#disinformation

#disinformation

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.

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.

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.

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.

The most recent Engaged Journalism Exchange - a convening of journalism practitioners, funders, and scholars in San Francisco over the summer - began with Anita Varma describing how she'd been the target of a disinformation campaign, a home vandalism, and doxxing during the several years she's been leading the Solidarity Journalism Initiative as an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin.

We are in a time of distress. We are in a time of total degradation of democracy. Orwell wrote that the degradation of language is the condition for the degradation.

He made it clear that media organizations are the barrier to protect the world from the disinformation that can do so much harm. And he championed the profession. In a speech to media executives at the 39th Conference of the MINDS International Association, Leo said, "Doing the work of a journalist can never be considered a crime, but it is a right that must be protected."

We study AI and democracy. We're worried about 2050, not 2026. Half of humanity lives in countries that held national elections last year. Experts warned that those contests might be derailed by a flood of undetectable, deceptive AI-generated content. Yet what arrived was a wave of AI slop: ubiquitous, low quality, and sometimes misleading, but rarely if ever decisive at the polls.

Last Friday, during an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, CNN commentator and former Obama adviser Van Jones claimed that Iran and Qatar are running a disinformation campaign to manipulate young Americans into caring about Gaza. To make his point, he crudely imitated what he said appears on their social media feeds: Dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, Diddy, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby. The audience laughed.

The devices were designed to what experts call a "SIM farm," an industrial-scale operation where hundreds or thousands of SIM cards can be manipulated simultaneously. These setups are typically associated with financial fraud or bulk messaging scams. Still, the Secret Service warned that they can also be used to flood telecom networks, disable cell towers, and obscure the origin of communications. In the shadow of the UN, where global leaders convene and security tensions are high, the proximity of such a system raised immediate questions about intent, attribution, and preparedness. "(SIM farms) could jam cell and text services, block emergency calls, target first responders with fake messages, spread disinformation, or steal login codes," Jake Braun, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago and former White House Acting Principal Deputy National Cyber Director, tells The Cipher Brief. "In short, they could cripple communications just when they're needed most."

"Nobody likes Democrats anymore. We have no voters left because of all of our woke, trans bullshit. Not even Black people want to vote for us anymore - even Latinos hate us. So we need new voters,"

From Boko Haram to herderfarmer clashes, Nigeria's crises are complex. Simplistic genocide claims fuel propaganda. In recent days, coordinated attacks on Nigeria's nationhood have swept across social media, blogs and television outlets, alleging a so-called Christian genocide. These attacks, driven by foreign actors, mischaracterise Nigeria's domestic conflicts, ignore its complexities and manipulate longstanding ethnic and resource-based tensions to advance sectarian agendas.