ReportWire

Tag: Disinformation

  • As world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, concern over

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    As the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday, experts warned that a flood of “AI slop” is threatening efforts to preserve the memory of Nazi crimes and the millions of Jewish people killed during World War II. 

    Images seen by the AFP news agency include an emaciated and apparently blind man standing in the snow at the Nazi concentration camp Flossenbuerg, and a viral image of a little girl with curly hair on a tricycle falsely presented as a 13-year-old Berliner who died at the Auschwitz extermination camp.

    Such content — whether produced as clickbait for commercial gain or for political motives — has proliferated over the past year, distorting the history of Nazi Germany’s murder of six million European Jews during World War II.

    A person walks through the field of stelae at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, Jan. 27, 2026. 

    Christoph Soeder/picture alliance/Getty


    Early examples emerged in the spring of 2025, but by the end of the year, “AI slop” on the subject “was being shown very frequently,” historian Iris Groschek told AFP.

    On some sites, examples of such content were being posted once per minute, said Groschek, who works at Holocaust memorial sites in Hamburg, including the Neuengamme concentration camp.

    With the exponential advances in AI, “the phenomenon is growing,” Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the foundation that manages the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora memorials, told AFP.

    Several Holocaust memorials and commemorative associations this month issued an open letter warning about the rising quantity of this “entirely fabricated” content.

    Some of them are churned out by content farms that exploit “the emotional impact of the Holocaust to achieve maximum reach with minimal effort,” it said.

    The picture supposedly from Flossenbuerg camp falls into this category, as it was shown on a page claiming to share, “true, human stories from the darkest chapters of the past.”

    But the memorials warned that fake content was also being created, “specifically to dilute historical facts, shift victim and perpetrator roles, or spread revisionist narratives.”

    Official Holocaust Remembrance Day Commemoration Ceremony In The Senate

    A man watches during a commemoration of the Official Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity in the Spanish Senate, Jan. 27, 2026, in Madrid.

    Europa Press News


    Wagner points, for example, to images of seemingly “well-fed prisoners, meant to suggest that conditions in concentration camps weren’t really that bad.”

    The Frankfurt-based Anne Frank Educational Center has warned of a “flood” of AI-generated content and propaganda “in which the Holocaust is denied or trivialized, with its victims ridiculed.”

    By distorting history, AI-generated images have “very concrete consequences for how people perceive the Nazi era,” said Groschek.

    The results of trivializing or denying the Holocaust have been seen in the attitudes of some younger visitors to the camps, particularly from “rural parts of eastern Germany … in which far-right thinking has become dominant,” said Wagner.

    In their open letter, the memorials called on social media platforms to “proactively combat AI content that distorts history” and to “exclude accounts that disseminate such content from all monetisation programs.”

    Auschwitz survivors tell their story 70 years later



    Auschwitz survivors tell their story 70 years later

    27 photos

    “The challenge for society as a whole is to develop ethical and historically responsible standards for this technology,” they said, adding: “Platform operators have a particular responsibility in this regard.”

    German Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer said in a statement to AFP: “I support the memorials’ call to clearly label AI-generated images and remove them when necessary.”

    He said that making money from such imagery should be prevented.

    “This is a matter of respect for the millions of people who were killed and persecuted under the Nazis’ reign of terror,” he said, reminding the platforms that they have obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act.

    Groschek said none of the American social media companies had responded to the memorials’ letter, including Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.

    TikTok responded by saying it wanted to exclude the accounts in question from monetization and implement, “automated verification,” according to Groschek.

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  • RFK Jr. breaks his promises about the CDC on vaccines and autism

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    Before voting to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.) stated on the floor of the Senate that RFK Jr. had promised him that “he would work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems, and not establish parallel systems. If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control [CDC] and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes. CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.”

    Every one of the main promises made to Cassidy has been broken. Eschewing the usual system of consultations with outside independent vaccine experts, RFK Jr. announced on X in May that “as of today the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule.” This announcement makes it harder for expectant mothers to access the vaccines because some insurance companies are less likely to pay for them.

    In their lawsuit in response to RFK Jr.’s announcement, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, and the American Public Health Association argued that the secretary’s goal is “to undermine trust in vaccines and reduce the rate of vaccinations in this country.”

    What about his promise to maintain the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes? Nope. RFK Jr. fired all of the vaccine experts and loaded up the committee with anti-vaccination appointees.

    Finally, there is RFK Jr.’s promise that the CDC will not remove statements on its website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism. As of Wednesday, the CDC website states:

    • The claim “vaccines do not cause autism” is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.
    • Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.
    • HHS has launched a comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism, including investigations on plausible biologic mechanisms and potential causal links.

    After making these statements at the top of the webpage, the CDC website maintains a headline with an asterisk.

    A screenshot from the CDC website that says "Vaccines do not cause autism"
    cdc.gov

    Why the asterisk? A note at the bottom of the page explains:

    The header “Vaccines do not cause autism” has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.

    These changes are not merely dishonest; they are dangerous. All three of the new claims at the top of the CDC website are specious.

    First, evidence accumulated over numerous studies, including studies with millions of children, has found no link between vaccinations and autism.

    Second, in support of this claim that studies suggesting a link are ignored, the CDC gestures at reviews by the HHS’s own Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Scrounging through them for something that might suggest harm, RFK Jr.’s team found a minor note in a 2021 AHRQ report that observed the current evidence for childhood Tdap (Tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis) vaccination is “insufficient to support or reject a causal relationship between those vaccines and autism.”

    The report found that with respect to vaccines recommended for children and adolescents, “we found either no new evidence of increased risk for key adverse events with varied [strength of evidence] or insufficient evidence.” The critical question is: “insufficient evidence” for what? The report explains: “There remains insufficient evidence to draw conclusions about some rare potential adverse events [emphasis added].” Certainly, RFK Jr.’s alleged “autism epidemic” caused by vaccines would not count among “rare potential adverse events.”

    It is worth noting that the cited 2021 AHRQ report is peppered throughout with findings that vaccines do not cause autism. The new CDC site also fails to mention that the report observed that prenatal Tdap vaccination is not associated with a higher risk of autism in children.

    Meanwhile, as a result of falling Tdap vaccination rates, the number of American children infected with whooping cough (pertussis) is surging.

    What about the third claim that HHS has launched a “comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism”? In April, RFK Jr. appointed anti-vaccination stalwart David Geier to head up that assessment. As I noted at the time, “Geier will doubtlessly and transparently get the answers that our new secretary of Health and Human Services thinks he already knows.” In September, RFK Jr. announced the dubious finding that taking the painkiller Tylenol during pregnancy was associated with a higher risk of autism in children.

    “We are appalled to find that the content on the CDC webpage ‘Autism and Vaccines’ has been changed and distorted,” declares the Autism Science Foundation in a statement, “and is now filled with anti-vaccine rhetoric and outright lies about vaccines and autism.”

    That’s correct. This isn’t what the Senate—or the American people—were promised.

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    Ronald Bailey

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  • The DOGE Subcommittee Hearing on Weather Modification Was a Nest of Conspiracy Theorizing

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    The popularity of these conspiracies may also be on the rise in right-wing spaces. Some MAHA figureheads, including Nicole Shanahan, have shared geoengineering content promoting conspiracy theories, while Marla Maples, Donald Trump’s ex-wife, told Fox News in July that she helped Florida’s anti-weather modification bill pass. (Bill Gates’ track record of funding solar geoengineering research has undoubtedly helped fan some of these flames.)

    Doricko, the Rainmaker CEO, has spent much of the past year testifying in state legislatures that were considering vague anti-geoengineering bills that would have also banned cloud seeding. In May, he told WIRED that he and his team had spoken in front of 31 state legislatures. Education, he says, is key to getting people on board with the technology.

    “I think there’s some cohort of people that believe that, you know, Joe Biden is actually a lizard person,” he says. “I think that a lot of people aren’t quite that far along, but are very concerned about chemtrails, probably. Showing them farms that are greener than they otherwise would have been with testimonies from those farmers—that’s probably the way that we’re gonna win hearts and minds.” (Doricko told WIRED last week that in recent months, his company has had “interest, curiosity, and excitement” from various state governments, both Democratic and Republican, in using cloud seeding to enhance water supply. “The education that we had the opportunity to do ultimately I think assuaged a lot of reasonable people’s concerns.”)

    There is one additional type of human-caused shift in the world’s weather that played an outsize role in the hearing: climate change. Greene and other Republican lawmakers repeated many climate denial talking points and bad framing around climate science, including the idea that carbon dioxide is good for the planet because it is plant food. There were multiple mentions of beach houses owned by Barack Obama and Al Gore as a way of illustrating supposed hypocrisy about sea level rise. One of the witnesses called by the House majority works at an organization with a long history of questioning established climate science; he claimed in his testimony that there is “uncertainty as to exactly how much influence humans have exerted” over the global rise in temperature—a take that is out of line with mainstream science.

    “My view is that this is mainly a way of saying there are secret forces at work that are making your life miserable, and everything bad is due to these secret forces,” says Dessler. “When in reality, it’s not secret forces, it’s climate change and it’s these other things that are hurting people.”

    But even a whole hearing dedicated to a conspiracy theory grab bag may not be enough for some. On X, a popular anti-geoengineering community was alight with posts about the hearing—including many critical of the experts and their findings. “This was a scripted show to protect the government’s weather control agenda,” one moderator’s post reads. “Why no independent voices?”

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    Molly Taft

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  • Anti-Vaxxers Rejoice at Florida’s Scheme to End Vaccine Mandates for Kids and Everyone Else

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    On Wednesday afternoon, Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo announced that he would advocate for ending all vaccine mandates in the state. This would include, among other things, the end of vaccine requirements for children in school. Within minutes of Ladapo’s announcement, members of a private anti-vaccine Facebook group called The Vaccine Free Child were rejoicing.

    “Amen, stop the application of poison given to our precious children,” one member wrote, with another adding: “F yah! About time. Let the revolution begin.”

    “I shouldn’t have to inject my kids with poison because you’ve been brainwashed to live in fear,” another member wrote, adding: “Hopefully more will follow Florida’s lead.”

    Soon, group members from other parts of the country expressed their desire to have similar measures in their own states. “I am so jealous! I hope GA is next,” one member wrote, with another adding: “Ugh I wish Mississippi would do this but I don’t see it happening.” Another added: “Hopefully VA follows suit.”

    While many members were celebrating, others were seeking medical help. That same day in the group, one member was seeking advice for treating whooping cough in their child. Responses included various vitamin supplements and “onion socks.” (Some people believe, without evidence, that sliced onions held close to the body absorb viruses and toxins.) Elsewhere in the group, members recommended an hourly administration of chlorine dioxide—a toxic bleach solution—to treat a baby’s possible case of meningitis. The groups don’t just boost anti-vaccine content; they also spread unproven and often dangerous medical advice.

    The outpouring of joy in The Vaccine Free Child group echoed a celebratory mood online among the anti-vaccine community.

    “This is how you make America healthy again. Will other states follow Florida’s lead?” Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., posted to its X account. Moments later, the group hosted a live X Space with Dr. Memhet Oz, who heads up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Kennedy’s wife, actress Cheryl Hines. (Oz didn’t discuss the announcement from Florida.)

    While the anti-vaccine community celebrated, public health experts slammed Florida’s decision, saying it will possibly endanger the lives of children who will be left unprotected from diseases like measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, and hepatitis—all of which can be prevented by safe, affordable vaccines.

    “There is short-term damage as this announcement alone will further undermine trust in vaccines around the world,” says Alex Morozov, an oncologist who has overseen hundreds of drug trials at multiple companies including Pfizer.

    For Natalia Solenkova, a Miami-based critical care physician who has been fighting anti-vaccine disinformation for years, Ladapo’s announcement and the ensuing celebrations came as no surprise—and she believes the outcome will be just as predictable.

    “Florida has been moving in this direction for several years,” says Solenkova. “We know from history that before vaccines, children died from measles, polio, whooping cough, and other vaccine-preventable diseases. Without vaccines, children will die again.”

    With vaccination rates across the US already dropping in recent years, the impact of Florida’s proposed vaccine mandate ban could be devastating. “Long-term, we don’t know the impact. There is very little data on what happens when mandates are lifted. That is the danger of doing this so abruptly,” says Morozov. “Maybe vaccination rates will drop by 10 percent? Or maybe by 50 percent? Nobody knows. Higher drops could lead to devastating epidemics.”

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    David Gilbert

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  • Election Deniers Are Out in Full Force. We Went Where They Did

    Election Deniers Are Out in Full Force. We Went Where They Did

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    Las Vegas — Mindy Robinson has spent four years telling her hundreds of thousands of followers online that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But just days away from the 2024 vote, she has a unique new tactic to prove it’s getting stolen again: Not casting her ballot at all.

    “I’m not voting, I want to see if [my ballot] gets counted while I didn’t do anything,” Robinson, who desperately wants Trump to win, tells WIRED at a Las Vegas restaurant on Saturday morning. “I want to see it magically show up as counted. It’s the only fucking thing I can do at this point.”

    Just miles away, JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr were at the Whitney Recreation Center, where they urged their supporters to get out and vote.

    As Tuesday’s vote looms, the well-funded and lucrative election denial movement that sprung up after former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election is already calling foul, pushing conspiracies about immigrants voting and harassing election workers.

    The weekend ahead of the election, Robinson and thousands of others like her are challenging election officials and spreading conspiracy theories online and in person. Right-wing election observers are already at polling sites and voting tabulation centers; this weekend, election officials in Shasta County, California walked off the job because of the aggressive behavior of election observers.

    These election deniers have spent years building and buying an alternative reality sold by far-right groups that have been working around the clock to activate and train them. The groups are well-connected: The Election Integrity Network is run by former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a Texas-based group, was cofounded by election denial superstar Catherine Engelbrecht who has worked on dropbox monitoring and voter roll purge initiatives around the country for more than a decade. Election observers have also been trained in online calls by pro-Trump groups like Turning Point USA and the campaign’s own TrumpForce47.

    Over livestreams and in conferences around the US, these groups have prepared thousands of activists for this very moment.

    Since the 2020 presidential election, Robinson has become something of a celebrity in MAGA world. She calls Laura Loomer a friend and says Roger Stone phones her to get the lowdown on breaking news. She has over 400,000 followers on X and her own show—called Conspiracy Truths—on the America Happens Network, a platform she founded with her business partner Vem Miller, who was recently arrested at a Trump rally in possession of a shotgun and a handgun. There are few conspiracy theories Robinson, an actress with over 150 credits to her name on IMDB, doesn’t indulge in: In addition to believing the 2020 election was stolen, she also thinks most major school shootings are perpetrated by crisis actors, that shadowy organizations are implementing digital currencies to control the population, that COVID was released as a bioweapon, that COVID vaccines are untested and kill people, that January 6 was an inside job. She even believes the moon landing didn’t happen.

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    David Gilbert

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  • A Russian Disinfo Campaign Is Using Comment Sections to Seed Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theories

    A Russian Disinfo Campaign Is Using Comment Sections to Seed Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theories

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    “Video has come out from Bucks County, Pennsylvania showing a ballot counter destroying ballots for Donald Trump and keeping Kamala Harris’s ballots for counting,” an account called “Dan from Ohio” wrote in the comment section of the far-right website Gateway Pundit. “Why hasn’t this man been arrested?”

    But Dan is not from Ohio, and the video he mentioned is fake. He is in fact one of hundreds of inauthentic accounts posting in the unmoderated spaces of right-wing news site comment sections as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. These accounts were discovered by researchers at media watchdog NewsGuard, who shared their findings with WIRED.

    “NewsGuard identified 194 users that all target the same articles, push the same pro-Russian talking points and disinformation narratives, while masquerading as disgruntled Western citizens,” the report states. The researchers found these fake accounts posting comments in four pro-Trump US publications: the Gateway Pundit, the New York Post, Breitbart, and Fox News. They were also posting similar comments in the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid, and French website Le Figaro.

    None of the websites responded to a request for comment from WIRED.

    “The actors behind this campaign appear to be exploiting a particularly vulnerable part of the media landscape,” McKenzie Sadeghi, the AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, tells WIRED. “Comment sections designed to foster reader engagement lack robust security measures, allowing bad actors to post freely, change identities, and create the illusion of genuine grassroots campaigns rather than orchestrated propaganda.”

    The disinformation narratives being pushed by these accounts are linked to Storm-1516, according to Newsguard. Storm-1516 is a Russian disinformation campaign with a history of posting fake videos to push Kremlin talking points to the West that was also connected to the release of deepfake video falsely claiming to show a whistlelbower making allegations of sexual assault against vice presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz. (WIRED first reported that the Walz video was part of a campaign by Storm-1516. A day later, the US government confirmed WIRED’s reporting.)

    Links to the video were posted by multiple accounts with names like “Disobedient Truth” and “Private Patriot” in the comment section of outlets like Breitbart and the Gateway Pundit.

    “More bad news for the Dems: Breaking: Tim Walz’s former student, Matthew Metro, drops a shocking allegation- claims Walz s*xually assaulted him in 1997 while Walz was his teacher at Mankato West High School,” the comments read.

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    David Gilbert

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  • Steve Bannon Is Out of Prison and Spreading Lies Online

    Steve Bannon Is Out of Prison and Spreading Lies Online

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    Steve Bannon got out of federal prison at around 3 am Tuesday. Seven hours later, he was live on his War Room podcast to “flood the zone with shit” exactly one week before the presidential election.

    Flooding the zone with shit is Bannon’s own oft-quoted description of his media strategy: churning so many lies or half-truths into the stratosphere that it becomes impossible to draw a line between fact and fiction.

    “I am more energized and more focused than I’ve ever been in my entire life,” said Bannon on the War Room stream on Rumble, which garnered nearly 100,000 live viewers at one point. “The four months in federal prison not only didn’t break me, it empowered me.”

    Bannon, 70, a longtime ally of and former strategist for Donald Trump, spent four months at a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for contempt after he defied a subpoena in the congressional probe into the January 6 Capitol riot.

    Bannon has cast himself as a martyr—someone who, like January 6 rioters and like Trump, is being unfairly persecuted by the same tyrannical forces they’re up against next week in the election.

    On Tuesday on air, and later at a press conference, Bannon repeatedly suggested that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi banished him to prison because she wanted to contain his influence.

    “If you’re not prepared to be sent to federal prison as a political prisoner, then you’re not worthy to be in this movement,” he said. “You have to understand, they want to put you in prison, and they will put you in prison. If you can’t accept that, then you don’t know what they represent.”

    Bannon’s return to the public sphere also means the return of a massive mouthpiece to amplify the election fraud conspiracies that are already raging online. And Bannon got directly to business, spinning a tale to his viewers of Democrats plotting to heist the 2024 election.

    “Every day after November 5 is going to be Stalingrad,” Bannon said. “If they can’t take it away from Trump, if they can’t nullify it right there, they want to at least delegitimize his victory.”

    “They will go to any length to stop President Trump,” Bannon continued. “That’s the reality.”

    A 2023 Brookings study on disinformation in political podcasts identified Bannon’s War Room as the biggest disseminator of falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims; about a fifth of all episodes assessed by researchers were determined to have claims flagged as false by debunkers such as Snopes and Politifact.

    “If the Pelosi apparatus wins, you better be prepared to go to federal prison,” Bannon said. “Because these people have no qualms about weaponizing the justice system, weaponizing the legal system, against Americans who have different political views.”

    His fans seem to be happy he’s back. “God Bless You Steve’ Get The Bannon Sledge Hammer Out, And Start Smashing The TRAITORS,” one viewer wrote during the Tuesday livestream.

    “Welcome back Steve, we need our leader,” wrote another. “Give us our marching orders and lets get this done.”

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    Tess Owen

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  • Donald Trump Vows to Let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ‘Go Wild on Health’ If Elected

    Donald Trump Vows to Let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ‘Go Wild on Health’ If Elected

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    At his rally on Sunday at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, former president and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that if elected he would allow wellness conspiracist and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild on health.” Kennedy, a former Democrat and scion of the famous political family, initially ran as an independent third-party and potential spoiler candidate, and has spent the better part of two decades spreading conspiracy theories that would likely inform the policies of a Trump administration.

    In August, Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign and threw his weight behind Trump. (Both the Trump and Kennedy campaigns received support from billionaire donor Timothy Mellon.) There were early indications that he might have a place in a possible Trump administration, particularly in some areas focused on health. Kennedy himself even created a spinoff of Trump’s MAGA slogan with his own Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA. But Trump’s speech seems to indicate that Kennedy would indeed have a place in the cabinet, perhaps running Health and Human Services (HHS).

    Kennedy has since hit the campaign trail stumping for Trump alongside another former Democrat and conspiracy theorist, Tulsi Gabbard.

    Kennedy has spent years spreading health mis- and disinformation, particularly about vaccines. In 2014, Kennedy joined Children’s Health Defense (CHD) as a member of its board. CHD pushes debunked conspiracy theories linking conditions like autism with vaccines and other environmental factors. In 2021, Meta banned Kennedy’s Instagram account for spreading disinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine, and he was named by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) as one of 12 people responsible for 65 percent of vaccine disinformation across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy’s own profile, as well as that of CHD, began to rise. CHD raised more money in 2021 than it ever had before.

    Meta reinstated Kennedy’s Instagram account last year when he announced his run for the presidency, and it remains up, despite the fact that he is no longer running for office. CHD remains banned from Meta’s platforms. More recently, Kennedy has echoed unfounded conspiracies that could undermine faith in the integrity of the 2024 elections.

    During his presidential campaign, Kennedy tried to distance himself from the anti-vax movement. Still, he continued to spread disinformation, like falsely saying that the Biden administration had violated the Nuremburg Code by mandating vaccines. And his vision for making America healthy again is drastic. Last Friday, he posted on X to warn the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that its “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, [and] hydroxychloroquine” was about to end.

    The Department of Health and Human Services oversees 13 agencies, including the FDA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In an interview with NBC News while he was still running for president, Kennedy said he would gut those agencies, which he has said are now captured by corporations. He would also impose more testing on already existing vaccines, which health experts told NBC would result in many children being unable to get vaccinated. (Trump, for his part, has claimed he would withhold funding from schools that require vaccination.) Kennedy’s plan would also include dismissing scientists at the NIH who study infectious diseases, focusing instead on the environmental factors and vaccines that he believes cause illnesses.

    During his campaign, he held a health policy roundtable with doctors that pushed fake Covid-19 treatments.

    Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told WIRED that “President Trump announced a Trump-Vance transition leadership group to initiate the process of preparing for what comes after the election. But formal discussions of who will serve in a second Trump Administration is [sic] premature.”

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    Vittoria Elliott

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  • Microsoft Warns Foreign Disinformation Is Hitting the US Election From All Directions

    Microsoft Warns Foreign Disinformation Is Hitting the US Election From All Directions

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    As November 5 draws closer, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) warned on Wednesday that malicious foreign influence operations launched by Russia, China, and Iran against the US presidential election are continuing to evolve and should not be ignored even though they have come to feel inevitable. In the group’s fifth report, researchers emphasize the range of ongoing activities as well as the inevitability that attackers will work to stoke doubts about the integrity of the election in its aftermath.

    In spite of escalating conflict in the Middle East, Microsoft says that Iran has been able to keep up its operations targeting the US election, particularly targeting the Trump campaign and attempting to foment anti-Israel sentiment. Russian actors, meanwhile, have been focused on targeting the Harris campaign with character attacks and AI-generated content, including deepfakes. And China has shifted its focus in recent weeks, researchers say, to target down-ballot Republican candidates as well as sitting members of Congress who promote policies adversarial to China or in conflict with its interests.

    Crucially, MTAC says it is all but certain that these actors will attempt to stoke division and mistrust in vote security on Election Day and in its immediate aftermath.

    “As MTAC observed during the 2020 presidential cycle, foreign adversaries will amplify claims of election rigging, voter fraud, or other election integrity issues to sow chaos among the US electorate and undermine international confidence in US political stability,” the researchers wrote in their report.

    As the 2024 campaign season enters its final phase, the researchers say that they expect to see AI-generated media continuing to show up in new campaigns, particularly because content can spread so rapidly in the charged period immediately around Election Day. The report also notes that Microsoft has detect Iranian actors probing election-related websites and media outlets, “suggesting preparations for more direct influence operations as Election Day nears.”

    Chinese actors focusing on US congressional races and other figures also indicates a fluency and far-reaching approach to deploying influence operations. China-backed groups have recently launched campaigns against US representative Barry Moore, and US senators Marsha Blackburn and Marco Rubio (who is not currently up for re-election), pushing corruption allegations and promoting opposing candidates.

    MSTAC says that many influence campaigns from all of the actors fail to gain traction. But the efforts are still significant, because the narratives that do break through can have significant impact and the activity in general contributes to the volume and intensity of false and misleading claims circulating in the information landscape surrounding the election.

    “History has shown that the ability of foreign actors to rapidly distribute deceptive content can significantly impact public perception and electoral outcomes,” MSTAC general manager Clint Watts wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “With a particular focus on the 48 hours before and after Election Day, voters, government institutions, candidates and parties must remain vigilant to deceptive and suspicious activity online.”

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    Lily Hay Newman

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  • The Shitposting Cartoon Dogs Sending Trucks, Drones, and Weapons to Ukraine’s Front Lines

    The Shitposting Cartoon Dogs Sending Trucks, Drones, and Weapons to Ukraine’s Front Lines

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    The fundraising drives are organized on Discord, Signal, and Telegram—but not on X, the platform that the NAFO movement has thrived on for years.

    “People are being forced away from X, just because Russia basically bought the platform,” the UK-based fella tells WIRED, citing the prevalence of Russian bots and pro-Kremlin accounts allowed on the platform under Musk’s stewardship. X did not respond to a request for comment.

    One of the most successful and prolific NAFO fundraisers has been Ragnar Sass, who runs the NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade, which has raised more than $10 million to date for Ukrainian troops. That money has allowed Sass and his brigade to send more than 460 vehicles to Ukrainian troops, as well as more than 1,000 drones and other equipment to soldiers on the ground. They have even rescued 32 Ukrainian pets.

    Sass’s brigade not only supplies the trucks, but also kits them out with custom technology designed specifically for combat such as jammers and night vision cameras. The trucks and jeeps are then painted, including NAFO lettering, and driven in convoys to the front lines in Ukraine.

    “What makes us different, is that we are analyzing every week what are the most effective electronic warfare solutions,” Sass tells WIRED while coordinating his brigade’s 33rd convoy to the Ukrainian front lines.

    Sass is an Estonian entrepreneur and cofounder of cloud-based software company Pipedrive, which was valued at more than $1 billion in 2020. He has been operating in Ukraine for more than a decade, and in 2019 launched a startup incubator in Kiev called Lift99.

    When the war broke out in early 2022, Sass donated $20,000 to the Ukrainian army. “Many people followed, and by the end of day, we collected $200,000,” Sass says. By March 2022, Sass had organized his first convoy of 14 cars, and by June of that year, he joined with NAFO.

    Sass’ operation incentivizes donations by offering a patch to anyone who donates more than €100 ($110), and he says to date they have sent out more than 10,000 patches to donors in more than 50 countries.

    The NAFO fundraisers are needed, Sass says, because of the glacial pace that organizations like NATO operate in response to wartime situations.

    “We are the fastest and most effective,” Sass says. “We can fundraise and deliver help in a matter of days. Like we did with Kursk: We started a campaign on Thursday evening. Next week, car and drones were handed over to units in Kursk. This war will be won by drones, and NATO procurement is from the stone age.”

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    David Gilbert

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  • Border protection head debunks false claims about FEMA funds

    Border protection head debunks false claims about FEMA funds

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    Border protection head debunks false claims about FEMA funds – CBS News


    Watch CBS News



    The federal government says it has been dealing with an unprecedented number of rumors surrounding the recent hurricanes, Helene and Milton. CBS News immigration and politics reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez speaks with the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection about one of those false claims. Then, CBS News national security contributor Sam Vinograd joins with further analysis.

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  • The Influence of the US Far Right on Ireland Is Growing

    The Influence of the US Far Right on Ireland Is Growing

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    “The people who are running us act like they are Jewish and act like they are Christian. They are not Christian, nor are not Jewish, they are Satanists. And they belong to secret societies, and that’s where their loyalty lies, not with God, not with Jesus, not with anything else, but the deceiver.”

    Pedersen told WIRED that he was invited by an Irish-based X account to “explain to them what Q is, not what the mainstream media says it is but what it really is,” adding that he wanted to spread the message that “if the US falls, by not electing Donald Trump, the whole world falls.”

    Far-right Canadians have also become increasingly focused on Ireland.

    Ezra Levant, the founder of Rebel News, a far-right website that promotes Islamophobic content, traveled to Ireland to report on anti-immigrant protests in Dublin, interviewing several prominent members of Ireland’s far-right community. Shane Sweeney, an influencer from Newfoundland who regularly posts white nationalist content on social media, is also very closely linked to Butler, regularly joining him in online discussions.

    Levant did not respond to requests for comment. Sweeney declined to comment.

    During a number of chats in recent months, some members of these far-right groups have suggested they have connections to people in the US who may be willing to provide funding for Irish extremist groups.

    While there was no evidence provided to back up these claims, one recent fundraiser for an Irish far-right group does indicate that there is at least some willingness for Americans to donate money to these causes.

    Justin Barrett, a well-known figure in Irish far-right politics who has called Hitler the greatest leader of all time, recently launched a fundraiser on Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo. The money was earmarked for the National Shield, the “protection unit” of his newly created political party, called Clann Eireann, which means “Family of Ireland.”

    While the effort has so far raised just €3,000 of its €10,000 goal, many of those donating money claim to be based in the US. “Much love from America,” one donor wrote, while another added: “Integration has failed in America. We can move out of the citys [sic]. You live on an island. You don’t have anywhere to go. Fight the invasion.”

    Irish far-right influencer Keith O’Brien, who is known online as Keith Woods, is also seeking to benefit financially from links to the US. O’Brien has spent years building up relationships with figures in the US far-right movement, including Fuentes, who has hosted the Irishman numerous times on his podcast. Woods also appeared last summer at a notorious white supremacist conference in Tennessee.

    “He has a significant US audience very much focused in the same space as Nick Fuentes and the Groyper movement,” Malone said. “There isn’t a large paying Irish audience for his material, so O’Brien is really US-focused.”

    O’Brien did not respond to a request for comment.

    In the US, armed militias are once again organizing at a local level ahead of November’s election, and while Irish people do not have easy access to guns, there are efforts underway to create localized groups.

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    David Gilbert

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  • Inside the Anti-Vax Facebook Group Pushing a Bogus Cure for Autism

    Inside the Anti-Vax Facebook Group Pushing a Bogus Cure for Autism

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    Czelazewicz is just one of many affiliates who sell Pure Body Extra online, including Larry Cook, one of the best known US anti-vax influencers. Cook and his Stop Mandatory Vaccination group was kicked off Facebook in 2020, but only after it had amassed a following of around 200,000. Today, Cook sells Pure Body Extra as a cure for autism via his Detox for Autism website.

    Pure Body Extra is manufactured by a company called Touchstone Essentials, which was founded in 2012 by Eddie Stone and is based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

    The company sells a variety of other health and wellness products. On the product page for Pure Body Extra on the Touchstone Essentials website, the company says the product is safe “for all ages,” and in a section labeled “science,” the company states that the product’s “capacity to capture toxins, heavy metals, and environmental pollutants is evidenced by more than 300 studies documented on PubMed.”

    However, when WIRED analyzed the 300 studies, it emerged that many were nonhuman trials, including numerous tests on animals. Indeed, over the course of the last 10 years, just seven medical trials on clinoptilolite, the particular type of zeolite used in PBX, had been conducted on humans, all of which were conducted on adults, and some of which didn’t concern detoxification.

    “This is a broader trope in alternative health where [anti-vaxxers] rail against the medical establishment, saying they don’t have your best interests at heart and that you can’t trust ordinary doctors or ordinary medical science, but they do love to cherry-pick studies that seem to show favorable results for some cure that they offer,” says Calum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “They’re then misapplying that science to try and sell people on the idea that a bit of zeolite is going to cure their child’s autism.”

    When asked to provide proof that clinoptilolite was safe for use in children, Touchstone Essentials did not provide a response, but Sonia O’Farrell, the company’s chief marketing officer, told WIRED that the company “does not claim that Pure Body Extra (PBX) can cure or treat autism, or any medical condition for that matter. Pure Body Extra is a dietary supplement featuring natural zeolite to support the body’s detoxification systems. By definition, dietary supplements may not claim to treat, cure, diagnose, or prevent any disease.”

    O’Farrell added that the company does not endorse any individuals who sell its products or how they promote them. “Upon becoming aware of an Affiliate making any medical claims, our compliance team will advise an Affiliate to remove any such materials,” O’Farrell added.

    A statement written in small text at the bottom of the Touchstone Essentials website states: “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Our products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

    The FDA did not respond to a request for comment about the way Pure Body Extra is being promoted online.

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    David Gilbert

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  • Trump Supporters Are Boosting a Clip of a Voting Machine Being Hacked. It’s Not What It Seems

    Trump Supporters Are Boosting a Clip of a Voting Machine Being Hacked. It’s Not What It Seems

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    Behizy’s post caught the attention of some big names in the world of voting machine conspiracies. Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who was named in a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting on account of lies he spread about their machines following the 2020 election, amplified Behizy’s post. Trump’s former national security adviser and election conspiracist Michael Flynn reposted Behizy’s post about the hack: “Our election system is vulnerable to nefarious actors,” Flynn wrote. “We MUST get rid of the machines! Total BS that we continue using them.” Right-wing influencer Phillip Buchanan, known online as Catturd, also reposted Behizy’s post along with a pithy statement to his millions of followers: “Imagine that!”

    The clip of the successful hacking—minus key context—also spread across fringe news sites and platforms. Right-wing commentator Vigilant Fox, who runs Vigilant News, flagged the podcast clip to their 1.3 million followers on X as an “important story” that the media “hid from you today.” On Truth Social, the news was distributed via links across fringe sites such as Slay News, and shared by Freedom Force Battalion, a QAnon account.

    “I haven’t listened to the whole interview yet, to be fair,” one poster on Truth Social wrote, while sharing the short clip and claiming that all voting machines are compromised.

    Voting machines have long been a target of election conspiracies. But in 2020, with the help of GOP members of Congress, right-wing sheriffs, conservative pundits, and Trump, those narratives exploded into the mainstream.

    At the same time, officials in the US government and agencies charged with running and defending elections in the US called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”

    Well-intentioned cybersecurity experts and hackers, like Hursti, are often tapped by state and federal agencies to probe election infrastructure for security vulnerability to make elections even safer. This August, like every year, hackers at Defcon’s “Voting Village”—led by Hursti—identified some minor weaknesses in the machines. Politico reported that while it was unlikely any of those weaknesses could disrupt the election, some experts were concerned about election conspiracy theorists weaponizing the results to advance their own narratives about the system.

    For the past four years, a massive network of national and state-level election denial groups have built up, formed on the belief that the 2020 election was stolen. In recent months, these groups have kicked into gear ahead of November’s vote, pushing conspiracies about immigrants voting, trying to remove thousands of names from voter rolls, and even spying on drop boxes in swing states.

    Throughout his podcast episode, Bet-David repeatedly tries to push conspiratorial claims about why voting machines are so insecure, suggesting that an unnamed “they” are purposely trying to keep the system insecure.

    Hursti continuously pushes back, pointing out that computers by their very nature are vulnerable and that instead of trying to create a perfect system, officials are working to mitigate risks where possible.

    “Every computer in the world can be hacked if you have access and no mitigation,” Hursti said. “When we’ve hacked machines, it is for the purpose that we can improve, and if you cannot improve the system, then you have to improve everything around the system, have a mitigation strategy, how you defend the system.”

    Citing the vulnerabilities that Hursti has revealed in dozens of voting machines in recent years, Bet-David pushed the well-known conspiracy that in 2020 “the winners were flipped because somebody got into” the machines.

    But the Finnish hacker pushed back, dismissing the suggestion and pointing out that without proper regulations in place to ensure voting machines meet basic security standards, the idea that elections were vulnerable to cyberattacks was enough to damage democracy.

    “The [worry] here is to deny the result or make a false allegation,” Hursti said. “This is very dangerous because it is feeding the distrust of the public and, in democracy, any distrust is damaging the participation, and democracy is all about participation. Distrust is causing apathy. Apathy is something which is detrimental for functioning democracies.”

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    Tess Owen, David Gilbert

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  • What Right-Wing Influencers Actually Said in Those Tenet Media Videos

    What Right-Wing Influencers Actually Said in Those Tenet Media Videos

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    In hundreds of videos since taken down by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—a company the US Department of Justice alleges was financed and guided by a state-backed Russian news network—showed interest in a highly specific set of topics, according to a WIRED analysis.

    Using closed captioning of the videos we downloaded before the videos were removed, we’ve compiled lists of terms frequently mentioned in them, along with a searchable database:

    The content of these videos was described by prosecutors as “consistent” with Russia’s aim of sowing political discord in the US. Among the areas covered: free speech, illegal immigrants, diversity in video games, supposed racism toward white people, and Elon Musk.

    While an indictment unsealed earlier this week does not name Tenet, WIRED and other outlets were able to identify it because prosecutors gave its motto as that of a business identified as “U.S. Company-1.” Prosecutors allege that two employees of the state-backed Russian network RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, paid Tenet and its parent company $9.7 million to produce and distribute videos supporting Russian aims. The vast majority of that money allegedly went to Tenet’s network of popular influencers, which included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.

    The influencers are not accused by the government of wrongdoing. Johnson, Pool, Rubin, and fellow talents Tayler Hansen and Matt Christiansen issued statements denying awareness of the alleged Russian influence scheme and portraying themselves as its victims. (They have not responded to requests for comment.) Prosecutors say that right-wing personality Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, Canadian nationals who founded Tenet—the two, who have not been charged with any crime, go unnamed in the indictment but are tied to the business through corporate records—were aware they were working with Russians and failed to register “as an agent of a foreign principal, as required by law.” The indictment alleges that the pair, who were not indicted, did not inform the influencers or other Tenet employees about the source of their funding.

    Nonetheless, Afanasyeva, using fake personae, “edited, posted, and directed the posting by [Tenet] of hundreds of videos,” the indictment says. The indictment does not identify specific videos as allegedly influenced by the RT employees, but prosecutors say they were intimately involved in Tenet’s editorial process: “While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying US domestic divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”

    To determine what specifically the Russian government is alleged to have funded, WIRED downloaded the closed captioning transcripts from 405 long-form videos posted on Tenet’s YouTube channel—you can access the file here—and used natural language processing to identify common themes. These 405 video transcripts represent nearly every long-form video available on the channel. We were not able to analyze approximately 1,600 YouTube shorts before the channel was removed from the site. We analyzed the data looking for the most frequently occurring two-, three-, and four-word phrases in each video, excluding words like “um” that don’t carry much meaning. (“Um” appears in the dataset 2,340 times.)

    This analysis does not show that in these videos the influencers were particularly fixated on the Ukraine war—the word “Ukraine” appears in the transcripts 67 times, about as often as “misinformation,” “Christianity,” and “Clinton.” It does show the influencers stressing highly divisive culture war topics in the videos, which carried titles like “Trans Widows Are a Thing and It’s Getting OUT OF HAND” and “Race Is Biological But Gender Isn’t???” The word “trans” appears 152 times, and “transgender” 98.

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    Tim Marchman, Dhruv Mehrotra

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  • DOJ: Russia Aimed Propaganda at Gamers, Minorities to Swing 2024 Election

    DOJ: Russia Aimed Propaganda at Gamers, Minorities to Swing 2024 Election

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    The documents show that the orchestrators of the campaign targeted existing divisions within US society, using racist stereotypes and far-right conspiracies to target supporters of former President Donald Trump.

    ​​”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in one document outlining his “guerilla media” plan. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.”

    The same document is full of racist and conspiratorial claims including that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color.” It adds that white middle class people are being discriminated against with high inflation and rising prices, while “unemployed people of color end up being privileged groups of the population.”

    And the goal of the campaign, from the beginning, was crystal clear: “To secure victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote in the Good Old USA Project planning document.

    The ‘Good Old USA’ plan openly admits that “none of the significant American politicians can be considered pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so rather than focus its efforts on trying to convince people that Russia is great, the plan called for promoting the idea that the US should be focusing its resources less on Ukraine and more on domestic issues, such as rising inflation and high gas prices.

    “It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that the Republican Party’s point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Old USA Project planning document reads. “This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”

    As well as getting Trump elected, the campaign’s secondary goals included increasing the percentage of Americans who believe the US is doing too much to aid Ukraine to 51 percent, and reducing the percentage of Americans who have confidence in President Joe Biden down to 29 percent.

    The plan lists a variety of audiences the campaign specifically wants to target, including residents of swing states, American Jews, “US citizens of Hispanic descent,” and the “community of American gamers, users of Reddit and image boards, such as 4chan.”

    The document describes this category of gamers and chat room users as the “backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet.” In recent months, the Trump campaign has embraced many of the most influential figures within these communities, including many who share deeply misogynistic rhetoric on a regular basis.

    To spread their narrative, the plan called for the creation of YouTube channels that shared pro-Trump content as well as other viral videos (“music, humor, beautiful girls etc,” according to the documents) in order to appear at the top of search results for “US elections.”

    Meanwhile, Gambashidze and his colleagues used Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to create community groups of Trump supporters, with one sample name given as “Alabama for America the Great.” The document also reveals that the Russians planned to use Reddit as a vector to disseminate their propaganda as it is a platform “free from democratic censorship.”

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    David Gilbert

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  • How Israel Is Exploiting Google Ads to Discredit a UN Aid Agency

    How Israel Is Exploiting Google Ads to Discredit a UN Aid Agency

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    What Kronenfeld says truly worries her is that Americans are being exposed to Israel’s propaganda while trying to understand UNRWA’s role in the ongoing crisis. Beside the search ads, Israel has aired video ads in the US through Google that say “UNRWA is inseparable from Hamas” and that it “keeps employing terrorists.” Public misunderstanding could further jeopardize support from the US government, which until the war had been the largest donor to UNRWA.

    “There is an incredibly powerful campaign to dismantle UNRWA,” Kronenfeld says. “I want the public to know what’s happening and the insidious nature of it, especially at a time when civilian lives are under attack in Gaza.”

    Google spokesperson Jacel Booth tells WIRED that governments can run ads that adhere to the company’s policies and that users and employees are welcome to report alleged violations. “We enforce them consistently and without bias,” Booth says of the rules. “If we find ads that violate those policies, we take swift action.”

    The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New York acknowledged but did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story over the past four months.

    UNRWA Takes Action

    Using nearly $1.5 billion annually in donor support, UNRWA employs about 30,000 people to educate, feed, and provide care for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza and neighboring areas. UNRWA supporters say Israel doesn’t like that the agency preserves Palestinians’ refugee status, which arguably gives them a better shot at reclaiming occupied land someday.

    Israel for decades has accused UNRWA of standing in the way of lasting peace by protecting Hamas and enabling the US-designated terrorist organization to indoctrinate generation after generation with hateful ideology.

    The agency has acted in response to Israel’s accusations. UNRWA this year has fired 13 employees, including nine whom an oversight body determined may have been involved in last year’s Hamas attack based on evidence provided by Israel. The US has paused funding to UNRWA since January, while other countries that cut off dollars to the agency this year, including Germany and Switzerland, pledged to reopen the spigot.

    UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, has said that his organization plays a neutral and vital role in the region and that it engages in screening and training to keep Hamas sympathizers out of its ranks.

    Kronenfeld, who is Jewish, says Lazzarini’s transparency and good-faith efforts have left her feeling comfortable about her role. She joined UNRWA USA in 2020 because her grandfather had escaped Nazi Germany and instilled in her that no one should be brutalized ever again based on where they were born. Among her initiatives was ramping up online advertising, with the aim of bringing in at least $3.90 for every $1 spent.

    Driven by the war, the return on investment has been $25 on every $1 spent this year, but the competition from Israel on Google has meant UNRWA USA is winning fewer advertising auctions and likely getting its message shown to fewer users.

    After Kronenfeld and colleagues complained to Google in January about Israeli ads featuring headlines such as “UNRWA for Human Rights,” they say a company representative told them, without providing a reason, that the ads in question had been removed. Google’s Booth says there was no policy violation.

    By May, per screenshots seen by WIRED, Israel was back to promoting the same content but with tweaked verbiage—“UNRWA Neutrality Compromised,” “Israel Unveils UNRWA Issues,” and “Israel Advocates for Safer, Transparent Humanitarian Practices”—that more clearly previewed what users would get if they clicked.

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    Paresh Dave

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  • Information Pollution: The Tragedy of the Commons and Well-Poisoning on the Internet

    Information Pollution: The Tragedy of the Commons and Well-Poisoning on the Internet

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    Discover how the internet propagates “information pollution” and how it threatens our collective understanding of facts and truth. Here’s how to navigate the chaos and find clean water to drink.

    In a healthy and functional society, shared common resources are essential for the well-being and sustainability of the community.

    These resources can include natural goods such as land, water, and the environment, as well as man-made goods such as public schools, parks, and libraries.

    Generally, the ability to manage, sustain, and distribute these resources determines the success of a society, community, or nation as a whole.

    The Tragedy of the Commons

    The tragedy of the commons is a concept introduced by ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968, describing a scenario where individuals, acting in their own self-interest, overuse and deplete a shared resource, ultimately harming the entire community.

    Classic examples include overgrazing on common land, overfishing in shared waters, and pollution of air and water. The key issue is that while the benefits of exploitation are enjoyed by individuals, the costs are distributed among the entire community.

    Information as a Shared Resource

    One common resource that is often neglected is news and information.

    Over the last century, newspapers, radio, TV, and the internet have become the lifeblood of many nations, shaping public opinion and collective consciousness.

    Truth and reliable information function as shared resources critical for various societal functions, including governance, public health, and social interaction.

    Just as a community depends on clean water, society relies on accurate information to make decisions, build trust, and maintain peace and harmony.

    When these information resources are polluted, the consequences can be severe, leading to mistrust, division, and poor decision-making.

    Information Pollution

    Information is a shared resource that is susceptible to degradation through neglect or deliberate actions, leading to a type of “information pollution.”

    This phenomenon mirrors the “tragedy of the commons,” where the self-interested actions of individuals can spoil a common resource for everyone.

    Information pollution occurs when false, misleading, or harmful information is introduced into the public discourse. This can happen through:

    • Misinformation: Incorrect or misleading information spread unintentionally.
    • Disinformation: False information spread deliberately to deceive.
    • Malinformation: Information that is true but presented in a misleading context to cause harm.

    All three types of information pollution hurt people’s ability to discern truth from fiction.

    Well-Poisoning on the Internet

    The internet can be a wonderful place to learn new things, but it’s also littered with information pollution, especially on social media sites filled with bots, spammers, and grifters.

    When a water well is poisoned, everyone in the town ends up drinking dirty and contaminated water. The same is true for information pollution on the internet – and social media is dirty water.

    There are a lot of factors that drive information pollution on the internet, but key ones include:

    • Clickbait and engagement farming – For most people, the only measure of success on the internet is how much attention you get. An outrageous lie or falsehood will get a million impressions before anyone tries to confirm what’s been said. People rarely correct themselves if a lie is getting them a lot of impressions.
    • Grifting and easy money – Many people see the internet as an opportunity for a quick buck, so a lot of content you see is purely money-driven, including advertisements, sponsored content, or superficial merchandise (mugs, t-shirts, diet supplements, brain enhancement pills, etc.) If you see anyone selling these types of products on the internet, you can be certain that truth is not their main motivation.
    • Bots and algorithm-hacking – Artificial engagement on the internet is a huge problem. A lot of viral content you see these days is pushed by bot farms and clever algorithm manipulation. Organic growth by independent thinkers and creators used to be a genuine thing about a decade ago, but most big e-celebrities and influencers you see today are completely astroturfed.
    • Politics and propaganda – A lot of misinformation and disinformation is politically driven propaganda. Governments and corporations are known to create their own bots and internet campaigns to shape public opinion in one direction or another.
    • Echo chambers and groupthink – While it’s natural to associate with people who think like us and share the same beliefs, the internet tends to heighten this tendency. People only spend time on online spaces that confirm their existing beliefs and very rarely seek out different perspectives.

    All of these factors make the internet a less reliable place for seeking truth and information. These phenomenon have only increased over the past decade, making the internet increasingly harmful and stupid (to be frank).

    Filtering Dirty Water

    Now more than ever we need to find ways to filter the information we are being exposed to online. Effective strategies you can employ include:

    • Pay attention to your digital environment – Ideas and information can often seep into our brain without us even realizing it, especially when we are consistently exposed to the same information over and over again. What are the top five websites you visit? Where do you go for news and current events? What’s your social media feed look like? All of these make up a part of your digital environment which is having an influence on you whether you realize it or not, so pay close attention to the types of online spaces you’re spending time in.
    • High value vs. low value information – Not all information is created equal. A random social media post that goes viral doesn’t have the same level of rigor as a peer-reviewed study. The information pyramid is a helpful guideline for assessing what information sources tend to be more trustworthy, accurate, and high value. Please note that this doesn’t mean a social media post is always wrong, or a scientific study is always right, just that one source tends to have more substance than another and you should generally give it more weight.
    • Be your own fact-checker – Too many people take funny memes, shocking screenshots, and catchy headlines at face value without ever digging deeper. This causes a lot of misinformation and disinformation to go viral, and it can also lead to some comical and embarrassing errors (“You actually believed that?!”). While there are many professional “fact checkers” on various sites, even those can be misleading and ideologically motivated. Unfortunately, in our low trust information world, there’s only one fact-checker you can really count on and that’s yourself. Learn how to double-check sources, dig up original links, and read full articles so you understand the context before accepting something as true.
    • Learn basic statistical literacy – Numbers can be very persuasive on a purely psychological level; if someone can make a claim with a statistic to back it, we tend to automatically think it must be true. However, statistics and graphs can be easily manipulated and deceptive. Understanding basic statistical literacy (such as knowing “correlation doesn’t mean causation,” or checking the “y” and “x” axis before looking at a graph) can give you a clearer idea of what a number is really telling you, and what is just being speculated, guessed, or misunderstood.
    • Beware of personality-driven consumption – Many people get their news and information from famous personalities such as news commentators, celebrities, influencers, or podcasters. While it’s natural to listen to people we like and trust, this can backfire when we end up mindlessly accepting information rather than confirming it on its own merit. For many, there’s an entertainment factor too: it’s fun to root for your “leader/clan” and make fun of the other “leaders/clans,” some people even form parasocial relationships with their favorite personalities, seeing them as a type of best friend. However, what often happens in these hyper personality-driven spaces is that they devolve into petty drama and gossip. That may be “fun” to participate in for some people, but it’s not education.

    If you keep these guidelines in mind, you’ll be able to navigate the dirty waters of the internet more effectively and hopefully find some springs of fresh and clean water to drink from.

    Conclusion

    Truth and reliable information are vital commons that underpin a healthy and functional society. Just as communities must manage natural resources responsibly to avoid the tragedy of the commons, societies must actively protect and nurture the integrity of their information ecosystems. Each of us plays a role in managing the information commons and minimizing information pollution.


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    Steven Handel

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  • Elon Musk Couldn’t Beat Him. AI Just Might

    Elon Musk Couldn’t Beat Him. AI Just Might

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    At times, the effects of it feel uncontainable.

    This is the third election cycle in the US—2016, 2020, 2024—where social media is going to have played a really significant role in the election. The US still hasn’t gotten to grips with the fact that our democracy is becoming more and more precarious. It’s becoming more polarized, it’s becoming more hateful, it’s becoming less capable of consensus. With the 2020 election we saw that people no longer even accept elections are real. It’s important that we start to put into place the transparency and the accountability that’s required for these platforms that control the information ecosystem that has such an enormous impact on our electoral cycles.

    Why do you think it’s been so difficult to regulate social media and the harm it can cause?

    Countries around the world are doing it. The UK legislated the Online Safety Act. The EU legislated the Digital Services Act. Canada has legislated through C-63, and I’m going to give evidence in Ottawa at some point on that. In the US, we have seen social media companies put up their most aggressive defenses that they put up anywhere in the world. They’re spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying on the Hill, in supporting candidates, trying to stop the inevitable from happening.

    Something’s gotta work, no?

    Ironically, I think the thing that is most likely to eventually move lawmakers is parents, and parents in particular worrying about the impact of social media platforms on their kids’ mental health. And that’s the thing with social media, it affects everything. CCDH looks at the effects of social media, disregulation on our ability to deal with the climate crisis, on sexual and reproductive rights, on public health and vaccines during the pandemic, on identity-based hate and kids. It’s the kids’ thing—really, it just is such an unimpeachable case for change.

    My wife and I are having our first soon. I understand what you would do to defend your kids from being harmed. I think that when you’ve got platforms that are hurting our kids at such a scale, it is inevitable that change will come.

    The optimist in me hopes you are right. The next generation should inherit a better world, but so much is working against that.

    You know, one of the things that really scares me, we did some polling last year that showed that young people for the first time ever, 14- to 17-year-olds—the first generation who were raised on algorithmically ordered short-form video platforms—they are the most conspiracist generation and age cohort of any in America.

    Oh wow.

    Old people are slightly more likely to believe conspiracy theories. But it goes down as you get younger and then 14- to 17-year-olds, bam, the highest of all of them. We did that by testing across nine conspiracy theories: transphobic conspiracy theories, climate-denying conspiracy theories, racist conspiracy theories, antisemitic conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories about the deep state. And on every single one, young people were more likely to believe it. And it’s because we’ve created for them an information ecosystem that’s fundamentally chaotic.

    And is only getting more chaotic.

    Look, the way that tyrants retain power is not just by lying to people, it’s by making them unable to tell what truth is. And it creates apathy. Apathy is the tool of the tyrant. It was true with the Soviet Union. It was true with Afghanistan. There’s no secret to the fact that CCDH is senior leadership of people who come from places where we’ve seen this kind of destruction of the information ecosystem lead to tyrannical government. So, yeah, there is this awareness that things could get real bad real fast. And you’re right in saying that we worry about our kids, and we want to make our world better for them.

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    Jason Parham

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  • Deepfake targets Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenksa with false claim she bought Bugatti

    Deepfake targets Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenksa with false claim she bought Bugatti

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    A new deepfake video that falsely claims the first lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska, purchased a $4.8 million Bugatti sports car has racked up millions of views on social media, CBS News has found. The video is part of a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at degrading Western support for Ukraine, researchers said. 

    CBS News determined the video was created using artificial intelligence. It shows a man claiming to be a French luxury car dealership employee sharing “exclusive” information about the fabricated sale. The man doesn’t move his neck, rarely blinks and his head barely moves — telltale signs of being manipulated using AI.

    Screenshot of a deepfake targeting the first lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska.

    CBS News


    The video was amplified by Russian disinformation networks across social media platforms, racking up over 20 million views on X, Telegram and TikTok. X and Telegram did not respond to a request for comment. A TikTok spokesperson told CBS News their policies do not allow misinformation that may cause harm and the company removes content that violates these guidelines.

    While it’s not clear who created the video, an early version of it appeared in an article on a French website called Verite Cachee — or in English, Hidden Truth — on July 1. Researchers from threat intelligence company Recorded Future linked the website to a Russian disinformation network they call CopyCop, which uses sham news websites and AI tools to publish false claims as part of influence campaigns. 

    The article included a fabricated invoice purporting to be from Bugatti to dupe readers further. Bugatti Paris — which is operated by Autofficina Parigi, a Car Lovers Group company — said it had filed a criminal complaint against people who shared the video and forged the invoice. Car Lovers Group said the invoice is not theirs, and it contains errors that show it’s fabricated, including the lack of required legal details and an incorrect price for the vehicle. 

    Russian disinformation networks have spread similar false claims about Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his family in the past year, including a false claim that he bought two luxury yachts for millions of dollars, and a false claim that Zelenska bought over $1 million worth of jewelry at Cartier in New York City.

    Clément Briens, a senior threat intelligence analyst for cybersecurity company Recorded Future, told CBS News that false stories about corruption are created to undermine Western support for Ukraine and “erode trust in the leaders, their institutions, and international alliances.”

    The falsehoods play into existing concerns and documented reports about corruption in Ukraine, researchers say.

    Darren Linvill, a Russian disinformation expert and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, said the false claims are “framed for a very particular audience that wants to hear and is ready to hear that and repeat it.”

    Linvill said the narratives have managed to gain traction online, despite being debunked — likely because of the cost and status of the brand used by the network. “I think Bugatti has something to do with it,” he said.

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