Latest in Disinformation
Numerous individuals and groups are posing—both online and in person—as members of groups they oppose. Malign state actors have also begun to enter the fray.
During protests in Washington, D.C., a conspiracy theory spread on Twitter that the federal government had cut off communications within and from the city. Twitter users could have been warned.
The president retweeted a deepfake of Joe Biden. The fake was made on an iPhone app that I’d already been researching.
In this episode, I interview Thomas Rid about his illuminating study of Russian disinformation, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. It lays out a century of Soviet, East European, and Russian disinformation, beginning with an elaborate and successful operation against the White Russian expatriate resistance to Bolshevik rule in the 1920s.
With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s disinformation campaign has taken a dangerous turn.
As trade-wars proliferate, technological rivalries intensify and U.S. corporations take public positions on hot-button social issues, American businesses will increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs of nation-state sponsored disinformation operations.
The 2020 U.S. presidential election is playing out in the shadow of disinformation, but few candidates are promising to take action against it. Elizabeth Warren has a plan, but it’s not perfect.
In this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Kate Klonick spoke with Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Prior to joining Stanford, Alex served as the chief security officer at Facebook, and before that, as the chief information security officer at Yahoo. They talked about Alex's experience at Facebook handling 2016 election interference, as well as his work on cybersecurity, disinformation, and end-to-end encryption.
For the past several months, Australia has been struck by massive bushfires like nothing seen before in recent memory. As the country has grappled with the spread of these unprecedented blazes, it’s also grappled with the spread of falsehoods about what caused them.
The House Ethics Committee has announced that members who share deepfakes or “other audio-visual distortions intended to mislead the public” could face sanctions. It’s a small but noteworthy step.