#disinformation

#disinformation

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.

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.

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.

These short videos claim that the country is being governed by a "dictatorship" of its pro-European President, Maia Sandu, and the ruling liberal-conservative Action and Solidarity Party (PAS). They also allege that this "puppet regime" has sold itself to the European Union, NATO and US billionaire George Soros with a view to destroying Moldova's agriculture, "introducing LGBTQ ideology" and leading the country into a war against the Russian Federation.

A prototype app called Pixeltone developed by Adobe Research and the University of Michigan showed the possibility of using voice control and touch for photo editing. The top comment on the YouTube video demonstrating the capability is this one, left by a viewer 12 years ago: "Why so much hate? It isn't for the "real" photographer, but for my dad, that sometimes uses Photoshop; this is great."

If Russia gains control over Moldova, the consequences will be immediate and will threaten our country and the entire region. All Moldovans will suffer, regardless of who they voted for. Europe will stop at Moldova's border. Freedom of movement may end and our land could become a launchpad for penetration into Odesa Oblast. The Transnistrian region will be destabilised. These are their plans and they're not hiding them.

Over a decade ago, the crushing of the Arab Spring proved how the tools of the digital age, from smartphones to social media, could be weaponized against the very people many hoped they would uplift. Today, Israel's ability to livestream genocide for the world to see without facing any serious repercussions is showing us how easy it is for us to be collectively lulled into complacency, deterred by disinformation, and neutralized by surveillance.