#disinformation

#disinformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within minutes of Donald Trump announcing in the early hours of Saturday morning that US troops had captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, disinformation about the operation flooded social media. Some people shared old videos across social platforms, falsely claiming that they showed the attacks on the Venezuelan capital Caracas. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, people shared AI-generated images and videos that claimed to show US Drug Enforcement Administration agents and various law enforcement personnel arresting Maduro.

People on the island have grown so accustomed to Chinese displays of power that life continues as usual. As China carried out live-fire drills and rehearsed a military blockade in the waters surrounding Taiwan this week, 70-year-old Liao said she wasn't worried about war. She was enjoying life as a retiree, playing mahjong with her friends and keeping an eye on the stock market.

It seems possible that what will ultimately emerge is a clarified sense of principles and a deeper commitment to them (which is why part of the conflict is over American history itself). On one hand, there are the heads of the federal government and their spokespeople, whose lies are part of their disdain for the electorate and the rule of law.

Banning people because you disagree with what they say undermines the free speech the administration claims to seek. We desperately need a wide ranging debate on whether and how social media should be regulated in the interests of the people. Imran Ahmed gave evidence to the select committee's inquiry into social media, algorithms and harmful content, and he was an articulate advocate for greater regulation and accountability.

Toward the end of, X began listing account locations in the "About this account" section of people's (or bots') profiles. X also can list the platform through which users access the social media site, such as the web app or a region-specific app store. With these new transparency features, X exposed that major MAGA influencers are likely operating from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

A source tipped us off to something strange: a campaign called KICLEI was flooding city councillor inboxes across Canada with slick, professional-sounding messages urging municipalities to abandon their climate commitments. It posed as environmental wisdom, but it was a Trojan Horse designed to undermine municipal climate policy. Before, we would have investigated one city and written one story. But we had access to something new: a search engine we'd built in-house covering 617 municipalities and 24,318 council meetings.

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.

Levin posted an Instagram link to his source and a video sequence on Wednesday, one that has already widely circulated on social media, that appeared to show CCTV footage of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel calmly at their computers before disappearing in blasts that wipe out the camera feeds. Quote-tweeting Levin, BBC Verify senior journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh publicly warned him that all except one of the clips were fabricated:

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.