How foreign powers are gaslighting Americans; The Washington Post, October 6, 2025

  L. Gordon Crovitz, The Washington Post; How foreign powers are gaslighting Americans

"L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is co-CEO of NewsGuard, which assesses the reliability of news sources and claims spreading online.

The United States has unilaterally disarmed in the information wars. The Trump administration has ended key efforts to defend against Russian, Chinese and Iranian targeting of Americans with false claims.

This disarmament includes largely dismantling the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which was the leading U.S. intelligence operation charged with “mitigating threats to democracy and U.S. national interests,” including efforts by adversaries to influence popular opinion. The U.S. also recently canceled a cooperation agreement with European allies to identify and expose disinformation operations targeting Americans and their allies. The Trump administration defends its abdication by claiming it is countering censorship, but warning of false claims by hostile governments provides Americans with more information, not less."

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds; The New York Times, August 4, 2025

 Carl Zimmer, The New York Times; Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds

"Even as paper mills have worked to keep their efforts hidden, Dr. Abalkina has traced the output of companies in Russia, Iran and other countries, and found thousands of their papers in print. “You learn to see the patterns,” she said.

Dr. Amaral and his colleagues have now analyzed those patterns, using network theory and other statistical techniques. “We tried to give a picture of what’s below the surface,” said Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University and an author of the new study.

For their analysis, the scientists built a database of more than a million scientific papers. They searched for the papers in online forums where sleuths share duplicated images and tortured phrases, as well as the Retraction Watch Database, maintained by the Center for Scientific Integrity.

The researchers compiled a list of 30,000 papers that have either been retracted or show signs of having come from a paper mill. They discovered connections between the papers that strongly hinted that they were the product of large-scale fraud. Many of these connections linked clusters of editors and authors who often worked together.

“There are huge networks that are very densely connected, where they’re all sending their papers to one another,” Dr. Richardson said. “If that’s not collusion, I don’t know what is.”"

A torrent of Election Day disinformation is coming. Here’s how to avoid falling for it.; Politico, November 5, 2024

 JOHN SAKELLARIADIS, Politico; A torrent of Election Day disinformation is coming. Here’s how to avoid falling for it.

"Haitian immigrants did not vote multiple times for Vice President Kamala Harris in Georgia, and poll workers in Pennsylvania did not destroy ballots for Trump, though a pair of videos that went viral in the last 10 days would have you think otherwise.

Both were fabrications of Kremlin influence actors, the U.S. intelligence community has said, and late Monday, it released a new statement calling out “additional influence operations” from Russia...

America’s adversaries “likely learned lessons” from the political turmoil that engulfed the U.S. after Election Day in 2020, senior U.S. intelligence officials told reporters last month. That means Russia, China and Iran are likely to amp up their efforts to spread lies and even incite violence between Election Day and inauguration.

One key defense is to refer any pressing questions to your local officials. “The bottom line when it comes to mis- and disinformation is that voters need to go to the source, and the source is your local and your state election officials,” said Marci Andino, the senior director of the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center."

As Election Looms, Disinformation ‘Has Never Been Worse’; The New York Times, October 23, 2024

Steven Lee Myers , The New York Times; As Election Looms, Disinformation ‘Has Never Been Worse’

"Numerous factors have contributed to the surge in disinformation, which Ms. Easterly and other officials have warned will continue far beyond Election Day. 

Social media platforms have helped to harden media ecosystems into distinct, disparate partisan enclaves where facts contradicting preconceived narratives are often unwelcome. Artificial intelligence has become an accelerant, making fake or fanciful content ubiquitous online with merely a few keystrokes."

This threat hunter chases U.S. foes exploiting AI to sway the election; The Washington Post, October 13, 2024

Cat Zakrzewski, The Washington Post; This threat hunter chases U.S. foes exploiting AI to sway the election

"Ben Nimmo, the principal threat investigator for the high-profile AI pioneer, had uncovered evidence that Russia, China and other countries were using its signature product, ChatGPT, to generate social media posts in an effort to sway political discourse online. Nimmo, who had only started at OpenAI in February, was taken aback when he saw that government officials had printed out his report, with key findings about the operations highlighted and tabbed.

That attention underscored Nimmo’s place at the vanguard in confronting the dramatic boost that artificial intelligence can provide to foreign adversaries’ disinformation operations. In 2016, Nimmo was one of the first researchers to identify how the Kremlin interfered in U.S. politics online. Now tech companies, government officials and other researchers are looking to him to ferret out foreign adversaries who are using OpenAI’s tools to stoke chaos in the tenuous weeks before Americans vote again on Nov. 5.

So far, the 52-year-old Englishman says Russia and other foreign actors are largely “experimenting” with AI, often in amateurish and bumbling campaigns that have limited reach with U.S. voters. But OpenAI and the U.S. government are bracing for Russia, Iran and other nations to become more effective with AI, and their best hope of parrying that is by exposing and blunting operations before they gain traction."

The Chinese threat that an aircraft carrier can’t stop; The Washington Post, August 7, 2018

David Ignatius, The Washington Post; The Chinese threat that an aircraft carrier can’t stop

"America’s vulnerability to information warfare was a special topic of concern. One participant recalled a conversation several years ago with a Russian general who taunted him: “You have a cybercommand but no information operations. Don’t you know that information operations are how you take countries down?”"