I immediately became a Carmen fangirl and subscribed to her newsletter, Scroll Sick, where she curates the stuff worth reading, watching, and listening to every two weeks, so I thought I’d invite her on The Wayfinder. The ethos of our newsletters is shared: we want to help you navigate the overwhelming internet with a little more calm.

I hope you’ll tune in—and thank you , , , and many others for watching live.

I highly recommend subscribing to Carmen’s newsletter below, and following her on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn (yes, she’s so good she even makes that dreary site more exciting.)

Scroll Sick

A newsletter with cherry-picked suggestions about where to devote your attention.

By Carmen

Drumroll please🥁 🥁 🥁

I’m happy to announce that coming soon, right here on The Wayfinder, I’ll be launching a brand new podcast that unpacks the conspiracy I’ve covered here for years. DISARMED: How the U.S. Gave Up the Fight Against Falsehoods will examine how the second Trump administration dismantled the infrastructure built to identify, explain, and counter organized disinformation campaigns ahead of the consequential 2026 midterm elections.

For the past ten years, public servants, researchers, and civil-society partners worked to help institutions and the public understand and respond to information threats both foreign and domestic. Thanks to a sustained political campaign from the Trump universe, that work was recast as “censorship.” Civil servants lost their jobs. Researchers were investigated. Government teams that had taken years to build were dismantled.

DISARMED will tell this human and institutional story through in-depth interviews with people who did this work as well as experts in national security, technology policy, disinformation, and internet freedom.

You won’t want to miss it. More soon. 👀

Join me next Tuesday, October 6, at noon ET when I chat with Vicente of Scroll Sick—one of the best creators explaining the modern internet—about how we can stay sane online. Join us.

👀 Also... Watch this space! Next week I’m announcing a big new project right here on The Wayfinder. Ahead of the midterm elections, it’s one you won’t want to miss. 👀

LAST WEDNESDAY, I was traveling in the UK when I woke up to texts from friends all sharing the same piece of news: overnight, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham had used a few paragraphs in his speech at the UN General Assembly to announce the creation of a new National Centre for Information Defence.

The texts were pregnant with questions. They asked for my reactions, and more critically, my advice for the PM and his government as they undertook a challenge very similar to what DHS tried—and miserably failed—to do in 2022.

“In recent years we have seen an industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment in the UK and that of many of our allies,” Burnham told the General Assembly. “Russian agencies,” he said, “have used every means at their disposal to spread lies and disinformation and prey on people’s fears.” He listed a few of Russia’s tactics: using bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles, and forging the branding of British organizations to “amplif[y] far right narratives,” “interfere with the 2019 general elections,” and “stoke tensions and unrest in the wake of horrific events.”

That’s why, Burnham said, it was past time to “put in place the architecture we need to stem this poisonous tide.” The National Centre for Information Defence (NCID) will “detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks.” The House of Commons recommended the creation of such a centre in an inquiry last fall.

Flying monkeys crying “censorship!” swarmed,1 despite a complete lack of evidence for the claim. Nigel Farage—who had appeared in the House of Representatives a year earlier to lambaste the EU’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Act as censorship—predictably railed against the new NCID as a “Ministry of Truth,” repeating the comparison the GOP had made between Orwell’s 1984 and the DHS Disinformation Governance Board. It’s not at all original, but who can blame them? That lie had successfully dismantled another government’s attempt to stem the tide of disinformation. Luckily, Larry the Cat, who has outlasted six Prime Ministers at No. 10 Downing Street, had a “cat check” at the ready:

Let’s unpack the good, the bad, and the outlook for the UK’s new National Centre for Information Defence, in hopes that it doesn’t end up in the same watery grave as the Disinformation Governance Board and other U.S. Government efforts felled by politically motivated lies.

The Good

The Name. The National Centre for Information Defence is a comprehensible, democratically-minded name. Though you’ll have to pry the term “disinformation” from my cold, dead hands—I refuse to cede ground to folks who have deliberately poisoned the term—it was the correct move to focus on defense and the centre’s more proactive, national-security-focused stance.

The Focus. In addition to tying the NCID’s genesis to the Russian information threat, Burnham emphasized the importance of individual resilience—not takedowns or draconian censorship measures—as a key part of the antidote to hostile state disinformation:

We are going to help our people to strengthen their resilience – because faced with this information warfare, security starts in every home.

If you’re struggling with the cost of living and your life is not improving – or if you’re a young person not in employment, education or training – then you are going to be much more vulnerable to this kind of influence.

So part of the challenge is to lift our people up and create the opportunities they need.

When inequalities grow too wide, our societies are at greater risk.

So we will work to make life more affordable.

This is a throughline in my work as far back as 2017, and as I’ve written over and over (including in my first book), no nation will win the fight against falsehoods by playing whack-a-troll. Governments must invest in helping people navigate a complex internet that is quite literally preying on them every day, and it appears Burnham is prioritizing just that.

The Bad

The announcement. With sensitive issues like disinformation, a government is much better off over-explaining than creating an information vacuum. Burnham’s announcement could have included a more thorough explanation of what he hopes the NCID will do—coordinate responses among disparate government bodies, serve as a one-stop-shop for information about malign foreign campaigns, build resilience—and critically, what it will not do—like censor domestic speech. Instead, he left viewers to use their imaginations about what “detect, attribute, and disrupt” mean. Any time the government is involved with any aspect of the free flow of information, people will naturally imagine what those words might mean. If they’re predisposed to distrust the government or the party in power, it might be divorced from reality, but it’s incumbent on the speaker to try to bridge that trust gap.

Which brings me to the second unforced error in the content of Burnham’s speech: he focused on the amplification of traditionally right-wing narratives as an example of the type of interference that gave the NCID a reason for being. I don’t doubt that Russia has done this, nor do many cross-party Members of UK Parliament, but I think Burnham could have built a lot more trust with his audience had he focused instead on the ways disinformation can deprive citizens of their savings, their rights, and even their vote. Rather than making the Centre about lies affecting national security, an amorphous concept that normal folks have trouble identifying with, he could have connected it to their everyday lives.

The Outlook

Because the United Kingdom has not fully succumbed to the conspiratorial brain rot that plagues the US, I don’t think the NCID is doomed. While I was in London, I joined Channel 4’s The Fourcast, where I discussed the announcement with two cross-party MPs. As I said on the program, the fact that such a conversation could happen, with plenty of agreement between the MPs on the reasons for creating such a centre, is already miles beyond where the U.S. would be in a similar situation.

You can watch the rest of that conversation here. But the TL;DW is that it’s incumbent on the Burnham government to fill in the blanks with the public on what the National Centre for Information Defence will and won’t do. If it does, I think it could make important contributions to informing UK citizens and allies about continued foreign malign information campaigns, hopefully leading to a more informed and discerning public. 🧭

Thanks for checking out The Wayfinder, where I help you navigate our polluted information environment. This is a space for people who believe a shared reality is the bedrock of democracy. It will always be free to access, because reputable information shouldn’t be behind a paywall.

If that resonates with you, join as a free subscriber to receive new posts in your inbox. Paid supporters help sustain this public work and receive the 10-Day Online Safety Tune-Up, access to the growing Wayfinder resource library, and invitations to occasional members’ conversations.

Subscribe now

And if you can’t commit to a paid subscription, you can still support my work by buying me a coffee.

With gratitude,
Nina

This week, the administration earned yet another fake-gold-plated star in their line of “most corrupt” accolades. ProPublica reports that Donald Trump Jr.’s tacky Bahamian wedding—which took place over three days across not one, but two private islands—was bankrolled by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev. There was a private firework display. A five-tier funfetti cake (for a wedding? really?) was flown in from Florida. Guests island-hopped on helicopters. Don Jr. even got jawline definition treatment for the event.

But a pile of Russian money and plastic surgery—what we could reasonably call “gender-affirming care”— still couldn’t buy little Donnie a group photo where he didn’t look like he was mid-sneeze:

Jokes aside, I’m old enough to remember when the MAGA universe went absolutely apeshit about Hunter Biden taking an ill-advised position on a Ukrainian gas company’s board. Allegations that members of the Biden family were “bribed” were lies, and the FBI source who made the claim pled guilty to lying to the FBI about it.

Where MAGA is concerned, every accusation is a confession. Unhappy to simply spin tales of the Biden family’s alleged corruption, Don Jr. decided to live it, evidently accepting Kremlev’s offer of financial support for his wedding. After the ProPublica story appeared, Don Jr. and wife Bettina Anderson acknowledged that Kremlev—who they called a “dear friend”—had “very generously hosted” two nights of celebrations, calling it an “extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend.”

Born Umar Lutfulloyev, Kremlev changed his name in 2010 after criminal charges of extortion and battery. He joined the pro-Kremlin biker gang the Night Wolves, became the head of the Russian Boxing Federation, and in 2020 ascended to the presidency of the International Boxing Association, which ProPublica reports “had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency.” Kremlev secured funding for IBA from Russian state oil company Gazprom. A former IBA board member told ProPublica: “Umar is guided by Putin. [IBA uses] the sport for soft political power. It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” In his spare time, Kremlev is involved with a group that Ukraine has sanctioned for abducting Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territories.

Counterintelligence experts told ProPublica that Kremlev’s bankrolling the wedding raised serious red flags:

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.

Since Don Jr’s late-May, Kremlin-adjacent nuptials, the Trump administration has taken a number of decisions that can be viewed as pro-Moscow:

• In late May, the Trump administration blocked a proposed G7 push to tighten an existing price cap on Russian oil; the price cap limited Russia’s ability to finance its war in Ukraine.

• Just before his son’s oligarch-funded wedding, Trump “return[ed] U.S. brigade combat team levels in Europe to where they stood in 2021, Parnell pointed out. That was before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted a larger American military presence in Europe.”

• Despite promising otherwise, Trump has yet to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriot interceptors in-country, which would be a boon for Ukraine’s safety along with American defense tech profits.

• Earlier this month, Trump sent inexperienced negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow and Kyiv to negotiate a peace deal; the result was a lot of puffery for Putin and precious little action to stop his indiscriminate killing of Ukrainians.

• Just last week, Trump requested that Zelenskyy and Ukraine stop striking Russian oil infrastructure.

We know Trump and his administration are not beneath a little quid pro quo. With Kash Patel scheduled to travel to Russia in a month and a historically weak president barreling toward a midterm election that is likely to be a bruiser for MAGA, we should be vigilant as we wait for the other shoe to drop in the Kremlin-funded wedding gambit. 🧭

Thanks for checking out The Wayfinder, where I help you navigate our polluted information environment. This is a space for people who believe a shared reality is the bedrock of democracy. It will always be free to access, because reputable information shouldn’t be behind a paywall.

If that resonates with you, join as a free subscriber to receive new posts in your inbox. Paid supporters help sustain this public work and receive the 10-Day Online Safety Tune-Up, access to the growing Wayfinder resource library, and invitations to occasional members’ conversations.

Subscribe now

And if you can’t commit to a paid subscription, you can still support my work by buying me a coffee.

With gratitude,
Nina

LAST WEEK, Steve Witkoff went to Moscow for the eighth time, where he raved to Vladimir Putin that his trips to the country imbued him with “incredible memories.” He gave the reigning war criminal a challenge coin that said “peace through strength,” a Trump administration motto that has so far ended no wars, but prolonged at least two.

From Moscow, Witkoff traveled to Kyiv—his first trip to the country, despite President Trump’s insistence that only his administration could end Russia’s war—where he compared the “Peace Express” train that he and Jared Kushner traveled on to the train he used to take when he traveled to see his grandmother in Florida.

Witkoff publicly treats one nation as a formidable equal and likens the other to a cute childhood memory. His public commentary reveals his opinions of the countries and their leaders; last year, he pushed a “peace plan” that would have had Kyiv cede its sovereign territory to Russia, promise to never join NATO, and reduce the size of its military, all in return for unnamed “security guarantees” from the United States. Tell us how you really feel, Steve.

I am feeling especially salty about Witkoff and Kushner’s apparent indifference to Ukraine’s suffering because this week happens to be the ten-year anniversary of the day I moved to Kyiv, sight unseen, hoping simply to learn and make a difference—two qualities that seem to be lacking in America’s chosen “peace” negotiators.

I was 27, and itching with the desire to do something that felt bigger than myself, bigger than my comfortable existence of writing program proposals and reports for the international non-profit where I worked, bigger than the newsletter I wrote for a few hundred colleagues. On a whim, I had applied for the Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship, which sent folks in their 20s and 30s to be embedded advisors in allied government ministries. While there were slots around the world, from Peru to Kosovo to Samoa, I applied to go to Ukraine.

After five years of work supporting democratic movements that were—at best—struggling, it seemed that Ukraine had a real shot at breaking from the post-Soviet yoke. I was inspired by the commitment and bravery of Ukrainians during the Revolution of Dignity and frustrated by the U.S. Government’s indifference when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbas. In my application, I wrote about the necessity for the Ukrainian government to combat Russian propaganda and explain its policies clearly and transparently to its citizens and allies—a crusade that would become central to my career.

Before I even set foot in the country, I knew I wanted to help in any way I could. And I did. At the Foreign Ministry, I supported the spokesperson and press service team, doing everything from translating press releases to writing op-eds and wrangling international journalists. But the most important work I did wasn’t something I logged onto a computer to complete. The Fulbright program—conceived by Senator J. William Fulbright in the aftermath of World War II—was engineered to promote peace and build mutual understanding between the United States and nations around the world through exchange. Throughout my time in Ukraine, I grew close with my co-workers at the Ministry. They saw me through personal and professional hurdles. One of my colleagues got married during my fellowship; we all attended the wedding. (She still has a video of me giving a tipsy and extremely embarrassing toast in an ungrammatical mix of Ukrainian and Russian.) We all blubbered when my colleagues saw me off to the airport to fly home in 2017. Whenever I return to Ukraine or visit another country where one of them is posted, we spend time together as if it’s 2016 again.

It is these personal relationships—the core of the Fulbright program—that motivate my continued admiration for Ukraine. They gave me a deep understanding of the challenges my colleagues faced, their motivations for working in government, their aspirations for the country they wanted to build for their families. They want a country that is prosperous, peaceful, and free, just as Americans do.

But the Trump administration is not interested in understanding. It is interested in dominance and self-enrichment. If a program doesn’t directly help Trump and his cronies line their pockets, even if it is a comparatively small investment, it’s on the chopping block. Since returning to office in 2025, the Trump administration has attempted to all but eliminate international exchange programs, requesting an 80% reduction in the FY27 budget for Fulbright. (The House has pushed back and maintained the Fulbright allocation at its FY25 level—$288 million—but the budget has not yet passed the Senate.) The administration has also politicized the program, denying awards to people who didn’t pass its political litmus test and putting thousands of others through unprecedented review. (Fulbright awards are typically determined by an independent review board and insulated from political pressure.)

The same administration that wants to end one of its most effective investments in peace sent two men with extensive conflicts and troubling relationships to negotiate an end to a war on its behalf. In addition to “possible ideas for a settlement” of the “Ukrainian crisis” that Moscow created, the men discussed “major Russia-US projects that could be mutually beneficial to both sides,” according to Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov. It’s no wonder Witkoff and Kushner remained fundamentally uncurious and uninterested in building the relationships and knowledge necessary to end Russia’s bloody and senseless war against Ukraine.

Ten years after I first arrived in Kyiv, I know that the mutual understanding Senator Fulbright sought to build in the aftermath of World War II is not based on the exchange of pleasantries or challenge coins. It’s slow work that can’t be done in a single parachute visit to a foreign capital, focused much more on the intangible motivations of people whose futures are being negotiated—why they fight, what they’ve lost, what they will not surrender—than on “mutually beneficial projects.” But Witkoff, Kushner, and Trump would rather create a windfall for a few than peace for millions. 🧭

Thanks for checking out The Wayfinder, where I help you navigate our polluted information environment. This is a space for people who believe a shared reality is the bedrock of democracy. It will always be free to access, because reputable information shouldn’t be behind a paywall.

If that resonates with you, join as a free subscriber to receive new posts in your inbox. Paid supporters help sustain this public work and receive the 10-Day Online Safety Tune-Up, access to the growing Wayfinder resource library, and invitations to occasional members’ conversations.

Subscribe now

And if you can’t commit to a paid subscription, you can still support my work by buying me a coffee.

With gratitude,
Nina

(TW: Descriptions and discussion of child sexual abuse.)

JANE DOE WAS FIRST ABUSED when she was a preschooler. An adult male “repeatedly raped and sexually exploited” her, filmed it, and distributed the resulting child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Now an adult, she is suing xAI, alleging that the abuse made its way into Grok, Elon Musk’s AI model, and that Grok is producing new images of her abuse. Musk is selling that revictimization as a service. For only $40/month or $395/ year, anyone can buy access to an AI model that generates CSAM with hardly any guardrails.

Last week, in a separate suit, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled that “the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to privately possess images or videos of child sexual abuse created using artificial intelligence — if the material does not depict a real person and remains in the home.”

Please pardon me while I throw up.

One case acknowledges the self-perpetuating harm generative AI creates, while the other seemingly ignores that harm entirely, as if the alleged crimes occurred on different planets. I am not a lawyer, but I am a victim of deepfake sexual abuse and an advocate for change in this space. Right now, it’s impossible not to feel that our inherently backward-looking legal system and impossibly gridlocked legislature—both of which have a pitiful understanding of artificial intelligence and the harms it perpetuates—are failing victims.

Decades-old precedent doesn’t consider current harms

In 2024, Steven Anderegg of Wisconsin, was arrested “on criminal charges related to his alleged production, distribution, and possession of AI-generated images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and his transfer of similar sexually explicit AI-generated images to a minor.” Last year, a federal judge in Wisconsin dismissed the possession charge, which the Justice Department appealed, resulting in the 7th Circuit’s ruling last week. (The ruling did not dismiss the production, distribution, or transfer charges.)

The decision stems from two pieces of legal precedent handed down long before accessible generative AI was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. The first, Stanley v. Georgia, is a case from 1969, which affirms that individuals have a First Amendment right to possess obscenity in the privacy of their home. The second is Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002), in which the Supreme Court struck down parts of a statute that extended child-pornography prohibitions to a broad category of “non-actual-child” imagery, including wholly computer-generated depictions and adult performers made to appear underage. The Court reasoned that the statute swept in expression that “records no crime and creates no victims by its production.”

But Free Speech Coalition was handed down before genAI was widespread or accessible, and it necessarily misses the biggest way that survivors of child sexual abuse like Jane Doe are revictimized by the creation of AI-generated CSAM: datasets that train AI models include images of child sex abuse. Researchers at Stanford identified over 3000 instances of suspected CSAM in a training dataset for Stable Diffusion, the model that Anderegg used to generate the images at issue in his case.

In the case against xAI and Grok, Jane Doe’s lawyers argue that Grok is not just creating AI-generated CSAM, it is perpetuating old abuse and generating more of it. “Because Grok’s terms treat public X posts and Grok’s own outputs as training data by default,” they write, “publicly posting an image does not just expose it to viewers, but also feeds directly into the pipeline xAI uses to train and improve its model and thereby generate further images.” In Jane Doe’s case, “the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has identified AI-generated CSAM on xAI depicting” Doe, causing her new personal injury each time such content is generated or published.

Moreover, they allege that although other industry leaders such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta block requests to generate sexual content:

Grok’s system prompts are not designed to regulate the creation of sexually abusive or exploitative content. For instance, Grok is instructed that “‘teenage’ or ‘girl’ does not necessarily imply underage” and that it should not “moralize or lecture the user if they ask something edgy.” Further, there are no restrictions on “fictional adult sexual content with dark or violent themes.”

To sum up: Jane Doe was notified Grok had generated CSAM of her. Grok did so because someone asked it to, and because Elon Musk sees the generation of CSAM and other sexualized deepfakes as financially lucrative. The model may have learned from the content it created, and may continue to generate content of Jane Doe today.

This is why I am so frustrated with the 7th Circuit’s ruling and the precedent from which it flows. Even if deepfake CSAM does not include an “actual child,” somewhere in the not-so-distant past an actual child was harmed to create the content that trained the model. This is different from the “virtual CSAM” that Free Speech Coalition considered: “pornographic images of children created wholly on a computer, without using any actual children.” Actual children were necessarily “used” in the generation of AI-generated CSAM.

Moreover, much like a human being, once an AI model “learns” this content, it is extraordinarily difficult for it to unlearn it. As an analogous example, months after The American Sunlight Project published research that showed how Russian propaganda network Pravda was cited on ChatGPT, the model still continued to cite and treat it as a reliable source. Rebuilding the model to produce a non-propagandized—or in this case, non-exploitative—result would be extremely difficult technically (not that this is an excuse!). We need regulation to ensure abusive images aren’t making their way into training datasets in the first place, and to ensure that strong guardrails are in place so models—and the companies that own them—are disincentivized from creating new abusive content.

Time to Act

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, in its recent opinion, acknowledged that its hands were tied. “Given the relentless advancement in artificial intelligence models,” the three-judge panel wrote, “we have some concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves.”

It’s possible the Anderegg case will be appealed up to the Supreme Court, creating a new standard for the possession of AI-generated CSAM. While the legal system tries to sort this out, in its slow, methodical, woefully unprepared way, more vulnerable people—primarily women and children like Jane Doe—are suffering. The time to act was years ago, before these models were unleashed on the public with almost no guardrails, but now will have to do. 🧭

If you have been targeted

Sexual deepfakes and nonconsensual intimate imagery are forms of image-based sexual abuse. You are not to blame, and help is available. 💜

• Cyber Civil Rights Initiative Image Abuse Helpline: Free, confidential 24/7 support, reporting guidance, and practical next steps. Call 1-844-878-2274 or visit cybercivilrights.org.

• RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: Call 800-656-HOPE, text HOPE to 64673, or visit rainn.org.

• Take It Down: If an explicit image or video was taken when you were under 18, use NCMEC’s free tool at takeitdown.ncmec.org.

• StopNCII: Adults can create a secure hash to help participating platforms detect and address intimate images shared without consent: stopncii.org.

• NCMEC CyberTipline: To report suspected child sexual exploitation or CSAM, visit report.cybertip.org or call 1-800-THE-LOST.

If you are in immediate danger, call 911 or your local emergency number.

THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE’S MISSION is “to protect and promote U.S. security, prosperity, and democratic values and shape an international environment in which all Americans can thrive.”

Notably, its mission does not include “attack U.S. citizens on official social media accounts.” But that’s exactly what Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers did on Friday night, targeting me and several other prominent American disinformation experts in a spectacular flame out on X.com.

The second Trump administration is governed by and for the trolls. It has hired trolls—and fired qualified personnel at their recommendation. It has dismantled offices and agencies based on internet rumors. It has nurtured cozy relationships with trolls to launder its attempts to suppress dissent. And now, it’s running a disinformation and smear campaign against a few of its own citizens. Like so much in Trump 2.0: this is not normal.

But, as Rogers found out this weekend when her hand-picked troll publicly rejected her, relying on online conspiracy theorists to break news is a risky strategy. They may not always lead their mobs toward your political enemies—sometimes they turn on you.

The False Promise of the So-Called GEC Files

What Sarah Rogers wrought on Friday night is cloaked in deep conspiracy lore, so strap in while I explain the background.

The MAGA world has been cashing in on conspiracies that the Biden Administration pressured or colluded with tech companies to censor conservatives for years. They were disproven. They were dismissed by the Supreme Court. But when governing by and for the trolls, facts don’t set policy, the feelings of a group of terminally-online people do. In 2025, when the Trump administration crashed into the U.S. Government, it could finally act on them.

Trump appointees quickly set about dismantling structures that dealt with countering foreign disinformation across government; one of them was the Global Engagement Center, an office at the State Department that worked “to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”

MAGA world believes the GEC worked to censor them; it did not, as I explained in an April 2025 Congressional hearing when I told the deeply unserious MAGA trolls anointed with House lapel pins: “everything looks like a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.” The GEC was dismantled a few weeks later in a weird and gleeful “interview” between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and noted white supremacist troll Mike Benz.

In that conversation, Rubio and Benz promised the public the “GEC Files,” a “Twitter Files”-style document dump in which hand-selected journalists would “report” on a trove of documents from the GEC’s nearly decade-long existence that they promised would provide evidence to “people who were harmed” by the GEC. A few weeks later, the MIT Tech Review reported that the State Department was in the middle of “a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between [the GEC] and a lengthy list of public and private figures—many of whom are longtime targets of the political right.” Yours truly—along with other researchers and journalists who have covered disinformation—was on the list.

The last we heard about the so-called GEC Files was 15 months ago. Sarah Rogers inherited them when she assumed the role of Under Secretary in October 2025, and she—like so many others in this universe—is also an avowed internet troll. As she admitted to Semafor earlier this year:

I was a prolific Gawker commenter, and the reason is that I got married in 2009, and I was worried that if I got married, that my wedding announcement and my husband and my family and myself were all going to be dissected by these malicious internet commenters. And I thought about this the way that perhaps a future public diplomacy under secretary would, which is I thought if I can just have four Gawker accounts and sock puppet the thread and say good things about myself, then I don’t have to be afraid to get married because people, even if they bash me in public, I’ll be able to speak back.

The fact that Sarah Rogers believes a Public Diplomacy Under Secretary would respond to online abuse by creating her own personal troll army says a lot about her views on transparency and free speech.

Those views boomeranged right back at her this weekend.

The State Department Serves Up a Nothingburger

After presumably spending 15 months combing through the GEC Files, Rogers decided to release them to MAGA troll “DataRepublican,” a popular, Musk-aligned, deeply amateur data analyst and conspiracy theorist who was influential in dismantling USAID. She has also engaged with and promoted lies and hate about me being a censor, so Rogers probably assumed she was a kindred spirit.

According to DataRepublican’s now-deleted tweets and screenshots of text messages, Rogers offered her documents on Cuba, but instead provided her cherry-picked documents on the GEC to leak, “with the option of ‘breaking’ the story as a sort of gift.” DataRepublican got mad about this; she pronounced the documents a “nothing burger” and convinced herself that Rogers had set her up to go to jail by handing off “improperly redacted” documents.

Rogers responded with “lol”—an extraordinarily diplomatic acronym—and proceeded to tweet the documents out herself in a reply thread to DataRepublican. After close of business on a Friday, on perhaps the deadest night in Washington’s year—the end of summer break, when most parents are focused on their kids headed back to school on Monday morning—an incredible rollout strategy from the Department’s top comms official.

, a former senior Foreign Service Officer and public diplomacy official, tells me that Rogers’ behavior is unprecedented:

In over two decades watching how State communicates, I’ve never seen an Under Secretary run a document dump like this off an official government account — seemingly without press office coordination, including offering unredacted material to an outside researcher who refused it and flagged potential legal exposure. That raises a real question: is this an official USG account being used for something well outside the public diplomacy mandate?

The Claims

The conspiracy theories and outright lies Rogers shared in her embarrassing Friday night thread suggest that’s exactly what’s happening, and of course, given the prime real estate in the minds of the MAGA mob I’ve enjoyed over the past four years, I’m her first individual target.

The claims Rogers makes about me and my appointment as Executive Director of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board and their nexus with the Global Engagement Center are vague and meandering, drawing heavily on her audience’s pre-baked misunderstandings and hatred. They probably don’t make sense to someone who hasn’t had their brain cooked by Fox News, but the core claim boils down to this: Rogers believes that because the GEC worked in coordination with five other governments to internally publish a report on gendered disinformation that mentioned my experience of gendered-based lies, harassment, and death threats as one of nearly 70 other examples, the GEC somehow betrayed their mission.

That’s the smoking gun Rogers came up with—and chose to lead her Friday night tweetstorm with—after 15 months of searching. DataRepublican is right; it is a nothingburger. Jointly authoring a report that accurately notes the existence of a disinformation campaign is not “targeting” “criticism,” as Rogers claims. And it certainly pales in comparison to the sitting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy using her official account to smear U.S. Citizens.

She makes false claims about me and my brief tenure at DHS (along with inexplicably misspelling my name throughout).

She alleges DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board was a “censorship effort.” It wasn’t. The Board’s founding documents, which have been public for four years, along with my sworn deposition before Jim Jordan’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, both disprove the baseless allegations that the Board had the authority, power, or intention to censor.

She claims the DGB was the “DHS counterpart” to the GEC. It wasn’t. I was its only full-time employee. The GEC was an office with over a hundred staff at its height, along with grantmaking and information-gathering authorities (neither of which included censorship). The Board had a completely different governing structure and served a different purpose. The Board intended to convene DHS component leaders to set Department policy, including how to respond to disinformation and protect civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy. It had no operational authority. It could not make grants. It never met.

She claims the GEC’s inclusion of me in the multilateral gendered disinformation report “is even more stunning” because she unearthed a single email where a GEC staffer shared a critical article about me. The article was based on a bizarre misreading of a chapter on the Czech Republic in my first book. It opined—based on misstatements of fact, lies, and outright fabrications of my beliefs and positions, embracing the position of partisans who claimed the Board would be censoring—that I was too political for my political appointment. But as Blum points out, “the internal emails Rogers cites are nothing—staff sharing news is routine.” That some people disagree with me and even dislike me is not news. The author of the piece (who, interestingly, now works in the Trump State Department and has scrubbed her LinkedIn of her long history of work in counter-disinformation) certainly didn’t. As usual, a conspiracy theorist has attempted to turn normal, working-level discussions into scandal, just as Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger did in the Twitter Files. Rogers included this detail—along with the disgusting attacks against me included in the GEC report—to revive the continuing smear campaign against me.

Rogers goes on to make false claims about the Election Integrity Partnership, which have been thoroughly debunked in multiple pieces of reporting since Taibbi, Shellenberger, and Congressman Jim Jordan first made them in 2023.

Let’s remember where this started: a fishing expedition based on 39 disinformation specialists’ names and a promise to find anything the GEC did that even remotely involved the manufactured claims of censorship that MAGA has alleged for years. They found so little substance that even their hand-picked troll rebuffed them and left Sarah Rogers to do her dirty work on her own.

DataRepublican and Rogers have evidently come to some sort of agreement—DataRepublican has deleted her initial tweets accusing Rogers of framing her. But not before many across the MAGA universe began calling for Rogers’ resignation.

How’s that nothingburger taste, Sarah?

The Fallout

I’m not going to lie: it was pretty delicious to watch this unfold. Rogers was so confident in her 2009 Gawker trolling credentials that she badly misread the landscape of conspiracy and intrigue that her own administration created, falling flat on her face in the process.

As much as I enjoyed watching a woman who celebrated the U.S. visa bans against five disinformation and hate speech researchers fail, it’s objectively not very fun to be targeted by a high-level government official who has used her power to abridge free expression.

I am worried—as I have been since I left government—that allegations against me and other disinformation researchers could be used as pretext for legal or administrative campaigns against us. Beyond the immediate chilling effect, this kind of campaign may also be designed to prepare the political and bureaucratic ground for later action against researchers and civil-society organizations. I can’t see a benign policy rationale for devoting this level of official attention to smearing private American citizens on social media.

“It’s one more embarrassment for the State Department,” Blum, the former senior foreign service officer tells me. But, she says, there’s a silver lining: Rogers is currently awaiting confirmation to another administration appointment, as CEO of the US Agency for Global Media. According to Blum, Rogers’ tantrum is “a real-time data point for the Senators who’ll soon decide whether to confirm Rogers to lead USAGM.” If Rogers is using her official account as a propaganda mouthpiece, what will she do when she gets the keys to American foreign broadcasting?

In the meantime, it’s possible Rogers is working to release other files to other “journalists” and “researchers” in the coming weeks. We should view any further drops for what they really are: a desperate, amateur attempt from a government by and for the trolls to suppress a group of people who are working to protect reality. 🧭

I scroll Instagram like I have midnight snacks: furtively, trying not to disturb the others in my household. The sound is off, the glow of my screen directed away from my husband as I scroll in bed.

We got a puppy in July; Kaylee is a Lab mix, puppy soft, and extraordinarily sweet while she’s not stealing and chewing everything that’s not nailed down. I’ve never had any sort of Lab before, so I started researching everything about them—their habits, their personalities, tips for training them. Of course, my searches followed me to Instagram, where the algorithm began to serve me Labrador content. “This is my 8-week-old Lab’s schedule!” “Look at the tricks my 12-week-old Lab can do!”

During my soundless scrolling, I was served a video from MiamiDogDaddy, who offered homeopathic remedies for typical Lab ailments, along with DIY ways to entertain your dog—have them bob for fruit! Drill holes in a cabbage and fill them with peanut butter!

It wasn’t until MiamiDogDaddy posted a video about combating typical Labrador parasites—while holding up a jar writhing with them—that I paused before scrolling to look more deeply. In the top left corner of the video, in a small font, alternating with the information about the video’s “sound,” was a label: AI Creator.

As we write on Substack today, in our latest investigation that was spawned by my Labrador-obsessed scrolling:

Neither MiamiDogDaddy nor his dogs exist.

[I was] far from the only person who has been misled; over 211,000 other users have followed the account, one of a few dozen “AI creators” affiliated with Iron Paws, a dog supplement brand.

From there, and I combed through the accounts MiamiDogDaddy was following to find how far the network extended; we identified nearly 50 AI-generated accounts promoting the Iron Paws supplement, with millions of collective followers. Using the Meta Content Library, Ben was able to estimate that the network had generated at least 27 million views for Iron Paws under the hashtag #ironpawspartner.

I checked each account to see if Meta labeled them or if they disclosed they were AI-generated. Meta only applied the small “AI Creator” label to 21.3% of accounts we identified, though 61.7% of accounts voluntarily disclosed their AI origins with the hashtag “#syntheticperformer”—an ironic hashtag if there ever was one. Can an AI persona that doesn’t exist, doesn’t have memories, and has never experienced the loss of a pet, “perform?”

In total, over one-third of the accounts—which impersonate breeders, mystics, and even vet techs—had no AI disclosures at all.

I hope you’ll read the rest of the ASP investigation here:

Read more about AI Dog Daddies!

These sorts of AI-generated marketing campaigns are rampant; our investigation follows from reporting by 404 Media, Factchequeado, and The New York Times on AI avatars hawking human health supplements. As AI and deepfake expert Henry Ajder told us, “The ease of which you can spin up these kinds of campaigns now and the relatively low cost and time it takes to do it is why I think we’re seeing much more of it.”

And unfortunately for the billions of people consuming vertical video on social media, they’re pretty convincing. Even I was fooled the first few times I encountered MiamiDogDaddy’s content.

Here are a few tips for recognizing this content—though it’s becoming more difficult by the day:

• Check for the “AI Creator” label at the top left corner of the video if you’re using Instagram on mobile, or under the username if you’re looking on desktop.

• Check for a “#syntheticperformer” or similar hashtag under the video.

• Put the sound on—AI-generated audio can sound less natural and more clipped than normal human speech.

• Look at the background of the video—is text legible? Does it look like a normal home/environment, or is it too perfect?

These aren’t foolproof—as our investigation proved, labeling is not well-enforced, and AI is becoming more convincing every day. My biggest piece of advice (which I should also take!) is to slow down when you’re consuming content online, and as soon as somebody starts selling you something, start asking questions—who is this person? do they exist? what’s their motivation?—and if you can’t answer any of them, don’t buy their supplement for $39.99 a month. 🧭

OVER THE PAST FEW DAYS I’ve been feeling somber and sad as I’ve reflected on the apparent suicide of Jason Arday, a Cambridge University professor who experienced a multi-point societal failure that turned his life upside down and ultimately led to his death.

For those that missed the media frenzy or avoid X.com, where the peanut gallery made Arday’s story trend in the United States, Sangita Myska of The Nerve brings us up to speed:

Jason Arday’s story – as he tells it – was nothing short of extraordinary. He grew up on a council estate in Clapham, south London. [...] Jason was diagnosed with autism, global developmental delay and dyslexia. He claims he was non-verbal until the age of 11, and could not read or write until he was 18. Yet, by 37, he was appointed a professor of sociology at a world-class academic institution. [...]

Now, serious questions have arisen over his backstory. There are allegations that he heavily embellished his CV. His claim that he was non-verbal at primary school has been undermined by a former classmate who says Jason Arday was so talkative as a child that his nickname was “chatty-patty”. Then there were his undocumented descriptions of racial harassment and stalking. Significantly more serious than all that were the accusations of plagiarism – that he stole other people’s research without sufficient attribution, change or development. Arday has admitted to “mistakes” in his PhD but denies the claim of plagiarism.

But, as writes:

The allegations trace back to Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday’s doctorate, previously investigated plagiarism claims, and did not uphold them. The latest campaign was reignited in part by Nathan Cofnas, a prominent anti-DEI academic who published his accusations under the headline “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge.”

Cofnas, by the way, published his claims on this platform (Substack). Karen is being charitable calling him an “anti-DEI academic;” he calls himself a “race realist” and was fired from Cambridge for asserting that there would be “close to zero” Black professors at Harvard if it were a meritocracy. Back to Attiah:

Arday resigned on August 5th from his dream position at Cambridge, citing that “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary” had taken a “profound toll” on him.

Nine days later, he was dead.

Arday’s story has brought up some serious questions about the academy and about publishing. For instance: Did Cambridge fully vet Arday before they hired him, or did they set him up to fail? Why, in this day and age, did Simon and Schuster not subject Arday’s memoir, which the carrion crows of the internet picked apart over the past few weeks, to a thorough legal and fact-checking read to protect both their author and their investment?

However—and as usual—this trumped-up scandal wasn’t focused on serious inquiry or making real change. It was about hounding a person out of their job and ruining their life—and in this case, tragically, ending it.

Jason Arday’s story shows that the right wing’s targets can do everything they demand—resign, admit to wrongdoing—and it still won’t satisfy the rabid online mobs.

Not even Arday’s death will.

Instead, they are moving on to other targets they claim enabled Arday, while continuing to malign and ridicule a 41-year-old father who can no longer defend himself—and his family. Yesterday, I was sent a post from a member of the UK’s right-wing reform party that ridiculed the fundraiser as a “family grift.” Arday left behind a wife and two children, and the mobs who targeted him would begrudge them financial support equal to a few years’ of his salary.

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wrote eloquently about mainstream and social media’s role in Arday’s story. As she points out, after Arday’s resignation, and his request to be left alone, “the media hounding didn’t just continue, it increased,” with some outlets buying ads to amplify their grotesqueries masquerading as “opinion” and “investigation.”

“The cultivation of targets that can be righteously attacked is the business model,” Carole writes. “This is what surveillance capitalism has given us. A recursive feedback loop that sees an ad team select a publication’s most clickbaity articles that leads to an increase in traffic that signals the “public interest” aka appetite to publish more articles. It’s a money machine.”

Carole also ends her piece with a list of ways to support targets of harassment. I shared the following with her:

I worry about the many people who will undoubtedly make themselves smaller after this campaign of hate. The people of color, the women who will eschew a life that has any public component for fear of what might be unleashed on them. Even if dismal human beings like [Nathan] Cofnas don’t succeed in literally policing academia or publishing, they may succeed in their campaign of self-censorship, unless institutions develop much more robust support structure for targets of networked harassment campaigns like this.

It’s those support structures—providing mental health support; assisting those who have been doxxed move to a second location; proactive monitoring and communications that don’t just protect the institution, but the individual target—those are the things that can bring people back from the brink.

A lot of institutions still subscribe to the idea that “keeping your head down” and “waiting for the scandal to blow over” are part of a winning strategy in the internet age. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Despite his resignation, the right-wing, racist, bloodthirsty mobs of the internet and the media sector that encouraged them would have continued to attack Jason Arday, were he still alive.

I know, because more than four years after experiencing my own digital witch hunt, my detractors still regularly find reasons to bring me up, to malign me, and to wish violence upon me and my family. Just this week, a “satire” news site (that deeply buries this label) claimed that I had died after being imprisoned in GITMO. Apparently this passes as a joke in MAGA land. As of this morning, two days after publication, the “article” has more than 30,000 views. It has hundreds of comments from people who clearly haven’t all read the site’s disclaimer about its content—one particularly nasty example reads “HANG HER DEAD CORPSE NOW !!!!! 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪.” (This “parody” site has also raised over $400,000—where are the right wingers aghast at the grift?)

Study after study has established that people with intersectional identities (a fancy way of saying people who represent multiple minorities, like Arday, who was Black and autistic) experience online abuse at higher quantities and levels of severity. (Here’s a very fresh study from University College London that demonstrates this phenomenon.) We’ve known this for years—the first study I did that made this conclusion was published in 2020, and I was far from the first person to reach it.

Yet here we sit, in 2026, shocked at what antiquated institutions, the media, and the internet have wrought. We should not be.

There will be postmortems, investigations, further speculation and ridicule. Some institutions may publish lessons learned and make feeble, bureaucratic attempts at protecting their people, while others will have learned a completely different lesson: that stories like Arday’s are moneymakers, humanity be damned.

In all but the most extreme of cases, public harassment campaigns have become normalized, viewed as the “cost of doing business” or the price of speaking out. A target who raises their voice in opposition to their public haranguing is often met with derision—“if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen”—or a claim they deserve what they’re experiencing for whatever crime they’re perceived to have committed.

And that’s the core of this tragedy. Multiple systems failed Jason Arday, but perhaps none so much as our common humanity.

We’ve been conditioned to wonder whether a person has done enough to deserve compassion, but when we’re asking that question, we’ve already lost. 🧭

Worth reading in full:

• Sangita Myska: Is Jason Arday a fantasist or a victim of racism? Actually, he’s both

• Karen Attiah: Jason Arday’s Death and the Age of Digital Racial Terror

• Carole Cadwalladr: A Digital Lynching

• A tribute from one of Arday’s friends, George Ryan

LAST WEEK, far-right influencer Mike Cernovich tweeted that I was nearly “given complete control over the internet” in my former role in the Biden Administration.

If you don’t know Cernovich, he’s a manosphere personality who rose to prominence during the #Gamergate harassment campaign and later cashed in on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The Southern Poverty Law Center writes that he “made his career on trolling the liberal establishment by accusing people of pedophilia or child sex trafficking. Armed with a law degree, Cernovich claims to defend ‘free speech,’ in particular the freedom to harass women and make misogynistic, violent comments.”

(That tracks; after he tweeted about me, X.com morphed into a Throwback Thursday of four-year-old lies about me, along with requisite harassment and threats. A prominent conspiracy theorist publicly called for my swatting for purported ongoing crimes.)

Now, Cernovich is cashing in on the MAHA movement, at least according to his Instagram bio: “Filmmaker, investor, and e-commerce co-founder of global brands. Currently launching a protein bar.”

Super nice guy. Obviously a paragon for trustworthy information.

To be clear: I never came close to having any sort of control over the internet. (You can learn about the boring truth of what my job in government was here.) I didn’t want that control. No one should have it. And any job that included any power to adjudicate speech is one I would have publicly condemned, in line with my career of anti-censorship research and advocacy.

But since Mike Cernovich is fantasizing about me, I thought it might be fun to do a little fantasizing of my own.

Here are five common sense policies I would pursue if I had “complete control” of the internet. I think the monetized liars might be surprised.

Give Americans the right to file appeals against social media company platform moderation decisions. Did you know that social media users in Europe can file appeals when they believe social media companies have taken down their content erroneously? Since this rule came into force, “30% of 165 million content moderation decisions that users appealed through the platforms’ internal mechanisms have been reversed.” Europeans have more online rights than Americans, despite what the monetized liars may say.

Get researchers access to platform data. Europe also has enshrined access to platform data for researchers and journalists in its internet regulation. This allows civil society to hold platforms and governments to account. Allegations of censorship or “complete control” of the internet, for instance, could be scrutinized through this data. Without it, conversations about what’s happening online amount to a very tiresome he-said-she-said. Who are we protecting if we are blocking measures like this? It’s certainly not citizens.

Dismantle the infrastructure behind deepfake nudification. Many countries—including the United States, in the context of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which became law this year—are imposing penalties on those who create, share, or enable the sharing of deepfake non-consensual intimate imagery. (Earlier this year, the Senate also passed the DEFIANCE Act, which would create a civil right of action for victims of deepfake abuse; it is awaiting action in the House.)

But what about the infrastructure that allows the images to be created in the first place—the servers that host websites dedicated to deepfake websites and nudifying apps? The app stores that serve them to users? The payment processors that facilitate the subscriptions or the exchange of money for the creation of a deepfake? If every part of the deepfake infrastructure were forced to implement Know Your Customer procedures the way banks are forced to vet potential clients for signs of terrorism and money laundering, the problem would not be the worldwide scourge it is today.

Make platform-level AI opt-in—not opt-out—the default. Some folks don’t want to read an AI-generated knowledge panel. They would rather avoid an AI-generated AI detector (looking at you, Substack). They would prefer their emails and documents stay their own, not hoovered up by an app’s AI model for training purposes. Rather than forcing users to figure out how to opt out of opaque systems, platforms should make them opt in by default, seeking our informed consent for both using our data in training and turning on AI features on platforms.

Incentivize on-platform information literacy education. I’ve been harping on this for years. The multi-billion dollar platforms that are poisoning our information ecosystem should educate users about the manipulative features of their platforms. They have ubiquitous access to millions of people. They encourage people to register to vote and cast a ballot, but they don’t educate them about why and how information impacting their vote made its way to them, because it impacts their bottom line. What would it look like if platforms ran compelling public service announcements about AI-generated scams and fraud? The basics of algorithmic amplification?

Those are the first five things that popped into my head. Notice how none of these involve anything even remotely related to the removal of political speech! A power-hungry would-be censor would be focused on that, and we don’t have to speculate what it might look like. We have hundreds of examples from the current administration that has been cataloguing for the past year and a half over at TrumpCensorship.com.

Just sayin’. 🧭

Online Notes

A few pieces of news and analysis from recent weeks

LinkedIn Adds a “Seems Like AI Slop” Button

Last week, I wrote about Substack’s decision to partner with Pangram, an AI-powered AI detector (yes, you read that right), in order to give users more visibility into how content on this platform is being created. In Substack’s rollout materials on the partnership, Co-Founder and CEO Chris Best took several opportunities to dunk on LinkedIn. “We don’t want to wait until your Substack app turns into LinkedIn before we start to learn and make progress,” he all but chortled.

LinkedIn answered that potshot this week with an announcement from its Chief Product Officer, Hari Srinivasan that the platform had rolled out a “Seems Like AI Slop” button. In an opaque reference to Substack, he wrote: “We want members to get feedback from real humans on what sounds authentic - not just have an AI detector review it and get it wrong.”

While I think this is closer to the right solution than publicly assigning an AI-generated scarlet letter to any post that Pangram thinks deserves it, LinkedIn’s effort also leaves something to be desired. I would have liked to have seen a little more information from the platform on what happens next. At least from Srinivasan’s post, it seems like right now this button is just generating signals for the platform to interpret and decide what content moderation actions to take, and that, like Substack, LinkedIn is making it up as it goes along.

Mozilla Audited Invasive Cycle Tracking Apps—Here are Two Alternatives

The Mozilla Foundation published a useful audit of period tracking apps. As they write:

Period tracking apps aren’t just about when your period happens. Apps in this space ask you to log extremely intimate details so it can predict your cycle or help you get pregnant. From when you bleed, but also when you’ve had that late-night chocolate craving, and even when you have a miscarriage. In the Post-Dobbs landscape, we believe safeguarding this data and keeping it private is more important than ever.

If you or a woman in your life use a cycle tracking app, it’s worth switching to an app that takes privacy seriously. Here’s how Mozilla rates a few popular apps:

A privacy-minded friend also recommended Drip to me; I’ve used it for years and can confirm it checks all the boxes for privacy and is incredibly user-friendly.

The Horrifying World of Spy Cam Voyeurism

A couple of years ago, a friend was visiting Washington and was a few nights into an Airbnb stay in Georgetown when he made a horrifying discovery: his host had installed cameras throughout the property. He covered them, understandably creeped out by the potential for his host to spy on him.

The host wasn’t happy; he kicked my friend out the next morning. Airbnb has since updated their policies to globally ban this sort of spying. But imagine if the footage of my friend showering, using the bathroom, or any other private activity had been uploaded to the internet. According to a new BBC documentary presented by , there’s a growing market both for this voyeurism and the tools necessary to create it.

I was lucky enough to meet Jess, an advocate for women’s rights and privacy and author of No One Wants to See your D*ck, in 2024 when the Department of Health and Human Services held an event on ending image-based sexual abuse. I was impressed by her conviction and have followed her ever since. Her new documentary explores the amateur forums that equips men to spy on women in hotels, dressing rooms, restrooms, and beyond; Jess even confronts one of the site owners, who whines that “men are unhappy” about laws like the UK Online Safety Act, which are trying to root out behavior like this. It’s well worth 30 minutes of your life.

In case you missed my latest…

This week I wrote about why Sarah Rogers, Trump’s pick for the CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, among other foreign broadcasting properties, is just a MAGA monster in free speech clothing:

Offline Notes

The real-life pastimes, products, and programs getting me through the infopocalypse.

As I’ve written before, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the garden this summer. Earlier this year, as I was researching how to deal with the hard clay soil that is typical for my region, I heard a great conversation on NPR’s 1A about native plants and their role in supporting threatened species. Natives can also thrive in poor soil conditions without the construction of raised beds or making amendments to the soil. Natives, I decided, were the way to go.

I spent five years working in a plant nursery as a teenager, but I didn’t know the first thing about natives. Luckily, my very first boss in Washington, , who had a long career in democracy support, is now a native plant landscape specialist. She created a gorgeous plan for us and we’ve been enjoying caring for our new plants throughout the summer.

Lately, the biggest burden has been weeding. We had a few rainy weeks in a row, followed by the oppressive smoke cloud from the Canadian wildfire. I was heads down on some big projects, and before I knew it, I had some massive crabgrass specimens snaking their tentacles through my beds. It took a few hours of hard work over two weeks to claw them back. I finished last weekend before we went out of town, and by the time I was out in the garden to water this week, the first bed I finished had more weeds peeking through again.

While I’ve been weeding and watering, I’ve enjoyed listening to a book I’ve come to think of as writer church: Susan Orlean’s Joyride, a recounting of The New Yorker staff writer and The Orchid Thief author’s life and career, and, more importantly (for me anyway!) a peek inside her process. I’m glad I am not the only writer walking into interviews with very little idea what I’m going to be asking my subjects about! 😅

Enjoy the rest of your weekend! If you enjoyed this post, send it to a friend or hit the heart button. 🩵

This email contains affiliate links to Amazon.com, whereby I earn a small commission on any purchases you make.

PICTURE, IF YOU WILL, a person who has cheered the both barring of researchers from the United States based on their speech and the dismantling of an office that fought foreign influence.

A political appointee who appeared alongside an extreme UK politician who pushed “progressive eugenics”—and considered giving groups affiliated with him US government funding.

A person who likened government action against the non-consensual deepfake nudification of women and girls to a “Russia-style ban.”

Someone so hell bent on owning the libs they instructed the State Department to build an internet portal that would bypass other countries’ internet laws and allow users to see illegal content, including neo-Nazi content and hate speech.

That person is Sarah Rogers, who currently serves as the Trump Administration’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. Though she has been described in multiple outlets as a “free speech crusader” (see here, here, and here), her actions tell a different story: she is on a free speech crusade for MAGA and its far-right allies alone, not for those who criticize them. She has also been nominated to lead the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM); the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding her confirmation hearing this morning.

If confirmed, Rogers—who is a lawyer by training and has no experience running a media organization—would continue her work overseeing America’s rapidly deteriorating public image around the world while bringing her far-right views to the agency that oversees Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and other public media properties that are meant to bring reputable information to closed societies.

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USAGM has been decimated under Trump 2.0. In March 2025, election denier Kari Lake—who served as Acting CEO of the Agency while it was without a Senate-confirmed appointee—worked with DOGE to slash a workforce of over 2000 journalists around the world to the statutory minimum of 81. Broadcasts to places like Iran, Venezuela, and Russia—places you might think the Trump administration had an interest in undermining local propaganda—were halted.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled a year later that Lake had illegally served as Acting CEO and that her actions in that position were null and void. The judge ordered USAGM to return former employees to their positions and resume broadcasts.

In the months since, as the Trump administration has fought an unpopular war in Iran, it has attempted to turn USAGM back on—and turn it into a MAGA propaganda outlet. Patsy Widakuswara, former VOA White House Bureau Chief and lead plaintiff against the administration’s attempt to dismantle the agency describes the partisanship that has come to characterize VOA for ’s Substack:

Current editorial priorities bear many of the characteristics of wartime propaganda, including at VOA Farsi, one of only six of VOA’s 49 language services brought back in a much-reduced capacity following legal action against the administration. Stories center on administration statements, often without opposing context. Recent articles highlight administration claims that oil prices are lower than before the war and that maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been restored. Meanwhile, VOA suppressed coverage of civilian death tolls from U.S. airstrikes and barely mentioned the February bombing of the elementary school in Minab.

The USAGM that Rogers stands to inherit bears no resemblance to the promise Voice of America made to its listeners during its first foreign broadcast on February 1, 1942: “Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America...The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.”

Rogers will not do that. Whatever editorial independence USAGM still clings to will be obliterated. Critical coverage of Trump will be softened or canned, as will coverage of his allies such as Nigel Farage or other far-right figures across Europe. She will calcify the transformation of America’s foreign broadcasters into propaganda outlets and continue to squander the trust of audiences that have depended on them for reputable reporting for decades.

America’s advantage in the information war has never been peddling propaganda; it has been the dependable truth. We don’t serve America’s interests by pushing a puffed up, perfidious picture of our country. But our adversaries—whose propaganda is slicker, more compelling, and more practiced than MAGA’s blunt, cringeworthy attempts—will surely celebrate when we do.

I’d tell you to picture it, but you don’t have to. It’s already happening. 🧭

Further reading:

• Just published today: The New Yorker on “How Trump Silenced the Voice of America.”

• in The Atlantic on Kari Lake’s tenure at USAGM.

A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, a Google Alert let me know my name was mentioned in a Substack post from a user I hadn’t heard of. The “resistance”-themed account specialized in writing songs and poems and had mentioned me in one of its non-rhyming posts. It got basic facts about my government tenure wrong and made odd conclusions, so I dug deeper. The account posted new content almost daily. Its “poetry” was too long and verged on nonsensical. The pace and the quality made it pretty clear the account was using AI to generate its content.

To my dismay, the account had tens of thousands of subscribers, was monetized, and seemed to be cashing in on the left’s very real desire to support something—anything!—that was taking a stand against Trump. Meanwhile, my own newsletter and others’ sputtered despite putting in real work to write human-generated content on Substack’s so-called “engine of culture.”

I don’t want to read AI slop on Substack—or any other platform where I’m spending hours of my one wild and precious life. I think AI is wildly misogynist—and others have proven it is racist and biased in many other ways that reflect the state of our world. And I’m worried enough about the effects widespread AI use is having on cognitive function that I ban AI use in the graduate-level course I teach.

So I wasn’t necessarily predisposed to dislike Substack’s new partnership with AI-detection tool Pangram. But the tool’s imperfections, along with the platform’s perplexing rollout strategy for the partnership, makes me think this is little more than a vanity project that will allow Substack to claim it is the last human-dominated social media platform.

The Pangram collaboration, which Substack CEO and Co-Founder Chris Best rolled out in The Substack Post on July 21, allows anyone to scan any post, note, or comment on Substack to see if it is fully AI-drafted, AI-assisted, or human-written.

Some writers seem perfectly happy to shrug as an AI tool—itself trained on the stolen works of writers—passes its imperfect judgement on whether our work is also AI-generated. Even though Pangram is widely recognized as best-in-class among AI-detectors, its still makes plenty of mistakes, as writes:

Given that Pangram still gets a false positive 1 out of every 10,000 analyzed posts (and as notes, that’s in controlled lab conditions!), if there are say, 2 million posts a week, that’s 20,000 cases where someone’s content is labeled 100% AI-generated.

Pangram performs worse in the other direction; The Atlantic reported that “Pangram’s false-negative rate, or how frequently the model incorrectly labels text as human, is closer to one-in-70 (although some other assessments say it is more accurate than that).” And after Indicator’s Alexios Mantzarlis conducted his own adversarial test on the tool, he found it fairly simple to get the detector to produce false negatives by making text rhyme or inverting phrases.

Aside from these concerns about accuracy, the way Substack rolled out the feature—and with whom—gives me tremendous pause. Its landmark announcements—the aforementioned piece from Best and a conversation with noted tech bro shill Matt Taibbi—did not address some of the biggest questions users were bound to have about the tool, including:

If I or others scan my text, is it being used to train Pangram’s models? After a lot of folks raised this question, Substack clarified in a post published three days after the launch: “These features do not use publisher content, either through Substack or Pangram, to train generative AI models.”

Is it possible to opt out of this feature? Yes, you can do this on a by-post, by-note basis, only after you scan your own post for AI usage. Substack only introduced this option after user feedback. I worry, though, that if allowing the scans becomes the norm, turning off this feature might be viewed as an admission of guilt. (I’m frankly not sure if I’ll turn it off yet—you’ll find out when I do!)

Further, though users are asking for it, Substack has not allowed users to opt out on a platform level, which seems extremely suspicious particularly when paired with the “first scan, then opt out” flow above. Is the workflow constructed like this because Pangram wants writers to be incentivized to use this “free” tool? What were the terms of the deal? Is Substack paying Pangram on a per-scan basis, or have they paid a flat fee and want to get their money’s worth? Do they want to generate as much data as possible so they can claim they have the “most human-generated content on the internet?”

If your text is marked as AI, does it affect your distribution or ability to monetize content at all? Substack hasn’t really addressed this yet. In Best’s conversation with Taibbi, he says, “Whatever we do I never want Substack to be a cop” and hopes the tool will simply allow users to ascertain if “there’s a trust that’s being violated.”

What about when Pangram gets it wrong? Well, according to the Substack help page about the Pangram collaboration, you, the user, “report [the] detection error,” “enter feedback,” and “it will be reviewed to improve detection quality.” Will the score be reversed? Will it be removed? Will you be paid for the tool’s defamation of your brand, your work, your name? 🤷🏻‍♀️ We’re left to guess.

And, the most telling question for me: Why did Substack choose Matt Taibbi to flog this rollout? Is Taibbi—a man who has spent the better part of the last four years peddling nonsense about disinformation researchers, willfully misinterpreting quotes, and failing to grasp linear time—who they think the most respected journalist in the space is? Or were they just focused on picking someone who would act as a rubber stamp, ask no hard questions, and wave away inconvenient truths? (For example, in the interview with Best, Taibbi excused Pangram’s error rates by noting that the Pangram guys admit that their tool isn’t foolproof. Gee, I’m sure that’s comforting to a person whose career is being lit on fire by a false accusation of AI-generated writing!) Or perhaps most chillingly, Substack leadership could have been interested in getting ahead of the business implications if Taibbi and his merry band of memelords decided that these labels were somehow “censorship”.

It’s frankly shocking that people like Taibbi don’t have more of a problem with the forced deployment of Pangram to every Substack user. The same set of people who cried “censorship” about fact-checking and disinformation research and tools that rate and label websites for trustworthiness are perfectly fine with a machine running an opaque, probabilistic model being used for deterministic conclusions that could affect people’s reputations and livelihoods. Pangram, they assert, is “designed to raise awareness,” but the same is true of the suite of tools and programs that have been deemed Orwellian. The fact is that Pangram performs a role very similar to Facebook’s maligned fact checkers, except it does it more opaquely.

I don’t hate the idea of a tool like this in general—I was and remain a fan of adding fact-checks and context cards to tweets and Facebook posts, and those efforts slowed the spread of misleading information. But efforts like this need to be rolled out with adequate transparency and must include proper appeals processes. With a tool like Pangram, users should also be educated about its limitations.

Between the rollout opacity and their choice of messenger—a man who uses his brain to write, sure, but uses it to write fantasy under the label of “journalism”—I think this is more of a vanity project than an attempt to safeguard humanity or reality. 🧭

Online Notes

A few pieces of news and analysis from the past week

We Should View Trump’s Speech as Preparation for Election Interference

This week, I was happy to contribute a piece to MSNOW’s Opinion Page about President Trump’s desperate, conspiratorial speech this week.

In order to distract from his flagging poll numbers, high gas prices, and the ICE killings that for some reason keep happening, Trump scheduled a primetime address, returning to

a favorite topic: conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. The president made sweeping claims about a broad Chinese campaign to access voter records, agitate against his candidacy and interfere in the election. But the claims are not borne out by the evidence, including the intelligence documents he declassified as “proof.” The speech was a desperate attempt to undermine confidence in our democratic system and lay the groundwork for an unprecedented and illegal attempt to control elections from the White House itself.

In the piece, I provide some context about elections. Trump’s misleading claim that China has access to 200 million Americans’ voter information, for instance, is a lot less alarming when you realize this information is either public or available for purchase on the open internet. I also discuss the background of the documents that Trump declassified:

[They] don’t show some conspiracy by the intelligence community to hide information from the president. They show intelligence professionals doing their jobs: assessing sources, debating the reliability of reports and making judgment calls about when it is necessary to publicly sound an alarm. Disagreement is not a sign of a cover-up, as the president alleged, but a hallmark of intelligence professionals doing their jobs. Disclosing every detected foreign influence campaign, no matter how minor, would risk seriously undermining the American people’s confidence in our elections — exactly as the president did this week.

The documents do, however, leave unredacted the names of two since-fired intel officials that Trump believes were involved in the “suppression” of intelligence about Chinese influence campaigns against him. The documents show these officials recalled two reports because of flimsy sourcing (one source hadn’t provided confirmed information in over a year; the other was a secondhand source). Leaving these names unredacted isn’t an accident. The Trump administration knows exactly what follows: online and offline harassment and threats.

READ THE REST

We Don’t Need an AI Court or AI Journalist Rankings

While in the car this week, I heard an interview on NPR’s Here and Now with journalist Gary Baum, who became the first target of a bizarre, Peter-Thiel-backed AI startup called “Objection AI.” In reporting about the experience, Baum explains:

“Someone has filed an objection against something you wrote,” explained Austin Livingston, pointing me to a web page where Purdue Pharma heir Michael Sackler, a film financier and self-styled ethical investor, had paid a new tech startup — fittingly called Objection — to assess the legitimacy of a skeptical article I’d published about him and his business in The Hollywood Reporter five years earlier.

Livingston, a young staffer who describes his job on LinkedIn as, simply, “creating shareholder value,” noted that an AI tribunal would attempt to “adjudicate a determination of truth,” and that the announced outcome “will also affect your Honor Index score, a measure of the veracity of your published work.” He went on, adding, “You can argue your side by uploading your evidence and suggesting your interpretation of the allegation.”

What dystopian nightmare is this? AI is regularly hallucinating in and out of the legal world, but some people are so high on their own supply they think it can serve as a neutral and truthful adjudicator Baum’s reporting, which is worth reading in full, seems to have convinced the leaders of “Objection” it was a bad idea; it is now an AI-powered journalist-ranking site. To be clear, we don’t need that either.

Offline Notes

The real-life pastimes, products, and programs getting me through the infopocalypse.

I was in New York this week, and got to spend time with lovely friends and colleagues like and Michelle Kinney of the Mayday Network (have you listened to our Americans rewatch podcast, The Illegals?) and . I also ate pizza.

Kaylee, our pup, seems to be getting bigger every day. I sent in a doggie DNA test for her last week and can’t wait to see what breeds other than lab are contributing to her extreme cuteness.

I’ve been spending more time on Instagram, spending a lot of time making more vertical videos and post more analysis on that platform, only to see middling growth. Are you on Instagram? Do you follow me there?

Follow me on Instagram

Hope you enjoy your weekend—I’ll be back in your inbox early next week. 🧭

THE IRRESPONSIBLE SPECULATION around the death of Lindsey Graham and the long, secret illness of Mitch McConnell have provided ample evidence for a fact that may upset some of you: batshit conspiracy theories are not the sole terrain of the Republican party.

As far back as 2018, when I testified in the Senate about countering foreign disinformation, I’ve always repeated a single phrase: “disinformation knows no political party.” In that context and most others, it was meant as a warning to Republicans: you may be inclined to ignore, or even welcome Russian influence campaigns when they help you, but when one day an adversary targets your party, and your candidate, you’re going to regret it. (I was proven right—see Iran’s lego propaganda.)

But another warning—one that is too infrequently acknowledged—was baked into that statement. It’s not just Republicans who are susceptible to disinformation; Democrats can and do fall victim to it, too. In How to Lose the Information War, I told the story of a group of left-wing activists who organized a Les Mis-themed flash mob on July 4, 2017, and were unknowingly collaborating with a troll from Russia’s infamous Internet Research Agency, who had helped them purchase Facebook ads to advertise the event and drive up turnout:

The $80 spent to drive show tune-loving, progressive, D.C.-area residents to the White House to protest the president in song on July 4, 2017, wasn’t a mistake; Russia has long tried to increase discord in American society.

[Disinformation] feeds on, amplifies and weaponizes our emotions, pitting us against one another. It’s not just widespread digital literacy campaigns targeted at voters and social media users we need. Politicians need to sign on as well, calling out disinformation—whether foreign or domestic, no matter which political party it opportunistically supports—as the equal-opportunity threat to democracy it is. If our elected officials and political organizations traffic in disinformation, we are doing Russia’s work for it.

Well, I am sure the Russians who work on influence operations were absolutely delighted when troves of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum immediately worked themselves up into a conspiratorial froth over the death of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham on Sunday. Most prominently, those claims started on the right with Laura Loomer, who floated that Russia or Iran might have orchestrated a hit on Graham:

But it wasn’t very long before the conspiracies hopped the gulf between right and left like COVID at a choir practice. Progressives were telling off-color jokes about Graham in one post, and in the next expressing their deep concern that the White House was covering up his poisoning, as if poison was the sole reason a slightly-overweight 71-year-old man who just undertook an arduous journey to a war zone might suddenly drop dead.

In the evening, the DC medical examiner released a statement with their preliminary findings:

Graham suffered from an aortic dissection, in which a tear occurs in the inner layer of the main artery. This was caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, the statement said. These tears usually occur when there is high blood pressure.

Within the same hour, Senator Mitch McConnell, who had been the focus of intense speculation and conspiracy theories after his team had suppressed information about his health since he was hospitalized on June 14, released a “proof-of-life” photo, probably in hopes of getting self-appointed investigative journalists to stop creeping around in the back alley behind his house. (Yes, that really happened, but I’m not linking the video because I don’t want to amplify behavior like that.) The photo may have been edited a bit, or else compressed—McConnell’s finger, holding the Saturday edition of the Washington Post Sports section, has a strange halo around it. The edge of the left side of his pillow looks a bit off. There are completely legitimate explanations for why this might be.

But the left-wing internet saw only conspiracy. Almost every single post in my Threads feed on Sunday night was a would-be sleuth sharing their smoking gun: AI had told them the photo was actually from 2023! Or AI-generated! Or legitimate, but enhanced, so the Senator’s seemed younger and wrinkle-free! (Deepfake detection expert Hany Farid posted on Monday that he can find no evidence the photo is AI-generated.)

This all made me pretty distraught. A lot of the prominent folks who were fanning the flames of these conspiracy theories should have known better. The general population was primed for this, between a Senate office that hadn’t communicated in a month and a strong and understandable degree of distrust toward anything anyone allied with the Trump administration said or did. And everyone was using technology that was appealing to their worst instincts—they wanted answers, they wanted the answers to make them feel smart or righteous, and they wanted them now.

As the conspiracies were spiraling out of control, I posted the following two exhortations to reason on my social platforms:

In response, a lot of angry people told me I was being a scold, that I was admonishing them for asking questions, or that I was insane because the McConnell photo was—to their very expert eyes—so obviously manipulated.

I want to be clear: I’m not telling anyone that they should stop asking questions or holding the Trump administration to account. But it’s important to recognize that the behavior we saw on Sunday night—breathless speculation entirely devoid of evidence—isn’t what accountability looks like, and it isn’t accomplishing much besides making social media platforms money. It was incentivized by social media platforms that want to keep us scrolling and seething, generating revenue through advertisements. They created algorithms that reward enragement with engagement, and creators—who rely on social media to pay their bills—know what it takes to get and maintain attention.

What I’m asking of you, and of everyone who aspires to return to a shared reality, is actually a lot more difficult: to actively work against the way we’ve been conditioned by unscrupulous politicians, influencers, and the social media platforms that made them. To actively work against human nature. To practice patience.

These are four maxims that I hope will help you in that mission. I’d also encourage you to check out @ Michael Caulfield’s SIFT Method and The News Literacy Project’s Breaking News Checklist.

1. If the content you’re consuming is salacious, shocking, enraging, or otherwise making you emotional, someone may be manipulating you. We know platforms amplify emotionally-charged content. We know users—especially those who monetize their content—know this. Breaking news events are ripe for engagement bait. If the content were on the front page of the National Enquirer at the supermarket—or better yet, if you saw it on Laura Loomer’s feed—would you believe it?

2. If news is fresh, details will be scarce. News outlets and experts are doing due diligence to verify accounts from human sources and confirm video and photos are authentic. None of that happens instantaneously. For those that make claims with certainty in the hours after news breaks, see #1.

3. AI hallucinates. It can’t do what you’re asking. It probably can’t answer your questions about breaking news, and it definitely can’t accurately verify the provenance of a photo or video. Treat it like an intern that favors speed over accuracy or a student who definitely hasn’t done the reading but keeps answering the teacher’s questions anyway.

4. The simplest explanation is probably the right one. Yes, even now. An aging man had heart problems. A frail man who probably shouldn’t be a Senator anymore did a poor job communicating about his frailty. There are many evil things happening, but they are still outnumbered by plainly stupid choices and unfortunate facts of life.

If you’re a chronically-online engaged citizen who wants to keep up with the news and keep the pressure on the government, you can be a responsible information consumer in a world of AI slop, but you need to start by slowing down and recognizing that you can’t know everything immediately. Your advocacy and your rage is better served when it is grounded in reality. 🧭

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THINK BACK TO SUMMER 2024, to the lime green, meme-laden, hopium-laced “brat summer” before Donald Trump was elected to the presidency a second time. The presidential election was described as the first “influencer election,” when both parties were embracing the power of content creators to inform voters and drive behavior change. The Democrats boosted the clip economy and credentialed over 200 influencers to attend the DNC, among other strategies. But their play looked timid in comparison to the GOP’s long-term gambit, which involved a well-oiled, targeted, free-flowing creation and amplification machine that indexed on longform content.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled on where the Dems went wrong in 2024, as well as the party’s continued struggles building a content machine to rival the GOP’s today. I’m not invoking the ghost of brat summer to discuss which party is better at internetting—the answer is obvious. Instead, I’m thinking about 2024 and its aftermath because it demonstrated the troubling gulf between the mainstream, credentialed press and creators in stark relief.

Take the 2024 DNC, where the Party’s wining and dining of content creators left the mainstream press (rightly) pissed off with their comparatively shabby treatment. Or the ways since then that the mainstream media have irked creators, sometimes engaging in behavior and coverage that comes off as belittling, whether publicly or privately, intentionally or not.

Though it’s often cast in the context of political power—which strategy for engaging the media, both mainstream and new, delivers election victories—this trend of animosity within the sector (because press and creators are a single sector, whether they like it or not) is bigger than that. It’s creating a zero-sum incentive structure that has already led to a degradation of the information infrastructure that is leaving people less informed, and it’s time for everyone to put on their big kid pants in service of the greater good.

A Non-Exhaustive List of Beefs

Attribution

In Twitter’s heyday, when I would publish a new piece, I relished seeing how it was getting shared across the platform. All sorts of folks would distribute and amplify my work: journalists, average users, celebrities. Sometimes I would get tagged, sometimes I wouldn’t. I didn’t care; it wasn’t the reference section to an academic paper. I was just happy to see people learning from my writing.

I think about this when I hear gripes from journalist friends who say that creators are “stealing” their stories, angry that creators are “reporting” news to their audiences they didn’t actually report. I don’t see it that way at all. While there are less-than-scrupulous creators who don’t give credit where it’s due, videos with picture-in-picture or greenscreen screengrabs of the article being referenced are popular and highly-engaged with; often such videos will be a user’s first contact with a particular story.

Similarly, news organizations complain about the lack of editorial standards they see in creator-driven vertical video; as I’ve written before, platform algorithms, which incentivize emotional content, drive some to post sensationalist or conspiratorial videos so they can make rent.

The topline is this: Creators add context and their own interpretation of the news, which helps them connect with their audiences. When creators explain and react to journalistic content, is it “stealing,” or is it sharing? I’d argue it’s the latter—the modern form of a Twitter tag. And if journalists are worried about the lack of referral traffic from these videos or the way the content might be sensationalized, their gripe isn’t with the creators, it’s with social media platforms that disincentivize users clicking links, closing apps and moving off-platform, and reward them for posting rage bait.

Competition

Downstream from attribution is legacy outlets’ and journalists’ concerns that content creators are their competition. This concern is embodied by framing of Reuters’ coverage about the journalist-creator dynamic at the 2024 DNC:

Influencers have access to a creator lounge in the United Center and a creator platform section on the convention floor where they can create video content.

The besieged journalism industry, which has lost tens of thousands of jobs from cost-cutting and consolidation over more than a decade, had its space at the convention slashed compared to previous conventions, according to another Pew study.

“These are the worst working conditions of the 20 conventions I have covered,” said Jonathan D. Salant, assistant managing editor of politics at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In its 2026 survey of 280 digital media leaders from 51 countries and territories, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford found that 70 percent of those surveyed were worried about creators “taking time and attention away” from their work, while only 39 percent were worried about losing talent, in a year when many formerly mainstream reporters made the leap to the land of online creators:

But, according to RISJ’s Digital News Report, which surveys news consumers in 48 global markets, 77 percent of people surveyed consume news online each week, and “most people who get news from creators are using them alongside traditional media – not instead of it. In fact, those who access creators consume more traditional media than the average respondent.”

Trivialization

Creators, for their part, have plenty of complaints about the mainstream media, but by far the one I see echoed the most frequently in their videos is that the press trivializes both the work creators do and its impact. Content creation is treated as a “side hustle” or inherently unserious because it grew on platforms that got their start as a home for viral dance trends. But the platforms aren’t just for silly videos anymore—creators drive behavior change, movements, impact, and even reporting. And, as RISJ’s report shows, audiences find creators easier to understand and more entertaining than traditional media:

I can feel hundreds of pairs of journalists’ eyes rolling—who cares if creators are entertaining?! The news isn’t meant to be entertaining! Sure, we all might like to believe that. But for the past ten years, everyone from Kremlin trolls to MAGA shitposters have been making a bet on infotainment while the rest of us clutch our pearls. We need to work with the information environment that we have, not the one we’d like.

Burying the Hatchet

Earlier this year, serious allegations of sexual abuse tanked Senator Eric Swalwell’s California gubernatorial campaign. Creators Arielle Fodor (“Mrs. Frazzled”) and Cheyenne Hunt first surfaced the accusations; they were then reported out by CNN. As Susie Banikarim of the Columbia Journalism Review writes:

What made the creators’ approach notable wasn’t just their persistence. It was their understanding that social media influence alone would not be enough to take on a powerful politician and care for Swalwell’s accusers. They coordinated with the women who confided in them, helping them find legal counsel and directing them to CNN once they were ready to share their stories.

This example shows that collaboration between the warring camps is possible and productive, and that it can have positive, seismic impacts for democracy.

If I were advising mainstream media about how to compete in this environment, I’d tell them it’s time to bury the hatchet, stop publicly griping about each other1 and start collaborating with content creators and replicating what they do. (The same goes for experts, which I discussed in my recent keynote at GlobalFact.)

Collaboration

For collaboration between legacy media and creators to work—that is, for such work to feel authentic to creators’ audiences—it has to be more than a quid pro quo, “we report the news, you make videos about it and receive payment in return.” This might look like:

1. Reporting a story based on creator tips—like CNN did with the Eric Swalwell story—and involving creators in the process.

2. Inviting creators to shadow journalists for a period of time and make content about the process, pulling back the curtain on the parts of the reporting process that are rarely seen by the public.

3. Hiring creators to skillshare with your newsroom about scripting, shooting, and building and maintaining audience trust.

The uniting factor here is not to treat creators as a sideshow, but as experts in audience cultivation and retention. Recognize what they do is work. Come to them with humility and a desire not to learn from them, not just to extract value from them.

Creators need humility, too. I often see creators telling audiences that “no mainstream media are reporting” whatever their topic is, and nine times out of ten, that’s just not true. Goodwill needs to go both ways.

Empowering Journalists to Make Vertical Video

Remember when posting to Twitter was seen as a necessity for journalists? (For some, it still is—yikes!) Why were journalists never empowered to take the same leap into vertical video? Sophia Smith Galer—who cut her teeth at the BBC and VICE, makes beautiful video explainers for her 1+ million followers, and trains others in how to replicate her success—points out that more newsrooms are prioritizing making vertical video with high production values, but these videos

aren’t coupled with lower production value, faster-to-make videos that are platform native coming from individuals. Content remains glued to publisher accounts across the board and journalists uploading work themselves (like they’ve done on Twitter for years) remains the exception, not the rule.

To me, the gap is structural:

1. Journalists need to know that their newsrooms want them to make this authentic content about their reporting and the behind-the-scenes of it, and they need to know it won’t get them in trouble; this means creating or updating a social media guidebook with basic standards for journalist-generated vertical video.

2. Journalists also need the space and support to make this content. Even when you’re making quick, off-the-cuff videos, it takes time, and journalists shouldn’t be forced to make content in their time off. This should be factored into the workload that newsrooms envision for their journalists, understanding that they might not be filing ten stories a week if they’re also making video, but are doing integral work rebuilding trust with audiences and even reaching new ones.

What’s at Stake

Since 2024, I have been in more conversations than I care to admit in left-of-center circles in which the privileged few—journalists and executives from mainstream media, national security professionals, experts, political consultants—give creators short shrift. We all need to wake up. As much as I’d like to go back to the information environment of the 2010s—ah, those halcyon days!—it’s not going to happen. As wrote in a great essay this week, social media is media now.

My friend Sabra Ayres, who spent 20 years in traditional newsrooms around the world and now trains local journalists in Ukraine—including a course this year for local media on making mobile-first vertical videos—says she’s telling her grantees that “they better get used to creators and try to work with them instead of against them.” I agree. We can each keep trying to push our own boulders of truth uphill amid an avalanche of lies, or we can roll downhill, push the boulder into a lake, and make powerful ripples together. 🧭

Thanks for bearing with me this week! We just got a new puppy—meet Kaylee!—so it’s honestly a miracle I wrote anything at all. I won’t be sending out any field notes this week, but hope to be back to a two-post-per-week schedule when we’re more settled in.

I was surprised to find that my April “Field Notes” post was among the most popular in the six months since I relaunched this newsletter. I’m happy to keep scratching that itch for you!

Every Friday, I’ll send a short roundup of readings to help you find your way through our polluted information environment, along with some “offline” commentary—what’s going on in my garden, my kitchen, my life off screen. I hope you enjoy it...but first, some business!

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Online Notes

A few of my favorite pieces of news and analysis from the past week.

A victory against the “censorship” liars.

My colleagues in the disinformation research space, including and , were granted a dismissal in a case against them filed by a bunch of mendacious jerks and tinfoil cranks (funded by Stephen Miller’s lawfare factory) who alleged they had “censored” them. They had not. The liars found the researchers’ speech inconvenient, and they sued them to try to shut them up. One of the lessons here—which I mentioned in my speech to fact-checkers from around the world last month—is to always challenge the premise of BS suits and investigations, to never roll over and accept failure. The defense team and the folks they represented did just that. They still sustained damage to their reputations and lost funding and in some cases, work. But in the end, the very judge who amplified a lot of the conspiracies about them was forced to eat crow after the Supreme Court rebuked his nonsense, and that feels gooooood.

Celebrating July 4 like I celebrate the Superbowl.

I am feeling a bit melancholy about our nation’s 250th, as I’m sure many Americans are. We’re getting together with some neighbors and their kids and making some food. That will be the extent of our celebrations this year. When did I start celebrating July 4 like I celebrate the Superbowl? That is, when did I start using it as an excuse to gather and eat while ignoring the convening premise? I remember July 4, 2020 being totally surreal; Trump had organized flyovers from a bunch of military aircraft, I suppose meant to distract us from the ongoing pandemic and the ongoing clashes between law enforcement and Black Lives Matter protestors. Maybe that was the turning point?

argues that July 4 feels hollow this year because our leaders don’t respect the virtues, symbols, and values of America’s founding: “They believe that only their clan represents America, that only people like them deserve to be considered “real” Americans, and that the American government exists to serve them alone, they need to undermine anything that tells a more unifying story.”

I hope you enjoy your hot dogs; I’ll be inside and not going anywhere near the travesty on the National Mall.

“I can prompt with the best of them.”

I am teaching my annual summer course on disinformation and influence in the political age. My students are at the Master’s level, and like many other educators, I’m worried about what AI is doing to our collective ability to write, read, analyze, and reason. Rather than wax poetic about that—I’m still planning a longer guide on AI— enjoy this piece of satire on LLMs and the rapid atrophying of our brains.

Offline Notes

The real-life pastimes, products, and programs getting me through the infopocalypse.

It’s Spotted Lantern Fly Squishing Season

While the ideal yard for some Americans is a carpet of green grass, I’ve always wanted something a bit more wild. Growing up, my childhood backyard abutted a few wooded areas where I made forts, and where my dog, Max, would chase deer. (Once, he pulled away from my mom on a walk to chase a herd, only to return hours later dragging a log, which his leash had wrapped around.) We moved in 2025 and have been delighted by all the wildlife in our new area: foxes, skunks, deer, and many birds (our cat, Baxter, is especially grateful for them). We decided to put in some native plants (on which more in a future issue).

After the gardens were planted in May, our big household project has been their care and maintenance. Watering—especially in this heat—is essential, as is weeding and pest control. Spotted lantern flies—an invasive species with no dedicated natural predators in North America—have been feasting on my Sweet Bay Magnolias, so they’ve been the primary pest receiving our redirected rage. The whole family has been enlisted in our assault on them. Every time our four-year-old sees one of the black or red and white nymphs, he shouts, “Mommy! Daddy! A spotted wantern fwy!” We either whack them with a shoe or sandal or flick them into a bucket of soapy water. These scenes of suburban carnage give us great satisfaction—as does the fact that we have seemingly made an impact on the population; where we would once pull a few dozen during each session, those numbers are dwindling.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for sunscreen

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the subject of a lot of derision for their premature obsession with skincare, but I’m proud of them for doing what millennials and older generations did not: using sunscreen every day. After I gave birth, whatever whackadoodle bullshit happened to my hormones drove some heat-and-sun-induced melasma (freckles on steroids) on my pale-to-translucent skin, and since then I have been pretty obsessive about not leaving the house without a mineral sunscreen on my face and a big, dumb, hat on my head. When I went to Australia, I was impressed with how seriously everyone there takes the sun; young Aussies are required by law to wear hats (they’re part of their school uniforms too, so cute!) and adults will always have one—and some sunscreen—in their bag.

Given that we all now live in the fifth circle of hell, here are my favorite sun protection products that may you protect your skin. (These are all Amazon affiliate links; I’ll earn a small commission if you purchase anything.)

• For gardening, hiking, and time at the pool with my son, I love this extremely dorky wide-brimmed hat with a ponytail hole. Here’s the men’s version. Both are really UPF 80+, lightweight, and dry fast when wet.

• I wear this tinted mineral sunscreen every day; it does double duty as sunscreen, skincare, and very basic makeup. ILIA will match your shade for free on their website. If you don’t like the “dewy” look, this may not be for you.

• If you don’t want a tinted product, I like this face sunscreen mist from Sun Bum.

• I carry this matte, brush-on mineral sunscreen in my purse for touch ups and the rare instances that I’m out without sunscreen on. Pricey, but worth it; I think I’ve had the bottle I’m using now for three or four years.

• Similarly, if you have a kiddo who hates getting sunscreen on, I like this kid’s powdered sunscreen, especially for my son’s face, ears, and the top of his head. It’s also great for babies who can’t use chemical sunscreen yet! One tube of this has lasted us years.

• For the pool and other manmade environments, this is my favorite everyday body sunscreen. It’s not greasy at all. You’ll need a reef-safe sunscreen if you’re snorkeling near any reefs, though.

Widow’s Bay

It takes a lot to make me stay up late these days, but bingeing Widow’s Bay, the comedy-horror show starring Matthew Rhys on AppleTV+ had me doing just that a few weeks ago. There are plenty of gifted TV critics who have written about what makes this show so special, and I’m not them, so suffice it to say it’s been one of the best things I’ve watched in years. It is laugh out loud hilarious while also managing to be legitimately creepy at parts, with excellent writing, evocative set dressing, and physical comedy that is rare in the two-screen era of TV. If you haven’t watched it yet, make time this weekend—you won’t regret it.

Last week, I was honored to deliver a keynote address at the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities’ annual conference as the Association celebrated its sesquicentennial (150th anniversary). The topic was personal, and one that is very much in line with the Wayfinder ethos: scams and fraud online, and how this growing scourge intersects with the ongoing war on reality.

Excerpts from the speech, lightly edited for clarity and context, are below.

A little over a year ago, when the AAIDD proposed that I give a speech at your annual conference, I wasn’t quite sure what I would discuss. In some ways, the world my work inhabits felt miles away from yours.

A few months later, those worlds collided.

I got a call from a loved one. She has dyslexia and ADHD and had just gone through a difficult divorce. She said someone had hacked her Facebook account. Could I give her a hand?

She had graduated from high school in the 90s, during the internet’s infancy. Her ex had handled their family admin, and she had worked in customer service for a grocery store for almost 15 years, so she didn’t have regular contact with computers or the internet besides a little bit of Facebook usage and texting friends and family. That meant she had never developed the information literacy necessary to survive in today’s polluted information environment, where disinformation, fraud, and scams thrive.

She gave me her password so I could see what was going on with her account, and I logged in remotely. Even as someone who studies the internet, I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw: she’d been targeted by a man posing as an actor from a soap opera she loved. Over months, he’d cultivated her trust, solicited nude images and account passwords, then threatened her: if she didn’t send him money, the photos would go to her entire friends list. By the time she asked for help, we were fighting in real time to keep control of the account as he blasted those images to her brother and her aunt.

After hours of changing her password only to watch him change it back, I emailed colleagues at Facebook. They were able to help, but I went to bed really upset that night. I had just experienced the two-tiered system of aid at these social media platforms: If you know someone who works there, you have a chance to preserve your dignity. If you don’t, you’re out of luck.

It wasn’t the end of my loved one’s ordeal. Months later, I learned she was withdrawing $20 to $200 several times a week and converting it to bitcoin. She’d met a man on a dating app, allegedly an American serviceman deployed overseas who could only talk in the middle of the night. He’d sent her photos, and she was certain he was real. A reverse image search turned up other women taken in by the same con. The “soldier” had almost certainly used AI to alter his face and voice on those late-night calls. She didn’t know that was possible.

In all, she lost about $40,000 to two romance scams—her entire savings, plus a loan against her 401(k). We reported the incidents to the FBI, to the apps, to her banks. They told us the money was unrecoverable.

It was not her fault. No one ever gave her the tools to see it coming.

Online fraud is growing

Online fraud is a massive industry growing at a frightening pace. The FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report logged a record $16.6 billion in reported losses, a 33% jump in a single year. In 2025, that number rose again, to $20.9 billion.

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities are at greater risk of falling victim to online scams and fraud: Australia’s Bureau of Statistics found that people with disabilities experience scams at nearly twice the rate of those without, and identity theft at roughly double. A University of Washington study found 82% of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) named “knowing who to trust online” as a major challenge.

What makes me so frustrated about these statistics is that they are preventable. You do not need to study the internet, or be an expert on disinformation, or have any deep knowledge of these technologies to learn the basics that would have saved my loved one from being scammed.

Government and Platforms: Dereliction of Duty

So why aren’t we teaching these skills? And why aren’t technology companies doing everything in their power to prevent scams and fraud from happening on their platforms? Because words like “media literacy,” “fact-checking,” “information literacy” have been deliberately recast as “censorship.” This is part of a strategy designed by people who have a financial and political interest in keeping you—and the people your community serves—confused, isolated, and vulnerable.

Think about what that actually means. The very skills that would have helped my loved one recognize a romance scam—the ability to verify someone’s identity, to slow down and ask questions, to understand that strangers who profess love and then ask for money are following a script—those skills have been framed as dangerous and antithetical to freedom.

So federal funding for digital literacy programs has been cut. Researchers who study online manipulation have been investigated and subject to frivolous lawsuits. Social media platform safety teams have been gutted. The infrastructure that should have been built to protect people has instead been systematically dismantled, all to the applause of people who call it freedom.

Let me be direct about who benefits from that.

According to internal documents reported by Reuters, Meta projected that roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue—about $16 billion—would come from scam and prohibited-product ads, with high-risk scam ads shown some 15 billion times a day and the company tied to a third of all successful scams in the U.S. That’s a feature, not a bug.

When the companies profiting from scams spend money lobbying against platform regulation, when political operatives attack media literacy as censorship, when federal programs that would teach people to recognize manipulation get defunded, the person who pays the price is your grandmother on Facebook. It is your neighbor who sent his life savings to someone he met online. It is the person with a learning disability who didn’t know the warning signs, because no one ever taught them, and because the systems that should have caught them decided to stand down.

None of this was inevitable. The tools exist. The research exists. The evidence about what works is overwhelming.

What is missing is the political will to use them.

Build the ramp

When I was discussing this speech with the organizers, they reminded me that before the Americans with Disabilities Act, buildings didn’t have ramps. It wasn’t because the technology was complicated. It wasn’t because architects didn’t know that some people used wheelchairs. The ramps didn’t exist because no one was legally required to build them.

As you all know, the burden of access fell entirely on the person who needed it—to find another entrance, to ask for help, to simply not go. Buildings were designed for some people and not others, and that was treated as a fact of life rather than a failure of design.

The ADA changed that. Title III says: if you operate a place of public accommodation—a business, a school, a venue—you cannot discriminate against people with disabilities. You must provide equal access. And if your building has stairs, you gotta build the ramp. Not because it’s charity. Because it’s the law, and because access is a human right.

The internet is a place of public accommodation. But it has stairs everywhere. And we have chosen, as a society, to treat that as a fact of life.

It doesn’t have to be. In 2018, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner began developing Safety by Design, built on a simple premise: the burden of safety should never fall solely on the user. It requires platforms to remove harms before users encounter them, to set safety high by default, to design for people with “distinct characteristics and capabilities,” and to publish real transparency reports about implementation. The EU took a similar path with its Digital Services Act, requiring platforms with 45 million-plus EU users to assess risks to vulnerable populations. The U.S. has nothing comparable.

So here’s the ramp, in three parts. First: a Safety by Design standard for U.S. platforms, with legal liability for the largest ones when they fail. Second: a universal information-literacy curriculum—K–12 and adult—with accessibility built in. Third: targeted resources for people with IDD and the caregivers and educators who are the real first line of defense.

The scam techniques refined on isolated, vulnerable people have become templates for mass manipulation. The information environment left unsafe for the most vulnerable is the same one that radicalized your neighbor.

We are in a war on reality, waged by people who’ve calculated that a confused, isolated public is easier to exploit than an informed one. Every time you teach someone to navigate the internet more safely, you deny that industry a victim. Every time you demand platform accountability, you build the ramp.

Building a ramp is not a political position. Safety is not censorship. Protecting people from fraud is not an attack on free speech. My loved one deserved that support. So does every person you serve. And we can get there—together.

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In a room full of impressive folks whose bona fides include exposing scammers who promote made up miracle cures for autism, holding those perpetrating war crimes and human rights abuses to account, and taking down the biggest purveyor of nonconsensual deepfakes, I argued that the backlash against our work is not a sign of our failure but of our impact. The winning move is to get louder, bolder, and more organized.

Excerpts from my address are below, or you can watch the whole thing courtesy of GlobalFact sponsor LRT, Lithuania’s public broadcaster.

I’ve been asked to speak about what it takes for democracies to win the war on truth—no pressure, right? Just one of the biggest questions of our time.

If I had been asked that question a few years ago, my answer would have been pretty different, and this talk would’ve been a tad more optimistic. Invest in media literacy! Fund fact checkers and researchers and journalism! Regulate unaccountable social media platforms!

Now, don’t get me wrong, those are all crucial components of a winning strategy.

I spent the better part of a decade advocating for them, and if we had seriously invested in them, put the whole weight of government behind them, treated them as the core challenge that they are instead of the “nice-to-have” sideshow some governments pretended they were, we might be in a better situation today.

But it wasn’t solely a lack of investments or a lack of urgency that got us to a point where our work is demonized as “censorship,” where we are facing investigations and lawsuits and funding cuts, where we aren’t just fighting foreign adversaries, but our own allies—my own government!—and those adversaries are engaged in a deliberate campaign to intimidate us and suppress the truth.

That campaign uses the same tactics of suppression that autocrats have always used: media smears, administrative burdens, lawfare, and threats.

To some degree, it was inevitable. When autocrats encounter a challenge to their grip on power and to the narratives that put them there, they will try to eliminate it.

What was not inevitable was our response. We were—and in many cases, remain—too timid, too careful, too technical in a moment that rewards bold action and emotional connection.

Now, I’m not suggesting we fight fire with fire, that we stoop to the level of the autocrats attacking us. We don’t need to traffic in AI slop and online abuse to gain ground in this battle. But we do need to meet people where they are and speak to them in a language they understand—on topics they care about.

We need to take another page from our adversaries, too: we need more solidarity. We need more audacity. We need more courage.

[...]

The broligarchs, as calls them, want nothing more than for us to self-censor, to self-police, to self-select out of the work we are doing in service of the public. In service of democracy. In service of a shared reality.

But my friends, I’m here to tell you, we need to do the opposite.

This is the moment it’s more important than ever to stay in the fight.

If you remember one thing from my speech today, let it be this. We do not need to reinvent ourselves. We did not do anything wrong.

The liars of the world have spent so much time and money attacking us precisely because what we are doing is working. Because we represent a formidable challenge to their power and their profit.

They cut off our access to data because they were worried that our findings would undermine them.

They are using the legal system to keep us preoccupied and scared, to distract us from our work.

They have defunded and decried fact checkers because the facts aren’t on their side.

They are threatening us because we are a threat to them.

So we need to keep fighting. We can’t twist ourselves into knots trying to describe our work in ways they might find acceptable. If we do, we will always be reinventing, rebranding in ways that keep us from connecting with the public we are trying to support.

We can’t bury our heads in the sand and hope to resurface when this is all over. If we do, when we resurface, there might not be anything left to fight for.

The fight is now.

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Here are a few lessons learned from the last four-plus years of my fight:

First, before the worst happens, think through your online and offline security posture. Make sure all the boring details of multifactor authentication and password managers are worked out so that your personal and professional details are safe.

Next, if you become the subject of a politicized investigation—say, from Jim Jordan or one of his copycats around the world—don’t simply comply in hopes that it will go away. Push back. Make them subpoena you. Release your correspondence with them. Demand the transcript be made immediately public or demand a public hearing. Don’t let them operate in the shadows and punish you with process or declare you guilty simply by announcing an investigation. Challenge the premise—and challenge it robustly.

In addition to recommitting to our work, we need to defend it. There are two lessons to learn there.

The first lesson is about strategic, modern, compelling communications. Gone are the days of the ‘spray and pray’ press release. So are the days of considering a mainstream newspaper or TV feature as the pinnacle of influence.

That is what DHS counted on—and what failed it.

If you’re hit with a similar campaign, while you are trying to land the best reporter for your exclusive—or worse, waiting for the storm to blow over and hunkering down, saying nothing—your adversaries will have already filmed and repackaged a thousand media spots and reaction videos and comments. That content will drive more content. You’ll never catch up. Renee DiResta, another researcher who has been targeted by these mendacious lies, likes to say “if you make it trend, you make it true.”

We need to communicate proactively. Particularly in the age of ubiquitous, accessible AI, we can’t wait for a narrative to hit mainstream news or critical mass on social media to get the facts out. Publishing the truth early and often—and priming the LLM answer engines with it, the same way our adversaries are doing—gives us a better chance of undermining falsehoods.

But we can’t just put the truth out and hope for the best. It has to be the truth, well told. When we communicate, we need to eschew the dry and the technical, and communicate like Aunt Sally and Uncle Bob are listening. How would we explain our work to them—and why should they care?

We should also seriously consider if we’re truly the best messenger for our work. To many, we are elite and out of touch. Are there local content creators, community leaders, or independent outlets that might have more credibility with the audience we’re trying to reach? Are we on the right platforms to reach them?

This requires some experimentation. It will lead to failures. But our adversaries have been figuring out what works through trial and error for decades. We should let ourselves do the same.The last, and arguably most important lesson, is about solidarity. We need to focus on the big picture. We need to put aside differences we may have with each other and come together in support of something we all take for granted: our belief in democracy. Now is not the time to debate the perfect definition of disinformation, or to harbor bad blood because five years ago another organization won a grant that you wish you had been awarded. We need to recognize we are all on the same team, and all here to lift each other up.

One of the worst things about my experience has been how isolated I sometimes felt from this community. [...] But we know better than others that if there’s one thing the autocrats of the world are good at, it’s weaponizing division. Let’s not give them any to use against the counter-disinformation and fact checking community. Let’s speak with one voice and defend those who are being attacked. Let’s loudly and clearly and proactively explain who we are and what we are about. And let’s not just say it, let’s show it. Let’s coordinate and cooperate with those who are targeted, even when it might be risky or uncomfortable. We are much stronger together than we are when standing alone.

[...]

So send the tweet.

Use the disfavored word.

Read a banned book.

Publish the paper.

Speak out on behalf of a colleague.

Expose the liars and megalomaniacs profiting from online harms and disinformation for exactly who they are.

Keep on fighting.

EARLY IN the COVID-19 pandemic, I started getting questions from reporters who wanted to know why Russia was claiming biological weapons were being developed at US-funded laboratories in Ukraine.1 It was simple, I told them; Russia couldn’t resist an opportunity to cast doubt on the origins of the coronavirus, especially when it could potentially undermine Western support for Kyiv or make the United States look bad.

Those false and misleading claims, which were peddled as early as 2009, surged after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and again in 2024. And last week, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard amplified them again, declassifying documents that she said included “never before seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past US government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine.”

As RFERL reported:

“The unusual move...came just days before [Gabbard’s] departure as DNI, which oversees an intergovernmental office set up to coordinate information sharing among the sprawling US intelligence community. It wasn’t immediately clear why Gabbard was releasing the information. Nor was it clear that it contained anything new or revelatory.”

In a statement that looks like a high schooler wrote it, Gabbard uses classic disinformation tropes, claiming she has blown the lid on a coverup and has been wrongly accused of furthering adversarial narratives:

“The information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these US funded biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America.”2

What the documents actually show is quite different: a mostly-redacted briefing on Russian disinformation regarding a US-funded biolab in Ukraine, and a list of US-funded labs, partners, and funding levels in the country that was far from secret to begin with.

Here are the facts: the United States has openly funded biolabs around the world for decades. The government never denied it. The program, called the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, was never secret—Congress approved it. These labs aren’t developing biological weapons, they exist “to prevent, detect, and prepare for outbreaks caused by biothreat pathogens.” And yes, as the DNI points out, labs in Ukraine “may be at risk of compromise due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war” Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine,3 but that’s because most scientific and defense research is vulnerable to an entirely unscrupulous army undertaking a war of aggression designed to inflict as much suffering as possible, with no regard for downstream effects (see Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and its long pattern of threatening nuclear safety and security during the war)!

If Tulsi is worried about this lab, the best thing for her to do would be to work to end Russia’s war. You know, the one President Trump said he’d end on Day One of his second term.

Waving around “receipts” like these documents is in and of itself a time-tested disinformation tactic. Purveyors of bullshit know that most people don’t read past wild headlines, and when they do, they aren’t able to make heads or tails of the underlying source material. (See: the fever dream of falsehoods that is so-called Twitter Files.) They think, “if it’s got a U.S. Government seal on it, it must be trustworthy,” even when the source material says the opposite of what is being asserted.

It’s extraordinarily disturbing that the DNI would engage in this sort of conspiracy baiting and frustrating that Ukraine continues to be a favorite topic for both Russian disinformers and those closer to home. Beyond the continued implications of Tulsi’s lies for Kyiv, I’m most worried about what these actions might mean for the upcoming midterm elections. We’ve seen this administration declassify documents for political gain before: Tulsi declassified documents that she claimed proved the Russia investigation was a “hoax,” along with others she hoped would help the President in his efforts to get his first impeachment “expunged.”

Imagine, for a second, it’s October. What might happen if the next DNI declassifies intelligence assessments about an adversary’s attempted incursions into voting systems? Maybe that adversary is China or Iran, Trump’s favorite bogeymen, which his supporters are primed to hate. Even if the declassified documents only describe ongoing, thwarted interference attempts, or assess with low confidence that an incursion is possible or likely, the administration could wave this intel around to inspire distrust in our democratic infrastructure, or more chillingly, attempt to make changes to the electoral process on the basis of what it says are “urgent threats.”

If confirmed as the new DNI, Jay Clayton—who has been a yes man for Trump and raised questions about the sanctity of elections processes—could continue in Gabbard’s footsteps. There’s not much for ordinary citizens to do about this problem right now, other than be vigilant and seek news and analysis from a range of sources.

One thing is certain: In a world where the nation’s top intelligence official is declassifying documents to win at shitposting, Americans should feel confident in rejecting the lies the Trump Administration tells us—and worried about what that means for our nation’s safety and security. 🧭

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One of the most pervasive myths about online abuse is that it’s “just mean words” that shouldn’t have an effect on us as we move about the world.

My answer to anyone who believes that is to walk a mile in my stilettos and see how you fare.

When your children are threatened, is it “just mean words?” When your likeness is inserted into deepfake sexual abuse material for your neighbors, coworkers, and peers to see, would you be able to act like nothing’s happened? When a stranger approaches you to ask for directions and your entire body tenses in anticipation of what might be coming, did those words stay online?

They’re not. You can’t. They don’t. And anyone who believes otherwise is ignorant to the realities of the pervasive, normalized online harms that women and girls deal with every day.

A new film argues that the harms women face through social media and artificial intelligence are colliding with a backsliding women’s rights environment in an attempt to control and silence half the population. MISS REPRESENTATION: RISE UP, directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, is the follow up to the acclaimed MISS REPRESENTATION, which examined how mainstream media systematically distorts and diminishes women’s power over a decade ago. MISS REPRESENTATION: RISE UP turns the same critical lens on social media and AI, wrenchingly encapsulating the reality of being a woman or girl online today.

The film premiered at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival this weekend, and I was thrilled to attend and participate in a talkback panel after the screening. I sat for an interview for the film back in 2024, and was touched that the production team felt my insights and the story of what I went through at the hands of the far right and Fox News were worth including. But the film’s core isn’t archival footage or a parade of experts; it’s the stories of young women making change in their schools, running for office, and crafting policy to protect themselves and others from the harms they’ve experienced.

My mom came to the premiere, and though she’s read my books and watched me go through serious, widespread abuse, the film shocked her. She thinks the film should be shown in high schools across the country. I’m hoping it gets wide distribution on a streaming service. Following the journeys of young women who don’t know a life without the toxicity they face every day on social media will help actualize the offline harm of online violence for the many, many people who still think the problem is thin-skinned women who can’t take a few mean words.

After the talkback panel, which was moderated by MS Now’s Stephanie Ruhle and included Siebel Newsom, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dr. Safiya Noble, Jim Steyer, and me, I left feeling empowered. My work is often lonely, but once in a while I get the privilege of standing shoulder to shoulder with people who don’t just SEE what I study, they KNOW it in their bones. They have taken adversity and transmuted it into change. They are dedicated to supporting and platforming each other.

They are the movement builders. The connectors. The mothers.

Amid so much bad news and continued adversity, they are what gives me hope.

—

Siebel Newsom and her team at The Representation Project are building on the lessons in the film to provide resources to those experiencing harassment, exploitation, or abuse online, and to give voice to their stories. You can organize a screening, share your experience, get informed, and get help at missrepresentationriseup.org.

With apologies for being absent from your inbox for a bit, it’s been a really busy few weeks. My son had a birthday—parents know how all consuming birthdays can be for small kids, with the classroom celebration and the party for friends and marking the occasion at home…what a vortex!—I started teaching my regular summer course on “Disinformation and Influence in the Digital Age” at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, and I’m working toward meeting a very big deadline that’s occupying most of my brain power. I promise I’ll be back to a more regular schedule soon!

In the meantime: do you have questions about AI and how (if at all?) to use it responsibly? I’m preparing a big post on AI, so leave your questions in the comments!