter what it sees as excessive censorship in other parts of the world is troubling to the EU. Even if the plans appear to have been delayed and detail is thin, the US position is clear.

He and Ghislaine Maxwell did traffic children. And plenty of well-connected people were aware of multiple aspects of Epstein's behavior and crimes. While a lot of additional information about Epstein has been released in the last few months, the new information isn't decreasing the level of conspiracy theorizing. Instead, Epstein conspiracy theories are growing and multiplying. The new information isn't water putting out the conspiracy fires. Instead it is more like adding gasoline to the conspiracy theory fire.

Hungary is no stranger to extremely polarized election campaigns. For decades now, Victor Orban has whether in government or in the opposition followed the same playbook: Starting months ahead of the polls, he has run campaigns that suggest the very survival of the Hungarian nation is at stake. In these campaigns, he styles himself as the only one who can save Hungary and its people from evil and the threat of destruction at the hands of the country's enemies.

When we look at what makes media literacy effective, the data shows it works best when the content and skills are delivered by a trusted messenger. MediaWise ambassadors, like those we're working with on G.A.M.E., build on that proven strategy to address information challenges facing their communities. If we want to reach people, trusted messengers are really the best voices to be delivering this content.

Seven weeks today. We're waiting to hear the outcome of the settlement. But while we do, other western news organisations are cutting their international reporting teams, disinformation is flooding the digital sphere at an incredible speed, and state-backed media firms are using AI to promote propaganda. We have no time to lose. As a country, we face big decisions about our role in the international arena.

I was out of the country at the time, but shortly after I returned, I thought about Clem when Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot dead by ICE agents at a protest in Minnesota. It wasn't long before the Trump administration's top officials took turns blaming the victim, lying about the circumstances and calling Pretti an assassin. Pretti's distraught parents responded with this: "The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting."

Within minutes of Alex Pretti being shot and killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis on Saturday, the Trump administration, backed by right-wing influencers, launched a smear campaign against the victim, labeling him a "terrorist" and a "lunatic." Pretti, 37, was killed during a confrontation with multiple federal immigration agents. Pretti was an American citizen and a registered nurse who worked in the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a colleague who spoke to the Guardian.

Technology must serve the human person, not replace it,' Pope Leo said, decreeing that 'preserving human faces and voices' means preserving 'God's imprint on each human being,' which is an 'indelible reflection of God's love.' But chatbots simulate these faces and voices, oftentimes making it difficult for users to tell whether they engaging with a bot or a real person.

A group of researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale warn that the rise of AI bots and AI agents could pose a serious threat to democracy. For example, power-hungry politicians around the world can relatively easily create swarms of AI bots that flood social media and messaging services with propaganda and disinformation. In this way, they can not only influence election results but also persuade parts of the population to replace parliamentary democracy with an authoritarian regime.

The chart showed the vote totals over time for Wisconsin. At first glance, it appeared that Joe Biden was lagging far behind Donald Trump and then suddenly surged ahead to a tie. Almost immediately, people online seized on the image, claiming that all those Biden votes were actually evidence of fraud. In fact, it was nothing of the sort, and both Trump and Biden's votes had increased - the result of a large batch of absentee and mail ballots being counted all at once.

Transcendent moments in geopolitics that reverberate around the world are no longer just forged in the streets or inside situation rooms. They are increasingly engineered in the digital sphere, where actors, often with a self-serving agenda, compete to control the narrative, define its meaning and decide who speaks for whom. In recent weeks as protests erupted in Iranian cities, the hashtag #FreeThePersianPeople trended on X.

The news comes after right-wing Youtuber Nick Shirley went viral for videos accusing Somali people in Minneapolis of deceptively collecting Medicaid grants to run fraudulent daycares. While some child care fraud has been uncovered in places like Minnesota, investigators have debunked most of Shirley's videos, noting that he visited many of the daycare centers during irregular hours before claiming they don't offer the services advertised.

Speaking from the SpaceX headquarters in South Texas on Monday, Secretary of Defense, sorry, War (and gargantuan stain on our patriotic conscience) Pete Hegseth announced Grok will join Google's Gemini to be a part of the Pentagon's new internal AI platform (GenAI.mil) later this month. "Very soon we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department," he said. (Here's a fine example of this "leading model" in action.) "AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we're going to make sure that it's there."

The website (www.whitehouse.gov/j6) omitted numerous facts about President Donald Trump's culpability in baselessly claiming the 2020 election was fraudulent, inspiring the riot, further agitating the rioters against then-Vice President Mike Pence, and dragging his feet sending a tweet asking them to depart the Capitol peacefully, and seeks to shift blame to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other Democrats, Republicans who criticized Trump, and even the Capitol Police, accusing them of causing the violence by behaving aggressively with provocative tactics that escalate[d] tensions.

The Trump White House has published a government-sanctioned series of bonkers lies about the January 6 attack on its official website, formally abandoning the premise that presidential power should be constrained by evidence, courts, or shared reality. The newly launched The WhiteHouse.gov page does not merely reinterpret January 6 and dispute prosecutorial judgment. It asserts falsehoods as fact about one of the most exhaustively documented events in modern American history, using the institutional authority of the federal government to overwrite the evidentiary record.

By many accounts, those most impacted by the attacks - Venezuelans living and working in Venezuela - are resolutely opposed to the strikes, with thousands mobilizing in numerous Venezuelan cities in protest. (The death toll from the US strikes currently stands at 80 soldiers and civilians, a figure whichwill likely go up as the dust settles.) Though the attacks are still too recent to get accurate polling data of the country's sentiments, a November survey found that 86 percent of Venezuelans preferred for Maduro to remain head of state to resolve the country's economic woes.

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.