The Future of Truth is Local

A BRITISH FRIEND visited the U.S. recently; when he told a cab driver he lived in London, the man offered his condolences on “what happened to the city.” He believed it was engulfed in crime. The cabbie, it seemed, had been one of millions of social media users to see online disinformation—intentionally false or misleading posts—targeting London and the United Kingdom over the past two years. The users behind these posts tap into people’s real grievances, but not with the intention of solving them; their goal is monetary or political gain.

Research commissioned by London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan shows that since 2024, narratives claiming London is “in decline” have increased at least 150 percent, while migration-related narratives have increased 300 percent. Far from being authentic discourse from the UK about its capital, many users peddling anti-London narratives are unlikely to have ever set foot in the city. The Mayor’s report notes that pro-Russia, pro-China, and pro-MAGA actors have promoted or amplified this divisive content. Last week, a BBC Panorama investigation interviewed the profit-motivated users as far away as Sri Lanka and Vietnam who have shared “anti-immigration AI-generated posts about the UK” to audiences in the millions.

I’ve studied disinformation for most of my career, and even been involved in U.S. government efforts to combat it at the federal level. But the increase in AI-powered falsehoods and our increasingly insular internet have led me to reassess the antidote to this illness. While national-level governments must regulate Big Tech, addressing the economic, societal, and democratic impacts of social media, it is local and city governments, experiencing the first-order effects of disinformation, that should lead the charge to build societal resilience to online manipulation.

The online disinformation playbook has been around for two decades. Moscow used it in Estonia to exacerbate tensions between ethnic Russians and Estonians in 2007; it deployed the same tactics across Central and Eastern Europe for the intervening decade before famously unleashing them in the US ahead of the 2016 election and in the UK during the Brexit referendum. The themes in those campaigns would be familiar to audiences today; in 2016, Russia’s Internet Research Agency purchased ads served to UK and US audiences that contained anti-Muslim commentary from a page called “Stop All Invaders.”

The West’s introduction to this challenge was through the lens of nation-state-level information competition, so its response was nationalised and securitised, focussed on exposing adversarial campaigns that had national security implications. Together with poor communications from governments, this top-down approach has left government campaigns to combat disinformation vulnerable to accusations of censorship, even if such claims have little to do with reality. Further, too little effort and funds have been expended in empowering people to navigate an increasingly complex information environment, a generational investment that would arm them with the skills to identify manipulative tactics no matter what the medium is or which party controls the government.

Throughout my research, I’ve seen that these sorts of programs—grounded in community and aware of local issues—are the most successful. Librarians teaching information literacy. Local not-for-profits showing grandparents how to FaceTime their grandkids and avoid falling for scams. Comedians putting on free shows in their hometowns that both educate about online influence and entertain. Events like these help people understand their information environment. When local officials get involved and neighbors can discuss the issues facing their communities face to face, they also build trust in institutions and strengthen the social fabric.

(If you like this, you’ll love HOW TO LOSE THE INFORMATION WAR! 👇 )

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The rise of generative AI makes investing in local approaches to countering disinformation all the more urgent. Large language models and image generators have rendered it trivial for any huckster on the internet to develop bespoke messages and accompanying media tailored to vulnerable audiences. Meanwhile, our once-ubiquitous social media platforms are disintegrating and we’re self-selecting into increasingly insular communities. We need the ground truth that only face-to-face contact can provide.

So at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit in April, when Sadiq Khan highlighted the challenges facing his city as a result of online lies, I was glad to hear a local leader talking about addressing the challenge. He called on tech companies to do their part to stop incentivizing the “division dividend,” and promised his team would be “expos[ing] the people pushing lies about London and debunk[ing] the dangerous lies they’re spreading.” London, he told the audience, would be the canary in the coal mine for other cities around the world targeted by viral falsehoods.

But I think Khan and his city should go further. If he takes the challenge seriously, London could also be the first city with a dedicated resilience-building program, too. The Mayor should evolve his one-off research on London disinformation into a full-time insight and analysis unit that can not only tell him what’s trending, but clue him in before the disinformation reaches a fever pitch as it has done over the past few years. To be most effective, such insight-building should be cross-government, methodically drawing observations from disparate parts of city—and even national—government.

Using that information, his team could not only continue to craft communications campaigns to challenge false and misleading narratives, but understand which audiences in the city are more vulnerable to disinformation. Then, his office could fund community groups to offer trainings for their neighbors on how to avoid being manipulated and scammed online. These groups enjoy more trust than politicians and can mold curriculum so it’s more resonant in the local context. Moreover, the content wouldn’t be political; the same skills that keep you from signing away your life savings to someone you met in a Facebook Group are those that will help you avoid being manipulated by foreign actors. These community events have the added impact of drawing people away from their screens, out of their homes, and face-to-face with their neighbors, with a reminder that there is still kindness and humanity in the world.

Khan, along with New York’s Zohran Mamdani, Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey, and other mayors and governors like them, who are vociferously challenging falsehoods from their bully pulpits are headed down the right path. But they can take it further.

The disinformation spread about these cities is asking residents to “reject the evidence of [their] eyes and ears,” to borrow a quote from Orwell. Winning that battle is more than a he-said-she-said, more than strategically-deployed memes.

It’s about getting people back into their communities—and empowering them to be the first line of defense against online manipulation. 🧭

Paid supporters get access to my brand-new 10-Day Online Safety Tune-Up based on the tactics and tools I used to hold my digital ground against MAGA trolls and Russian hackers. Early reviews called it “invaluable” and “life-saving.” Become a paid supporter and get yours today!

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One of the stranger features of the last four years of my life is that the conspiracy theories about me are so numerous I’ve forgotten some of them. Strangers online purport to know my secrets. They falsely claim I attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding (no), that I was arrested by a Special Forces team outside of a defunct bar (no), that I was a “clandestine operative in Eastern Europe” (no).

This week, while trawling the State Department’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Archives for a research project, I was reminded of another conspiracy theory about me that burned short and bright in 2024: people believed that while I was getting a resource-poor non-profit up and running and mothering a two-year-old, I was somehow responsible for or involved in the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov. They believed this so fervently they submitted at least 23 pages of FOIA requests—totaling at least six dozen1— to the State Department seeking my (nonexistent) communications with the Department about Durov or to the French Embassy.

This episode, despite its absurdity, highlights something much more serious: the many ways that democracy’s openness is weaponized to punish enemies and undermine the basic functions of government.

What is the Freedom of Information Act?

Before we get into the meat of this saga, a quick primer on FOIA.

The Freedom of Information Act is a federal law enacted in 1967 and strengthened after the Watergate scandal that gives anyone the right to request access to records held by executive branch agencies of the U.S. government (the courts and Congress are exempted from the Act). Agencies are supposed to disclose requested records unless those records fall into one of nine narrow exemptions for things like national security, law enforcement, trade secrets, or clearly unwarranted invasions of personal privacy. Though all administrations work these exceptions to avoid embarrassing or scandalous disclosures, FOIA continues to be a workhorse of democratic accountability that watchdogs, researchers, and regular citizens use to understand or expose government decisionmaking.2

FOIA is how we learned about the CIA’s post‑9/11 torture program, government surveillance of Black Lives Matter organizers, and emails showing how officials in Flint handled the city’s water crisis.

A Study in Administrative Burdens

FOIA, for all its nobility, is also a system that can be gamed. Increasingly, bad‑faith actors are learning to weaponize the very transparency rules meant to keep the public “in the know.”

Over the past few years, we’ve seen powerful, often well-moneyed interests organizing their supporters to use the FOIA system to impose administrative burdens. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, for example, The Washington Post reported that local election administrators had been inundated with state-level public records requests:

In nearly two dozen states and scores of counties, election officials are fielding what many describe as an unprecedented wave of public records requests in the final weeks of summer, one they say may be intended to hinder their work and weaken an already strained system. The avalanche of sometimes identically worded requests has forced some to dedicate days to the process of responding even as they scurry to finalize polling locations, mail out absentee ballots and prepare for early voting in October, officials said. [...]

The use of mass records requests by the former president’s supporters effectively weaponizes laws aimed at promoting principles of a democratic system — that the government should be transparent and accountable. Public records requests are a key feature of that system, used by regular citizens, journalists and others. In interviews, officials emphasized that they are trying to follow the law and fulfill the requests, but they also believe the system is being abused.

This is an administrative burden, one of a few key tools that autocrats and their supporters use to keep their adversaries down and out. If autocrats can’t sue you, throw you in jail, or frighten you into abandoning your work, they bury you in paperwork, forcing you to invest limited resources in dealing with it. The right-wing ecosystem has used it against the government, but it can also be used against other public institutions.

In the field of disinformation research, publicly-funded institutions like universities have been targeted with frivolous and burdensome requests. I’ve heard over and over again that researchers and public organizations have had to hire extra staff to deal with them. Sometimes, the cost is too simply too great for them to bear. Institutions would sooner shut down entire lines of research inquiry and attempt to insulate themselves from such bad-faith administrative attacks than continue to bleed resources on responding to them.

The Inescapable Gravity of the Conspiracy Vortex

That brings us to the false allegations about my alleged involvement in Pavel Durov’s arrest that gave rise to dozens of State Department FOIA requests.

In the days after Durov’s arrest, a Qanon conspiracy theorist and professional election denier (who I will not identify, as I’d prefer not to drive traffic to their accounts) posted a late night rant on right-wing video platform Rumble. They then cross-posted it to their other social media accounts, including their Telegram channel, which today boasts over 40 thousand followers. The unhinged tirade repeated the core lie about me—that my job in the Biden Administration was to censor my fellow Americans (no)—and took it a few steps further. According to this conspiracy theorist, I was at the “center” of Durov’s arrest in France, and Durov was arrested because he wasn’t “silencing speech” as I allegedly wanted.

(A reminder, for those that may have forgotten: the United States had nothing to do with Pavel Durov’s arrest, which occurred in France and was conducted by French authorities, and the charges against him were not about misinformation, speech, or “censorship.” The French Government indicted Durov “on multiple charges including spreading child abuse images”—you know, that thing Qanon claims to care about!—“[and] drug trafficking” and cited Telegram’s “almost total failure to respond to judicial requests” as it was investigating crimes on the platform.)

The conspiracy theorist then encouraged their followers to send FOIA requests to the State Department that requested my communications about Telegram, Pavel Durov, or with the French Government. This is called “brigading:” coordinated, pre-planned, mass online activity that often gives the guise of grassroots support or dissent about a given topic. The influencer guaranteed their followers that I was behind Durov’s arrest, and that they would be rewarded with troves of my communications if they simply used their rights (and a little help from ChatGPT or Grok) to request them.

And request them they did. Beginning August 25, the conspiracy theorist’s followers sent dozens of similar requests to the State Department. It’s one of the cleanest examples I have that people are willing to take real-world action based on online lies about me.

Needless to say, they didn’t uncover evidence of collusion. They just forced some poor civil servants in the State Department FOIA office to waste their time sending dozens of replies stating no such records existed. They were guaranteed a treasure trove. When they received a goose egg, I doubt they noticed the crack in the mirror of illusion that had captivated them for so long. It’s more likely they interpreted the lack of records as yet another conspiracy, yet more evidence of my alleged crimes. When you’re convinced that everyone is lying to you, the gravity of the conspiracy vortex is practically inescapable.

The saddest part of the story is that though these individuals set out attempting to inflict harm on me, all they did was waste resources: their time, the government’s, and the taxpayer dollars that funded this escapade. This is part of a broader pattern. It wasn’t just local election officials or the State Department slammed with such requests. The Columbia Journalism Review reports that automated systems funded by right-wing money have lead federal FOIA requests to “nearly double” in the past five years. “In that same time period, the number of FOIA officers at the federal level hasn’t budged.”

Defector’s Diana Moskowitz argued:

Faithful mimicry should not to be confused with actual honesty. People who regularly work with public records understand why we have them—because of public pressure on institutions for transparency—and how gleefully those in power (aka state legislators) are about seizing excuses to take that right away. [...] Requesting a large and unwieldy...

...or, say, nonexistent!...

...data set from a local clerk for the 50th time does nothing to address that. What these requestors don’t seem to realize, or perhaps care about, is that they are not only making the lives of election workers much more difficult, but the most likely outcome of their demands is this: Calls for new laws limiting public records requests, which would not benefit the public in the least.

FOIA and other public records laws are critical to citizens’ ability to hold the government to account. I’m glad they exist. (Heck, I’m even glad that my DHS emails have been released under FOIA, because if the requestors actually read them, maybe they would finally realize they were taken in by lies!3 A girl can dream.) I struggle to identify ways public records could even be amended that wouldn’t block or slow down legitimate requests.

That leaves me where I often end up when dealing with issues of truth and trust in modern democracies: building resilience to bullshit. For dozens of strangers to be so convinced, based on one charlatan’s late-night Rumble outburst, that I was involved in another sovereign nation’s arrest of a tech CEO, they had to be pretty far down the rabbit hole. That doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of years of feeling disenfranchised, followed by years of powerful or amoral people capitalizing on that disenfranchisement for power and for profit. (The conspiracy theorist who started this saga has multiple paywalled feeds for her subscribers, of course.) We need to help people avoid the mendacious manipulation that is a feature of the 21st century internet—and, when people who safeguard the truth return to government, they’ll need to work hard to earn all Americans’ trust.

It’s not a satisfying or clean answer, I know, but it’s one that endures. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1820 (a quotation I’ve cited in many briefings and papers over the last 10 years):

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. 

Perhaps foolishly, I still agree. It’s part of why this newsletter exists—to help inform your discretion in an increasingly complex, polluted internet. And until we’re all retrofitted with AI-powered chips in our brains, I think it’s a goal worth pursuing. 🧭

This conversation part comms masterclass, part AI panic check, part foreign policy nerd-out, and part theater kid joy session. We start with a discussion of ’s new piece MAGA has effectively captured “soft power” while “Democrats are responding too often with white papers, earnest panels and fundraising emails that sound like hostage notes from a compliance department.”

From there, the conversation zooms into the atomized media ecosystem: hyper‑local pink‑slime outlets like the Michigan “Midwesterner”—which Emily discovered earlier this year— foreign adversaries exploiting the collapse of local news, and audiences that are both more sophisticated and uniquely vulnerable.

It wouldn’t be 2026 without a conversation about AI “slopaganda,” and why the bar for propaganda has fallen so low that openly fake Iranian Lego‑style war videos can rack up hundreds of millions of views and still move audiences. We talk about Anthropic’s unreleased “Mythos” model, the Trump administration’s sudden about‑face on AI safety after ripping up Biden’s AI roadmap, and why betting on “industry will sort it out” is a recipe for both national security risks and more AI sludge in our feeds.

And we talk about the juciest story of the week: Putin’s increasing paranoia about a coup or assassination attempt. We discuss why this story came out now, and the context of United States’ fraying intelligence relationships with allies.

Before we let everyone go, we pivot hard into joy: the Tony nominations. Two former theater kids compare favorite roles and notice a through‑line between what’s being rewarded on Broadway and what audiences are craving online. The shows getting love right now are weird, specific, and gloriously human, not bland IP recycling machines. That feels connected to a broader hunger for work that is obviously made by people, not models.

If you’re feeling lost in our toxic information environment, I hope this conversation gives you both a clearer sense of the big news moments this week, and a reminder that making room for joy is part of how we fight back.

Did you enjoy this conversation? Let us know in the comments and we’ll bring you more national security, tech, and theater commentary! 🧭

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Elsewhere…

• Have you been tuning into The Illegals, the new podcast from The Mayday Network I’ve joined that is rewatching The Americans episode by episode? I’ve been having so much fun diving deep into one of my favorite shows, dunking on Matthew Rhys’s wigs, and discussing the political context that makes this series so perfect. Watch the latest episode here.

• Are you in New York? Next month I’m headed to the Tribeca Film Festival, where I’ll be at the world premiere of Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s new documentary Miss Representation: Rise Up, which examines” the rising backlash against women’s progress and the hostile landscape of technology designed to harass and, ultimately, silence women.” My story is featured in the film. After the June 7 screening, I’ll join a talkback panel that includes Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dr. Safiya Noble, and Jim Steyers. Tickets can be purchased here.

The first time I was the target of serious online harassment, I didn’t see it at first—I felt it. I was in a doctor’s office waiting room when I noticed my phone getting hot in my pocket. When I pulled it out, my lock screen was filled with Twitter notifications about misogynist comments (RIP phone battery, RIP Twitter).

At the time, my public profile wasn’t huge; my first book had just come out and I had 10,000 or so followers, but I was being targeted by right-wing accounts that had hundreds of thousands. They were saying insane things about me. They claimed I was a psyop (I guess I have that in common with Taylor Swift?), or that I was transgender (a common line of attack against outspoken women). But most of it was just run-of-the-mill women-hating: criticizing my appearance, requesting sexual favors, instructing me to make the unwashed, anonymous, male masses a sandwich. I fought back, which made them angrier.

It was a formative experience for me, driving my interest in quantifying what abuse looked like and qualifying its impact. I ran a study for the Wilson Center and found that over 336,000 pieces of abusive content were targeted at just 13 women running for office during the 2020 election cycle. Women of intersectional backgrounds—who happened to be gay, or Black, or Latina, or another identity—faced more, and worse abuse. I’ll never forget some of the ways our focus group participants described what they had been through. They told us things like: “you don’t feel safe to continue speaking, so you don’t speak.”

Women were self-censoring because men couldn’t restrain themselves from expressing every vile thought they had directly to the women they were about; we actually confirmed that men preferred to yell at their targets rather than just about them. Platforms were failing women, too—their enforcement of their own terms of service was spotty at best and non-existant at worst.

From then on, I became an advocate for targets of online abuse. I didn’t want others to deal with what I had experienced and studied. I wrote another book, How to Be a Woman Online. I taught workshops on online safety for women as far flung as Belarus and Mexico.

I dealt with a second, much worse round of on- and offline abuse that is following me even today. But when anonymous trolls on message boards were trying to hack my devices, when they were threatening me, when they were discussing how to cause me physical harm, a security consultant I worked with told me: if you didn’t have such a good security posture, this would have been much worse.

He was right: I’ve spent most of my career shoring up my digital footprint. I’ve been targeted by Russian hackers, MAGA trolls, cyberstalkers, and creators of deepfake nudes, and traveled and lived in places where state surveillance is the norm.

I had already dedicated a lot of my career to helping women hold their digital ground, but having put the skills I’ve developed through the ringer, I knew at that moment I would always take great joy in sharing them with others.

Unfortunately, I encounter people in every corner of the world who think that basic cybersecurity precautions “aren’t for them.” They think because they’re just a normal person, with a normal job, hackers and scammers aren’t trying to access their information, steal their identities, or worse—discourage them from participating in public life. That’s not true.

It’s also not true that you need a certification in cybersecurity to be measurably safer online. That’s where the 10-Day Online Safety Tune-Up comes in. Over the next ten days, you will take concrete steps to deepen your digital defenses, so that if the worst happens, you won’t be left wondering what to do. You’ll be safe in the knowledge that you took proactive steps to blunt the impact of harmful digital campaigns with The Wayfinder. 🧭

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The first time I learned about the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine—a library of over one trillion snapshots of webpages since the earliest days of the net—was in my high school AP US Government class. It was the early 2000s, and Mr. Fenster, our teacher, was showing us how to access a slice of history. Though I’ve long forgotten the exact website we were looking at—an early version of nytimes.com, maybe?—I remember being bemused at how the internet used to look.

Today, I rely on the Internet Archive for my research. I have a Wayback Machine sticker on my laptop. The Archive has helped me understand the impact malicious lies might have on my safety and allowed me to track changing narratives from both state-backed actors and independent grifters. It has tried to equalize access to information.

But today, the Internet Archive’s—and by extension, the world’s—access to 23 major news sites is under threat. It’s not because they are worried about paywall hopping. Their decision is motivated by something much dumber: the AI industry’s insatiable appetite for information.

Buckle up, friends—generative AI isn’t just hallucinating “facts” and creating deep fakes anymore. Now, it’s directly undermining the historical record.

What is the Internet Archive?

The Internet Archive is best known for the Wayback Machine, which allows anyone to take a snapshot of what a webpage looked like at a given time, preserving that moment for the future. If a news outlet issues a correction or a politician makes a surreptitious edit to their website, the Archive provides a definitive record of a website at a specific moment, so long as someone—or an automated crawler—archives it.

The Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, says his goal in founding the Archive in 1996 was “to be a record of what happened so that people can’t rewrite history.” That goal has become a pressing need under the second Trump Administration, which has worked to suppress inconvenient facts and censor information it doesn’t like.

Less well known are the Archive’s libraries of 2 million books and 3 million hours of television, including an archive of state-run propaganda from the likes of Russia...and corporate propaganda from the likes of Fox News. The latter helped me understand the extent to which Fox had lied about me in 2022-2023. Since I don’t watch much TV, let alone keep Fox on all day and night, I needed a way to understand how often Fox had talked about me. The Archive provided it. By my accounting, I was among the top 20 Democrats that Fox discussed, even months after I left government service.

That’s a personal example, but the professional list is long and far-reaching. I’ve used the Archive to access content that has been taken down. Kat Tenbarge writes, “I’ve used the Wayback Machine to visit archived webpages from more than a decade ago, some of which helped corroborate serious allegations. I use the Wayback Machine regularly to figure out how many followers someone had at a given time, to resurface since-deleted material, and to find context for historical posts.”

In my research, I regularly Archive public interest links myself in order to preserve access to them and create a historical record. I’ve been burned too many times by dead links in other people’s work, and that’s not their fault; Kahle points out that the life of the average webpage is only 100 days.

Why Are News Sites Blocking the Wayback Machine’s Crawlers?

According to reporting from WIRED, it’s not the Internet Archive itself that has led 23 news websites to block the Archive’s crawlers. It’s AI:

USA Today Co. spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton emphasized that “this effort is not about specifically blocking the Internet Archive” but instead part of the company’s broader efforts to block all scraping bots. Robert Hahn, the Guardian’s director of business affairs and licensing, says that it has been in conversation with the Archive over “concerns over potential misuse by AI companies of content sets crawled for preservation purposes.”

In plain English, there are two worries at play here:

1. AI models need new data to improve, and they’re using web crawlers not dissimilar to the Archive’s to hoover up that data. The Archive’s web crawler is collateral damage.

2. News organizations (rightfully) want to be compensated if their work is used to train AI models. Instead of (or sometimes, in addition to) concluding agreements with those organizations, AI companies may be scraping the Archive’s data. News organizations are (again, rightfully) angry.

While the Internet Archive recently told WIRED it is “in conversation” with the New York Times and other outlets about a resolution, those outlets have been issuing mealymouthed comments to the press that appear to be the PR equivalent of “it’s not you, it’s me.” The Archive isn’t the problem, they’ve said, it’s those bad AI companies! Now, I’m not the most technical person, but I imagine it would be relatively easy for news organizations to whitelist the Archive’s crawlers while blocking the malicious ones from scraping their sites. Instead, they’re choosing the nuclear option at a time when the Archive’s work couldn’t be more important. These organizations are also shooting themselves in the foot. Even as USA Today Co announced it would be blocking Archive crawlers, its journalists relied on the service for a recent investigation on ICE immigration data.

As journalists organizing to support the Archive wrote:

In previous generations, journalists would turn to the physical archives of a local newspaper or of a local public library to access historical reporting and follow the threads of the present back into history. With many newspapers closed, and no clear path for local public libraries to preserve digital-only reporting, the work of safeguarding journalism’s record increasingly falls to the Internet Archive.

What You Can Do

I assume you are as incensed about these attacks on the Internet Archive as you would be if you learned your local library couldn’t acquire books anymore. That’s essentially what’s happening here—along with the undermining of current and future journalism, accountability, the historical record, and the truth.

But you can push back:

1. Archive stuff. I’m going to require that my graduate students archive sources for their papers, and as a rule, I do my best to archive sources I use in my work or shady stuff I see online. You can do the same. Simply add the url to the box on the right hand side of web.archive.org.

2. Donate. The Internet Archive is a non-profit. They’re being attacked by extremely powerful forces. Need I say more?

What’s your earliest memory of the Wayback Machine? What do you use the Internet Archive for? Let’s make the comments a love fest for an OG internet gem. 🧭

While at the Summit, I ran an online safety workshop. One participant called it “truly invaluable” and another said the content I presented was “saving lives.”

You can have access to this life-saving advice, too! Paid supporters of The Wayfinder will receive my 10-Day Online Safety Tuneup—a toolkit based on my Cambridge workshop—as a perk before the month is out. (All my posts remain free for everyone to access; this is a thank you to those who make that possible.)

If you haven’t become a paid supporter yet, now’s a great time to do so. The Online Safety Tuneup will help you do your digital spring cleaning a little bit each day, but I promise it will be much more pleasant than cleaning your patio furniture.

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Is Iran winning the propaganda war? — a new piece in The Nerve

After the Summit, I got to meet with the inimitable in London. I’ve admired Carole—who broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal, who has long reported on the “right-wing fake news ecosystem,” who coined the term “Broligarchy”—forever.

Last September, Cadwalladr and four colleagues formerly of the Observer (for Americans: the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper) founded The Nerve after the Observer was sold to Tortoise Media. (Read her account of the end of that journalistic era.) They launched the site—which covers politics, culture, and tech—with their redundancy payouts.

Sarah Donaldson, who leads the publication, told the Press Gazette that “the name The Nerve had been chosen because:

we realised nerve is the essential quality needed in our increasingly turbulent world. Too many people in positions of power are losing nerve, and the people we most admire have it in spades. We want to channel that kind of courage into a new publication. As our lives become more and more dominated by AI and algorithms we love that the name feels human and captures the idea of connecting people.

Amen. Nerve has certainly fueled the last four years of my life, so I was honored when Carole asked me to write about those crazy AI-generated Iranian Lego propaganda videos. Is Iran winning the propaganda war? I think so.

They’re crass, they’re childish, and they’re beating Trump at his own game. Iran is winning the information war, and MAGA only has itself to thank...The Trump administration has governed by and for trolls. Now Trump and company are discovering that their tactics are replicable on the increasingly lawless internet they’ve championed, particularly when they resonate with a pissed-off public.

Read the rest of the piece here, give The Nerve a follow on your social media of choice, and sign up for their twice-weekly newsletter. Their content, like mine, is free to access, so support it if you find it valuable.

Finally, send me your questions for another edition of Ask Nina, your digital advice column! Do you have an aunt or uncle who has fallen into an online vortex? Have an online safety question? I can help you (or a ‘friend’ 😉) find their way through this complex information environment. Don’t be shy! Submit here.

Happy spring! I am traveling to the Cambridge Disinformation Summit this week, so am bringing you a different sort of post, inspired by ’s Slow Sunday Scroll. In that weekly ritual, Emma deposits in your inbox a deliciously long list of links on a wide variety of subjects.

My remit will be narrower and more occasional: every so often (usually when I’m traveling or occupied with other deadlines), I’ll send a short roundup of recs to help you find your way through our polluted information environment.

Hungary Heads to the Polls

writes for The Atlantic that Hungary’s ongoing presidential contest—the first in which 16-year-incumbent Prime Minister Victor Orban faces a real challenge—“may be the world’s first post-reality campaign.” (Gift link 🎁 )

Backed by Russian propagandists, the European far right, and now the Trump administration, […] the party is directing a small fortune’s worth of posters and social-media videos toward a different goal: convincing Hungarians to fear sabotage, thievery, or even a military attack from…Ukraine.

The campaign is not subtle. In Budapest last week, Orbán’s face was almost nowhere to be seen. But posters featuring Zelensky were ubiquitous. Sometimes the Ukrainian president is seen glowering alongside the slogan “Don’t let Zelensky have the last laugh.” Sometimes Zelensky appears with [opposition leader Péter] Magyar and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European commission, along with the slogan “They are the risk. Fidesz is the safe choice.”

Now, that narrative seems to have jumped from the screen to “real life” in a false flag campaign at the Serbo-Hungarian border: Serbia’s pro-Russian President Aleksandar Vučić announced over the weekend that two backpacks allegedly containing explosives were found near a pipeline that moves Russian gas into Hungary.

We’ve seen this movie before; recall that Russia attempted to create the justification for its unprovoked war of choice in Ukraine by staging false flag attacks. And where the U.S. might have called these shenanigans out in the past, under Trump 2.0 high-level officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, and Trump himself have endorsed and are even campaigning for Orban.

Hungary votes on Sunday.

Iran Masters Slopaganda

If you’ve escaped watching Iran’s AI-generated, Lego-animation slopaganda music videos, congratulations, you have a far healthier information diet than most of the world. The rest of us have been watching plastic effigies of American leaders committing crimes in time to almost-catchy AI-generated music. Welcome to slopaganda, the latest front in the online information war.

Kyle Chayka of The New Yorker spoke to the team behind Explosive News, the YouTube channel that produces the videos: (Link 🔗)

When pressed by a fact checker about ties to the regime, [a spokesperson] said, coyly, “Is there any way to prove that you are not connected to Jennifer Lawrence?!” He described Explosive News as a “student-led media team with a background in social activism,” and said that the individuals behind it wished to remain anonymous out of fear that their viral success might make them targets in the war campaign. He added, “Funny twist: some of our old universities . . . got bombed. Yep. Quite a ‘gift’ from Donald Trump to Iranian science and culture!”

What I find most intriguing about the Explosive News campaign isn’t the form or the content itself, it’s how we got here. Whether connected to the Iranian state or not (my money is that they’re on the payroll), Explosive News is beating the Trump Administration at its own game:

The Lego videos have succeeded, in part, because they meet the political discourse on the level to which it has already sunk. The Trump Administration has waged its own meme-based battles on its official social-media accounts with A.S.M.R. videos of deportations, white-nationalist in-jokes, and supercuts of bombings interwoven with video-game footage.

The immature humor, the polarizing rhetoric, the idea of “owning” opponents, and the clicks-at-whatever-cost strategy that Trump and allies have employed is now being mobilized against it, and it’s likely to be resonant with some of the MAGA faithful; 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the war.

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The State Department Cares about Disinformation Again, Apparently

The State Department is not happy about Iran’s shitposting. In response, “the United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s X as an ‘innovative’ tool to help do it,” The Guardian reports. (Link 🔗 )

This announcement made me want to drink heavily. Instead I had a glass of crisp Sauvignon Blanc and made this video. (Are you following me on Instagram?)

Other than the rank hypocrisy of the cable, which conveniently forgets that this administration and its allies have spent the past several years vilifying the very concept of countering disinformation, this is a big departure from how the USG and platforms have traditionaly interacted, writes Kate Klonick in Lawfare:

What makes this cable remarkable is the extent to which it represents a departure from how U.S. technology platforms have historically interacted with state power—including with the U.S. government. For decades, U.S.-based social media companies operated as something closer to institutional rivals of government control over online speech, foreign or domestic. Google famously clashed with the Chinese government over censorsing its search engine and ultimately redirected its Chinese operations to Hong Kong rather than comply with censorship demands. Facebook and Twitter both resisted Brazilian court orders to remove content and to identify users. Twitter—before its acquisition—went to court to resist government data requests, publishing regular transparency reports and fighting national security letters that came with gag orders. These companies were imperfect actors, but their general posture was to resist governments that sought to use their platforms as instruments of state messaging.

The fact that X is being named as a preferred messaging tool belies who the intended audience for the State Department’s campaign is. It’s not audiences abroad, where X is far outpaced by Meta platforms and TikTok. It’s conservative Americans, who are now the primary users and beneficiaries of that Muskian hellscape.

Did I miss something this community should read or watch? Leave it in the comments! 🧭

Welcome to The Wayfinder, your guide to our toxic information environment. I’m so glad you’re here.

This newsletter is free to read, but in an increasingly challenging time for disinformation and online harms research and writing, paid subscribers help keep this public service content available.

If you purchase a yearly or founding subscription, I’ll send you a 10 Day Privacy and Online Safety Tune Up. This tune up is designed for busy people who want to make sure they have their digital i’s dotted and t’s crossed but don’t know where to start. The toolkit will be released in April; subscribe today to get yours!

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LAST WEEK, THE UK PARLIAMENT’s Foreign Affairs Committee released a report labelling foreign disinformation “the new warfare and open liberal democracies [...] sitting ducks.”

I was honored to testify—or, as the Brits say, give evidence—before the Committee last November, focusing on Russia and China’s information operations targeting the United States, and the Trump Administration’s unilateral disarmament against the threat of foreign disinformation.

When I shared the report on social media, I was a little surprised at the contrarianism in my comments. “About time,” the armchair experts quipped. Others claimed that the Trump Administration hadn’t done as much damage to America’s ability to defend reality as I asserted, or that the report was disingenuous, imperialist garbage, because the West was responsible for plenty of foreign disinformation, too. (I have never claimed otherwise or defended the West’s use of disinformation, and have, in fact, written about how it should be excised from our toolkit entirely.)

But these comments ignore the context in which the UK Parliament’s investigation on foreign disinformation was conducted. Disinformation is easier to create and distribute than ever before, democracies are polarized and viewed as largely unresponsive to the needs of constituents, and democratically-elected leaders like Donald Trump are engaging in human rights abuses and curtailing free expression.

We’re not in 2016 anymore, and the UK Parliament’s report on disinformation is an attempt to maintain the fight for reality in a moment when we’re losing our grip on it.

Why the Report is Unique

The conversation about foreign disinformation in the United States has always been myopic, focused primarily on one actor (Russia) and one or two large platforms (Twitter and Facebook). Americans’ analysis of the problem was similarly navel-gazing. It rarely considered the effects of information operations outside of our borders; when I published How To Lose the Information War in 2020 it was one of the first contemporary examinations of disinformation in Europe and what we in the States could learn from our allies’ attempts to stop it.

That’s where the UK report begins. The Committee writes:

We were struck when looking at disinformation overseas at the familiar patterns we saw. The UK has been the victim of [Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, or FIMI] and although it is not of the scale we saw elsewhere, we nevertheless learnt how quickly malign actors could build up their adversarial networks. It led us to ask whether the excellent work being done overseas by the UK to counter FIMI was also happening at home.

The scope of this report is sweeping, covering four regions (Europe, the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and the Americas—including frequently overlooked Latin America), six actors (Russia, China, Iran, and non-state actors the Wagner group, Africa corps, and Daesh), and multiple platforms (Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, and Telegram).1

What I Told the Committee

My contributions to the investigation focused on the research I’ve led over the past two years and my own personal experience; you can see clips from my interventions above and view the written evidence I submitted here.

I walked the MPs through ASP Lead Researcher ’s work on a Russian network of more than 1,100 likely‑automated accounts, responsible for over 11 million posts in a year on Ukraine, Gaza, and the cost‑of‑living crisis in the US and UK. This narrative shaping is designed to inflame social fractures, undermine confidence in democratic and economic institutions, and move markets.

I also highlighted ’s work on Large Language Model (LLM) grooming, a term we coined in early 2025, describing how Russia has changed its operations to target LLMs, pumping out millions of articles a year to launder Kremlin narratives into AI training data. This is not yesterday’s bumbling troll farm problem; in an era of accessible generative AI, we’re dealing with industrial‑scale information warfare infecting discourse from the moment a user queries a chatbot.

Critically, I told the Committee that while adversaries like Russia have upgraded their toolkit, the United States has unilaterally disarmed. Under the Trump administration, the US government’s foreign interference response was gutted, and disinformation researchers have been maligned and harassed. “Despite increased awareness of foreign-backed online influence campaigns, the United States is more vulnerable to them today than it was a decade ago,” I wrote. “Our strategic adversaries continue to actively exploit deepening fissures in our society in order to amplify discord and polarization. Social media companies have rolled back their efforts to address disinformation on their platforms and restricted access to their data, making it difficult to hold them to account. Government and public sector responses to foreign disinformation have been derided and dismantled. Our adversaries have taken note.”

What the Committee Recommended

The report lays out a broad set of recommendations under the assumption that disinformation is a form of warfare, and that the UK has to treat it like one. In short, the Committee wants the UK government to treat foreign interference as a core national security issue with the infrastructure to match. That means public‑facing campaigns to boost citizen resilience; a statutory National Counter‑Disinformation Centre similar to efforts in Ukraine, Sweden, and France; and a real increase in funding and staffing for the FCDO’s Hybrid Threats Directorate.

It also wants the UK to double‑down on media freedom and global influence, including more long‑term funding for the BBC World Service, more cooperation with European allies, and a much tougher line on social media platforms so that algorithms are transparent and platforms have to report on disinformation the way they report on other harms. On top of that, the Committee stresses that the UK needs to apply lessons from defending democracies abroad in its own territory, especially around elections, because the same playbook that targets Eastern Europe is actively being tested in the UK in smaller, but no less dangerous, forms.

Personally, I’m glad the report highlights the need for the UK to “stand up for those countering disinformation, wherever in the world it occurs.” It’s gratifying to see an acknowledgement that journalists, researchers, civic watchdogs, and local fact‑checkers are often operating in hostile environments—even in countries that are not traditional recipients of aid, cough cough—and that we have an ally in this fight.

Why It Matters

The armchair experts who think this report is too little, too late may imagine the Committee congratulating themselves on discovering the phenomenon of disinformation, but the report does more than sound the alarm. It both holds the line and emboldens it. Foreign aid—and counter-disinformation programming more specifically—have been twisted into culture war issues by the far-right autocrats they threaten. Despite that, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee calls upon the United Kingdom to work with its allies in Europe to defend its legacy of important work in fighting for the truth, and fill the leadership, strategy, and funding vacuum the United States has left.

That may feel like the bare minimum to frustrated activists around the world. But remember: the UK’s closest ally views any fight against disinformation as an encroachment on free expression and casts efforts to educate citizens to better navigate the information environment as censorship. That view has material impacts for U.S. trading partners. During tariff negotiations in early 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer was encouraged to go easy on tech platforms in exchange for a better deal, while Brazil faced 50% tariffs after it blocked far-right video hosting site Rumble.

Beyond that, the Members of Parliament who conducted the Committee’s investigation themselves could face consequences for taking this common sense stance; the State Department has already imposed visa restrictions on foreign nationals it (falsely) alleges have “taken flagrant censorship actions against U.S. tech companies and U.S. citizens and residents when they have no authority to do so.” Jim Jordan’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has now trained its sights on foreign regulators and legislators, labeling those that are working to implement their sovereign nations’ laws as “censorship.”

And let’s not forget the long view; we’ve seen the Trump Administration obscure and erase information and resources about a range of disfavored topics, including disinformation. Preserving a snapshot of the 2026 information environment is an important contribution not only to the historical record, but to the contemporary one. Hopefully we aren’t headed toward a future where reports like this are the only ground truth available to us, but we can’t rule it out.

We’re not in the early days of this crisis anymore. Disinformation—including disinformation coming from the Trump Administration—is already changing how governments negotiate, how markets move, and how ordinary people participate in public spaces. If allies like the UK can’t sustain the fight for reality while the US walks away, the democratic playbook, now in tatters, may as well be fed to the shredder.

As I’ve told every legislature I’ve ever briefed, disinformation is not a partisan issue, but a democratic one. This report recognizes that, and these days, that’s all too rare. 🧭

Last week, Darren Beattie—a white supremacist, far-right shitposter, and Trump State Department adviser—was permanently barred from entering Brazil. He had hoped to visit with former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27 year jail sentence for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election, but apparently lied on his visa application; the Brazilian Foreign Ministry accused Beattie of “intentionally misrepresenting a material fact or committing fraud.”

Readers of this newsletter will remember Beattie. As I wrote last May, “even by the nearly nonexistent standards of the second Trump Administration, Beattie is profoundly unfit and unqualified for public service,” having given a speech at a white supremacist conference, harassed women and minorities, and propagated absurd election conspiracy theories on his extremist media outlet. But in the Trump administration, those are the qualifications that get you multiple high-level appointments; in the past year, he has served as Acting Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Acting Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs, and the President of the U.S. Institute for Peace.

More recently, he attacked Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes as “the key architect of the censorship and persecution complex directed against Bolsonaro.” Reuters reported that “Brazil’s Foreign Ministry summoned the top U.S. diplomat in Brasilia to explain the comments.” That tantrum seems to have secured him an appointment as Special Advisor for Brazil Policy at the State Department; his public first act in this role was to attempt to visit Bolsonaro, to which Brazil said: no fucking way.

As that diplomatic incident reached its dramatic conclusion, Brazilian President Lula da Silva said of Beattie: “That American guy who said he was coming here to visit Jair Bolsonaro was prohibited from visiting, and I forbade him from coming to Brazil until they release the visa for my health minister.” The Brazilian government also told leading newspaper Folha de São Paulo that they saw Beattie’s visit—which did not include meetings with any current Brazilian government officials—as election interference.

And here, dear reader, is where I get to brag: I’m in Brazil and Darren Beattie is not. Unlike Beattie, I did not lie on my visa application and have been in the country for the past week, interviewing Brazilian officials and civil society activists, trying to figure out why Brazil fights back against wannabe authoritarians like Beattie and Elon Musk, and how, against the odds, it wins.

This post isn’t meant to be a definitive answer, but the beginning of an exploration. I’m fascinated by the fact that, as one government official told me this week, Brazil has the same story as the United States—a populist president who tried to overthrow an election, a highly divided populace, tech companies that support anti-democratic forces—but, for the time being, anyway, Brazil’s story has a happy ending.

Brazil versus Musk

Before Beattie, Brazil took on a more formidable (though seemingly no less drugged out) part of the Trump universe: Elon Musk. This showdown is a case study in Brazilidade, that ‘Brazilianness’ I’m trying to pin down.

When Musk took over Twitter, he rapidly rolled back many of the investments the company had made in staff and policies that kept it in compliance with the laws of the countries where it did business. In Brazil, those laws empower the courts to order social media platforms to remove illegal content, including hate speech, racism, incitement to violence, child sexual abuse material, terrorism, and disinformation, especially when tied to election interference or coordinated harassment. When Supreme Court Justice de Moraes ordered Musk to remove content related to the January 8 insurrection in Brazil, Musk refused, bucking an earlier promise that “Twitter [w]ould follow the laws of the countries it operates in.” He neglected to pay the ensuing fines and closed the company’s Brazil office, putting it in direct contravention of Brazilian regulations that require foreign companies to have a legal representative in Brazil.

Institutions that Work

Justice de Moraes attempted to engage with Twitter—then recently rebranded X—multiple times to bring the company in line with Brazilian law. Ultimately, it seemed Musk wanted to force a ban. (One of my interviewees this week mused that Musk wanted X to be banned in Brazil so he could spin the case as a censorship prop to wave around during the height of the 2024 U.S. election campaign.) And so de Moraes banned the service in Brazil from August 30 to October 8, when Musk ultimately relented, appointing a local representative, banning accounts involved in the January 8 coup attempt, and paying fines totaling about R$28.6 million (roughly $5.2 million USD).

When speaking with Brazilians throughout this trip, I asked them if de Moraes went too far in his decision. My interviewees were far from Lula’s lapdogs; they’ve spent the past 20 years holding Brazilian executives—from Lula, to his successor Dilma Rousseff, and to, yes, Jair Bolsonaro—to account, protecting the litany of rights Brazilians are expressly afforded in their constitution. While the folks I spoke with may have small critiques about how decisions around banning X (and later conservative YouTube alternative Rumble) were carried out (many believe de Moraes and other judges working on cases related to social media should operate with more transparency, for instance) they all believe the decision was correct, and reflective of the spirit and intent of Brazil’s judiciary. It’s Brazilian institutions, most of my interviewees said, that have enabled Brazil to fight back so adeptly. Moreover, without holding Musk and X (and later, charlatans like Beattie) to account, rule of law in the country would be undermined.

It’s certainly strange for Americans to consider the implications of a truly independent judiciary at this moment in our history, as we’ve seen our country’s struggle for democracy play out in the courts. When judges make decisions that the Trump regime does not agree with, they’ve been threatened with impeachment and worse.

Brazil has seen this movie before; the country’s judiciary got its fierce independence as a direct backlash to the 1964–1985 military dictatorship. Military rulers routinely overrode Supreme Court rulings, undermined habeas corpus, and governed by decree, leaving little judicial backstop against power grabs. Fresh off that trauma, the 1988 Constitution was drafted as an explicit “never again” to authoritarianism, with clauses restoring judicial safeguards and ironclad separation of powers. Supreme Court judges in Brazil have the power of abstract constitutional review, in which they can rule on important issues without waiting for cases to be referred to them, which massively amplified its political muscle. More broadly, they enjoy lifetime tenure, salary shields, and full administrative-financial autonomy, shielding them against political revenge or budget squeezes from Congress or the executive. (The Senate can impeach justices, but the two-thirds majority impeachment requires is a steep climb for Brazil’s multi-party system.)

In short: Elon Musk and Darren Beattie’s “censorship” tantrums against Justice de Moraes are a distraction for a larger gripe. They could care less about the man, and they’re perturbed by his decisions and their implications for their income and political futures. What angers them most is a system they can’t control—one that actively defends the democracy it was set up to protect.

Looking Toward Elections... and Election Interference?

Beattie’s thwarted visit shows the MAGA elite is not done interfering with Brazilian democracy just yet. The country will hold general elections in October, and my interviewees noted that social media platforms are walking a fine line as the vote approaches. Following Musk’s example, and in response to the manufactured outrage against content moderation that has gone mainstream over the past few years, platforms are reticent to cooperate the way they have in the past. There’s also pressure from the Trump administration not to comply with foreign regulatory regimes that MAGA describes as “censorship.” That puts tech platforms in a tough spot. They want to please their right-wing overlords but don’t want to lose access to an important market for their services; Brazil represents a top five market for the many of the biggest social media platforms.

Beattie’s visa denial is a reminder to MAGA envoys—whether in Silicon Valley or Washington, DC—that Brazil isn’t a backdrop for American psychodramas. The country’s institutions and the people that lead them aren’t perfect. But when a billionaire or a shitposter-turned-diplomat (dare I say...a shitplomat?) tries to turn the country into a content farm or a coup playground, the system says no, and means it.

What’s our excuse? 🧭

This newsletter is free to read, but in an increasingly challenging time for disinformation and online harms research and writing, paid subscribers help keep this public service content available.

If you purchase a yearly or founding subscription, I’ll send you a 10 Day Privacy and Online Safety Toolkit. This tune up is designed for busy people who want to make sure they have their digital i’s dotted and t’s crossed but don’t know where to start. The toolkit will be released in April; subscribe today to get yours!

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ON MARCH 5 I SPENT a few hours making a reaction video about a Congressional hearing in which Representative Bill Huizenga namechecked me and the conspiracy theory that I was hired by the Biden Administration to censor the internet. My goal was to make a lighthearted response that mocked MAGA’s continued obsession with a four-year-old lie and informed my audience about the cruelties of this administration; I’ve been trying—through Substack, through Instagram, through Bluesky—to “reach people where they are.”

I wrote a script. I pulled the relevant footage of the hearing. I filmed myself. I took screenshots of articles I mentioned, found old videos in my archive, and edited everything together.

As of this writing, it has 788 views.

On Instagram, I’m not a mega- or even a micro-influencer. I have just under 2500 followers that I’ve been painstakingly cultivating for the past four years. My videos generally earn a respectable few thousand views, breaking five figures if I’m lucky. But 700 views after more than a week is not the payoff I expected.

A lot of online creators would probably be mouthing off about being shadowbanned. If I were a Biden-era conservative, I would call this censorship, and allege that disfavored views were being suppressed because of some sort of shadowy cabal between the administration and the platforms.

The reality is more banal. Is Meta suppressing me, personally? Probably not. Is it suppressing the topics I work on? Maybe; educating people about how disinformation works is actively bad for Meta’s bottom line, after all. Is Meta adding artificial friction between people and politics? Yes, and so are other platforms.

But the most frustrating obstacle to trying to inform people “where they are” is that what the algorithm demands is not only different on each platform; it changes regularly and opaquely within each environment. Keeping experts and journalists and influencers and policymakers guessing is baked into the social media platforms’ business models. If every piece of content were a banger, there would be no incentive to keep on creating, seeking users’—and the algorithm’s—approval.

The algorithm is our asshole boyfriend, and babe? It’s probably time to leave.

A short accounting of the ways that I, a writer, have contorted myself to please the algorithm looks something like this. I learned how to edit video. I learned basic graphic design. I have tested psuedo-ASMR voice over videos, and B-roll videos that show me “at work.” I have made montages and curated meme carousels, substanceless “connection” videos slapped over trending audio. I have tested AI platforms, asking them to write hooks (they’re almost uniformly inaccurate and incendiary), and used moving captions and split screens to maintain interest. I wrote a song parody that, years later, generated a lot of ridicule (and no, I don’t regret it). I bought stuff—tripods, mini microphones, lighting. I have dropped everything to make reaction videos, disappearing from evenings and weekends with my family to get them online.

What haven’t I done? I do not post things I don’t firmly believe or can’t back up with a source. I don’t write clickbaity headlines or hooks. I don’t say anything I wouldn’t say on the news in a video online.

Sometimes, the algorithm rewards me with the manipulative partner’s equivalent of jewelry or a nice dinner. A few thousand views, maybe even tens of thousands. Nice comments. New subscribers and followers. I feel satisfied that I’m reaching my goals of reaching people “where they are.”

More frequently, I’m left wondering what I did wrong. Why did the algorithm ghost me this time? Should I try a “get ready with me” video? A walk and talk? (Can I make those work with my unique security concerns?) Can I show people my life without putting myself at risk? Do I want to? Should I have worn more makeup? Less? Am I too formal? Inauthentic? Too old?

Is the problem just...me?

No.

If you’ve been following me for a while—or read my first book—you’ll have heard this story before, but many of you are new here, so bear with me.

In 2018, I spoke at a conference for government communicators, most of whom were representing countries in Russia’s shadow. The information they needed to get to their followers wasn’t cute trending content. It was a national security imperative. But in the wake of revelations about Russia’s influence on social media in the 2016 U.S. elections, Facebook tweaked the algorithm to boost content that was from “friends and family” or about culture and suppress content that was “political.”

This change also affected information from official government sources, and the folks at the conference were annoyed. Luckily, a representative from Facebook was also at the conference. In clicking the “follow” button, one communications professional told her, their citizens had opted in to receiving content from them, but their engagement rates were a fraction of what they had been a few months prior. Were they expected to spend money on ads to reach these followers?

Of course not, the Facebook rep said, in her Zuckerbergian benevolence. But had they thought about making a Group? With the changes in Facebook’s algorithm, Groups were where users went to have “personal” conversations, so they might have more luck reaching their followers that way.

My jaw hit the floor. Facebook was telling this European government representative they couldn’t reach their constituents unless they paid or started a new form of outreach from scratch. The platform had risen to prominence in part because people were using it to learn about and participate in politics, everywhere from the Middle East to Ukraine to the United States. Now, it was suppressing legitimate content in favor of paid ads and rage bait. If you had the resources—like Trump, for instance, who spent an estimated $70 million per month on online ads during the 2016 campaign—you could reliably reach and grow your audience. If you were the communications rep from a small European country, you needed to pay or gamble on experimenting with a new format. If you were a plebe like me, you started constantly contorting yourself and your content into new shapes to fit whatever the platform was prioritizing that month.

In psychology, this is called intermittent reinforcement—“when rewards are handed out inconsistently and occasionally.” It’s the foundation of gambling addictions and toxic relationships, whether with asshole boyfriends or asshole algorithms. One of my best friends, psychologist Dr. Alexandra Stratyner, puts it this way:

The unpredictability of gambling is mimicked in social media algorithms; because the algorithm’s patterns (including manipulation of these patterns on an ongoing basis by social media companies) are concealed, we cannot predict when our posts will be rewarded (e.g. with high viewership) and this, in turn, reinforces a belief that we must be continuously posting. This is understandable, especially when social media is an important aspect of your career, because the consequence of not continuing to engage can be substantial (e.g., loss of livelihood); the potential for what behaviorists would describe as punishment (negative consequences for a behavior, in this case, not being active on social media) is high and potentially high-stakes.

If we’re successful all the time, we get bored. When we’re only successful sometimes, we keep coming back—and platforms want us coming back. Without our content, they can’t survive.1

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Since that 2018 discussion, platforms have further incentivized creators to stay locked in through monetization. Creators get compensated for content that performs well, generating more clicks, more views, more engagement. And what performs well? It’s certainly not even-keeled, nuanced explainer videos. The most engaging content is frequently the most enraging content, meaning that the creators who were already chasing intermittent reinforcement are further motivated to shapeshift to pay their bills—and that’s before adding off-platform incentives into the mix.

In a recent viral LinkedIn post, political creator Maria Comstock detailed how she was offered $2000 per video for left-leaning content, and $36,000 for right-leaning content—a 1700% difference. “For many creators, that delta makes the decision for you,” she writes. “Brand deals aren’t “extra.” They’re rent. They’re healthcare. They’re payroll for editors. When someone offers you the equivalent of several months’ income for one deliverable, it’s not an abstract ethical debate; it’s survival math.”

The impacts of the asshole algorithm aren’t just financial. Online content creators experience suicidal ideation at a rate of nearly double that of the general U.S. population. They also report worsening burnout over time: “49% of newer creators report burnout, compared to 74% of those with eight or more years of experience.” Moreover, content creators are frequently self-employed, lacking health insurance or the support networks—from editors to researchers to assistants—that traditional media rely on to create high-quality content and protect their people.

TLDR: asshole algorithms controlled by billionaires in bed with fascists—along with moneyed political interests—are driving people to create content they may not believe so they can keep paying their bills, and it’s driving them to burnout and suicidal thoughts, while polluting our information environment along the way.

Online content creation does not represent a major form of income for me; I do it because I want to reach people and help them better navigate the internet. But even that goal drives me to intense frustration when my content doesn’t perform.

So how should anyone making content for the internet navigate a relationship with an algorithm that turns toxic?

Break Up: In late 2023, writer and Substack superstar announced she was breaking up with Instagram:

“The relationship is finally over after dragging on miserably for a while. I haven’t deleted my account for now, but I’ve handed over the keys to someone else who will post updates for me, sparingly. (I have some upcoming book announcements that will be posted, that’s practically it.) But personally, I won’t use it. I don’t have the app on my phone, I will no longer have access to DMs or find my thumb reaching for a mind-numbing scroll. I haven’t felt this free in ages.”2

My friend Dr. Stratyner calls this abstinence. It was possible for Emma because she had a significant following on another platform (namely Substack) that she cultivated before it became increasingly enshittified (also Substack). She also had help in the form of a friend or colleague who posted for her so she didn’t fully sacrifice the platform. Dr. Stratyner notes that “abstinence—either short-term or permanently—is not a viable option [for some] because social media is central to work.” As a less drastic measure, creators might…

Set boundaries: Dr. Stratyner calls this “harm reduction” which “might look like more intentional, introspective engagement online.” Creator says his “theory of staying sane producing content for these apps” is “fire and forget...I assume everything is doing terrible by default, and just don’t look. I find out about my occasional successes when my wife tells me something went viral.” This seems like the most likely approach for me in the season of life I’m in. I already turned off push notifications and app badges a long time ago; maybe now it’s time for me to turn off notifications in the app altogether. “Fire and forget” might also have the added benefit of bringing back a little more spontanaeity to my online creations, which have been almost entirely scripted and engineered since I dealt with major online abuse.

Get support: I’m lucky to have a therapist that I’ve leaned on throughout the ups and downs of my career, on and offline. That’s critical, according to Dr. Stratyner: “If your relationship to social media is getting in the way of self-care (e.g. sleep, eating, hygiene), your relationships, or other important roles (e.g., parenting, work/school performance), or if you are experiencing symptoms of, for example, depression or anxiety (in particular, suicidal thoughts), it’s time to ask for help.” Initiatives like CreatorCare aim to support content creators through the unique struggles that the asshole algorithms put them through.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. You can also reach Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741. If you are in immediate danger, call 911, or go to the nearest emergency room.

If you’re consuming content but not creating it, I hope this piece pulls back the curtain on the realities of the creator economy that may not be apparent when mindlessly scrolling your feeds. Maybe that fringey creator that the algorithm suggested to you is saying crazy things because their livelihood depends on it. Try not to share or comment out of emotion alone. Make deliberate, reasoned choices about which content you consume, support, and engage with….If you can resist the pull of the intermittent reinforcement you might get from your story or comment racking in hundreds of likes, that is. 🧭

Hi Folks—

I’ve got a short round of updates for you today, with something longer and meatier in the works for early next week. Stay tuned!

A New Subscriber Perk

First, I’m excited to announce that I’m adding a special perk for paid Wayfinder subscribers. The main purpose of this newsletter will always be to inform and educate, so all of my content remains free for everyone to access, but in an increasingly challenging time for disinformation and online harms research and writing, paid subscribers help keep this public service content available.

To thank those of you who purchase a yearly or founding subscription, I’ll be sending each of you a 10 Day Privacy and Online Safety Toolkit. This tune up is designed for busy people who want to make sure they have their digital i’s dotted and t’s crossed but don’t know where to start. In future years, I’ll provide similar toolkits—or updates to the old curriculum—for recurring subscribers. The toolkit will be released in April; subscribe today to get yours!

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A New Podcast

Second, I’m excited to announce that I will be a recurring host of The Illegals: The Americans Rewatch Podcast from The Mayday Network. Together with , , and a rotating gang of Russia experts, media and culutral commentators, and retired intel officers, we’ll be rewatching the television gold that is Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields’ 2013 award-winning series The Americans, which follows two deep cover Soviet spies in Washington DC in the 1980s. The first episode drops tomorrow, Thursday, March 14. Check out the trailer and watch along with us!

A New Project

Finally, I’m delighted to be joining the inaugural class of the McCain Institute’s American Democracy and Technology Fellowship. Sensible, bipartisan tech policy debates that are grounded in reality are all too rare in Washington these days. My project will provide pathways to policymakers who wish to mitigate online harms while protecting the robust First Amendment rights that are the foundation of American democracy. I plan to cut through the noise about approaches to technology regulation, a topic that has been deeply politicized for far too long. As Senator McCain said in 2015: “As we dither, our Nation grows more vulnerable, our privacy and security are at greater risk, and our adversaries are further emboldened.” Stay tuned for more from the fellowship here.

I’ll be back next week with more tips on navigating our polluted information environment. Till then, you can always find me on Bluesky, Instagram, and right here on Substack Notes. 🧭

Be well,
Nina

PS: As always, if you’ve got a personal question about disinformation, online safety, or digital harms, you can submit it to my advice column here!

Have you heard? MAGA is making election interference great again.

After four years of filing lawsuits, threatening, harassing, deposing, and otherwise vilifying disinformation researchers for having the temerity to study, speak about, and try to undermine information threats to democracy—and after spending 2025 dismantling the government infrastructure that detected and responded to such threats—President Trump and his allies are suddenly raising the banner of “foreign election interference” to attempt to justify their unlawful actions at home and abroad.

They hinted at it during the kidnapping and rendition of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. They used it to bolster their reasoning for attacking Iran. And they’re conveniently playing the foreign interference card as they float the idea of federalizing American elections.

The Trump Administration and its supporters haven’t had a change of heart. They aren’t suddenly concerned about election interference. They’re searching for cover, and this real national security threat provides it.

The sanctity and security of our elections used to be an issue that motivated Republicans and Democrats alike to act. By couching Trump’s foreign adventurism and domestic despotism in the language of election interference, the administration can diffuse opposition, labeling those who oppose Trump’s illegal acts as hypocritical or weak; justify extreme actions it might take in the 2026 or 2028 elections; and normalize the use of force to respond to threats foreign or domestic, real, imagined, or somewhere in between.

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MAGA Cynically Twists the Reality of Election Interference

One of the characteristics of successful disinformation campaigns most misunderstood by the public is that disinformation is rarely completely false; the best disinformation is grounded in a kernel of truth. Hot button issues that generate a lot of disagreement or strong feelings are particularly fertile ground for disinformation. Our adversaries—along with domestic actors spreading disinformation for power and profit—have long weaponized topics like immigration, race relations, and the coronavirus pandemic in their influence campaigns.

The Trump administration has applied the “kernel of truth” tenet to its cynical reclamation of election interference to justify its autocratic actions throughout 2026. Some of its claims about foreign election interference are true, but deploying them after literally dismantling the nonpartisan infrastructure that was built to address them beggars belief.

Venezuelan Interference: False

After the Trump Administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in early January, MAGA influencers and a (now former) DOJ official resurfaced old, long-disproven conspiracy theories about alleged Venezuelan attempts to rig the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.

Trump figures like Rudy Giuliani and lawyer Sidney Powell falsely claimed that voting machine vendors Dominion and Smartmatic were secretly Venezuelan companies that were founded to rig elections for the country’s former leader, Hugo Chávez.

Since then, conspiracy theorists have claimed that the companies somehow disguised themselves as American vendors and used secret programming to flip votes in the 2020 election from Trump to former President Joe Biden.

The pair both settled their lawsuits with Dominion — and Powell even admitted in a filing in federal court that “no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.” Litigation is ongoing in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuits against both Giuliani and Powell. (Democracy Docket)

Further, the U.S. intelligence community’s 2020 election assessment notes:

The Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro had an adversarial relationship with the Trump administration and we assess that Maduro had the intent, though probably not the capability, to try to influence public opinion in the US against the former President. We have no information suggesting that the current or former Venezuelan regimes were involved in attempts to compromise US election infrastructure.

Of course, the MAGA crowd believes the intelligence community is full of deep state cretins, so they likely won’t be swayed by this assessment. Given that the President himself raised broader election infrastructure conspiracy theories with a tie-in to Venezuela, and that the Trump Administration has a history of pressuring foreign leaders to make politically-motivated accusations (remember the first Trump impeachment?) and no longer seems concerned with perjury, the odds that we see this false narrative rear its head—and resonate with the MAGA movement—in Maduro’s trial are strong.

Iranian Interference: True, But Lacking Nuance

Nearly four hours before Trump announced the United States had bombed Iran at 2:36AM ET on February 28, conservative slime outlet “Just The News,” owned by John Solomon (who famously parted ways with The Hill after his conflicts of interest and distortions about Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine caused the outlet to publish a scathing’ review of his work) posted a piece situating the looming armed conflict as a natural progression from Iran’s attempts to interfere in American elections. The President posted a link to the story to Truth Social an hour before he announced the action.

Google notified me about the article when I woke up on Saturday morning, because, inexplicably, I was mentioned in it. The author alleged that I and others had “tried to undercut” the assessment that Iran had interfered in the 2020 election against Trump. I did no such thing. I simply attempted to present a nuanced picture of the multitude of informational threats the United States faced in 2020: Iran was interfering, but did not have the resources or the expertise to carry out the level of operation that Russia was known to have engaged in. At the time, I felt that threats from Iran were being emphasized while threats from Russia were being minimized because of the president’s own desire to bury news related to Russia. Over and over in my writing and media commentary, I underlined that the Iranian campaign harmed Trump; I also noted that disinformation, no matter the source, ought to concern all of us, no matter our political affiliation, because its “ultimate victim is democracy.” That’s hardly undercutting an intelligence assessment.

Before Just the News posts a follow up piece alleging I refuse to acknowledge Iranian interference, I’ll write it plainly so even they can understand: Iran has attempted to interfere in multiple U.S. elections:

• The 2020 Election Threats report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed that “Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects—though without directly promoting his rivals—undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US. This included a now-well known operation in which Iranian actors masqueraded as the Proud Boys and used public voter rolls to threaten Democrats in several states. As explains, some of the very same civil society and academic researchers who have been lambasted for the past four years were critical to attribution and public notification about that campaign:
  
  “Researchers, including a team at the Stanford Internet Observatory, quickly noted inconsistencies in some of the metadata of the email and the video. The SIO team shared the results of their analysis directly with government agencies and through a public blog. Around that same time, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI formally attributed the emails and video to an Iranian advanced persistent threat (APT) actor.”
  

• In 2022, the ODNI report found that “Iran’s influence activities reflected its intent to exploit perceived social divisions and undermine confidence in US democratic institutions” during the midterms.

Yes, Iran attempted to interfere in our elections, but bombing a girls’ elementary school and sacrificing American servicemembers’ lives is not an appropriate response.

Chinese Interference in 2020 Election: False

Most worryingly, The Washington Post reported earlier this week that:

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting. (Gift link.)

The problem with this allegation, of course, is that the intelligence community’s 2020 assessment says that it’s false. According to the IC, China thought about interfering in the 2020 presidential contest but elected not to, because it “did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk blowback if caught. Beijing probably believed that its traditional influence tools, primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying key individuals and interest groups, would be sufficient to achieve its goal of shaping US policy regardless of who won the election.”

According to the Post’s reporting, the President would use these flimsy claims of Chinese interference to introduce a number of changes to elections that would make it more difficult to vote:

The measures listed in the 2025 draft of the proposed executive order include requiring hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots, requiring voters to register anew for the 2026 midterms with proof of citizenship, and restricting mail ballots to limited circumstances. The draft also proposes authorizing the Justice Department, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the Social Security Administration and the Postal Service to have a role in identifying ineligible voters.

The context of such a report—in which Trump advisor Steve Bannon has suggested sending ICE officials to the polls and Trump is taking violent action against election interference abroad—is incredibly chilling. It’s up to Secretaries of State, who administer elections, to actively resist these unlawful and unfounded attempts to assume federal control over their states’ rights. We, the American people, should make sure they know we’ve got their backs.

Trump Dismantled Our Counter-Interference Infrastructure

In his effort to “defend free speech,” President Trump has dismantled the government infrastructure that would have addressed the very threats his administration has recently claimed to be concerned about. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term:

• The Global Engagement Center, the State Department’s counter-foreign-influence arm, was shut down after a bad faith campaign labeled its work to expose foreign state-backed propaganda as censorship. The GEC’s efforts included intelligence gathering, public attribution and communication, and counter-programming.

• Tulsi Gabbard dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a Congressionally-mandated center within ODNI that was “dedicated to tracking and analyzing State-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society.” The center was established in a bipartisan effort and continued to receive bipartisan support as recently as 2024.

• On her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi shuttered the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which former FBI Director Chris Wray “described...as an effort to leverage the bureau’s collective expertise and resources in counterintelligence, cybersecurity and counterterrorism to investigate, call out and disrupt foreign-led efforts to interfere in American elections.”

• The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has pulled back from election disinformation work and lost a third of its workforce, with employees working on disinformation put on administrative leave or laid off. Former CISA Director and Trump appointee Chris Krebs, who was fired by tweet after declaring the 2020 election the most secure in our nation’s history, lost his security clearance because, according to the White House, he “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”

• Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. Cyber Command “to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.”

In addition to efforts to track and respond to foreign election interference, the Trump administration also halted softer approaches to the problem, axing USAID, which supported millions of dollars in disinformation research, media, resilience-building programming around the world, and gutting Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which provided authoritative news to people all over the world.

I know there are still patriotic, experienced civil servants quietly trying to keep this work alive across the Federal Government, but as in the first Trump Administration, when the Commander-in-Chief is either ignoring a threat because it is politically inconvenient or cynically championing it to achieve political ends, the American people don’t benefit. Our adversaries do. Without coordination inside government (which is, ironically, what I was hired to do at DHS) and clear, transparent communication to allies, adversaries, and the public, the quiet efforts to track and respond to foreign interference that may still exist are unfortunately doomed.

Why, and what now?

The Trump Administration’s sudden about-face on election interference is pure chicanery, weaponizing a serious national security threat for political purposes.

It justifies acts of retribution against enemies like myself, Chris Krebs, and the many fired civil servants who worked on these issues. We weren’t to be trusted; according to Trump world, we “missed” or “discounted” the signs of election interference the administration is now so bravely uncovering. But bringing us up as folk villains is an important tell; pro-MAGA media is making emotional arguments to their base in order to justify its illegal actions at home and abroad.

MAGA’s embrace of election interference has chilling implications for upcoming elections, normalizing a “whatever it takes” approach that could disenfranchise voters. It might be used to justify changes that would allow the White House to take control over federal elections, introducing rules that make it more difficult to vote. It could also be used as a pretext to send ICE or other armed units to monitor the polls, discouraging Black and brown folks from casting a ballot.

There’s never been a more important time for all of us to get involved with election administration and observation. Check if your local election board is recruiting pollworkers, or if a local office of Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the Ford-Carter Election Observation Network, or your local political party are running election observer training and missions. These operations document the electoral process, monitor for irregularities, and ensure everyone has the ability to vote.

I hope none of these predictions come to pass, but as the months ahead of the 2026 midterms tick by, I’ll be in your inbox, helping you navigate this toxic information environment. Thanks for reading. 🧭

On a personal note, thanks to everyone who became a paid subscriber or donated to my legal fund last week. Your support is doing more than helping me pay my latest legal bill; it’s motivating me to keep up this work when it’s more dangerous and costly than ever. Thank you.

I would like a reliable source for the war in Ukraine, especially the rumors/disinformation about the why of Russia’s invasion and reports of Zelensky’s “corruption,” etc. I have a brother who is all in with what sounds like Russian propaganda. -Scott

This week marks the four-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainians have been suffering and dying as a result of Russian aggression for much longer. Yet the power of Russian disinformation—particularly when parroted by the commander-in-chief—is too strong for some to resist.

I could give you a list of good sources but I doubt your brother will be persuaded by them. His criticism will probably be something like “they’re all part of the mainstream media/deep state” who, he will argue, are themselves “corrupt” and “on the take” from Zelenskyy or the anti-Trump/anti-Putin West.

Instead of fact-checking him, which in an instance like this might cause him to get defensive and further entrench his strongly-held beliefs, start asking him questions. “Why are you worried about that?” you might ask of his claims regarding Zelenskyy’s alleged corrupt activities. If he mentions he doesn’t want his taxpayer dollars going to fund corruption, you can say something like: “I agree with you—we shouldn’t fund corruption. But our aid to Ukraine mostly funds the U.S. military industry, creating jobs and boosting our local economy. Also, U.S. aid to Ukraine has been the most audited aid package in history and no corruption or fraud has been identified.”

Though your script might vary depending on what your brother is fixated on in the moment, this basic recipe of asking a question and acknowledging his concerns serves two key purposes: it brings the temperature down, signalling to your brother that you’re not there for a fight, and it recognizes that there is an authentic concern (eg, misuse of public funds) at the core of his strongly-held (if misguided) belief.

This might be a multi-part conversation, spanning several weeks or months. Your goal here isn’t to get him to be a flag-waving Ukrainian patriot, but rather to soften his view so that he might start to consume other sources that he may otherwise have discounted. Nobody wants to be proven wrong, and if you show your brother that you understand his point of view (even if you think it’s absurd), you’re more likely to achieve that goal.

Regarding your specific question—I don’t have a hard and fast list of go-to sources on Ukraine. I find coverage from major news outlets (NYT, FT, Guardian, BBC, and the global news wires) useful to keep up with. Early on in my time on Bluesky, I also discovered this “Ukrainian Voices” feed you can add to your home page; it’s mostly people in Ukraine sharing their experiences as Russia continues to attack their cities and homes. Generally, I look to see whether the outlet or individual I’m interacting with has a person on-the-ground in Ukraine and whether that person is Ukrainian or has deep experience in Ukraine. When news is breaking, I err toward “mainstream” outlets as their sourcing and attribution will usually be more rigorous than individuals’.

What should I do if I believe a local law enforcement officer has shared access to my real-time location with a network of many people in- and outside my area for the purpose of harassment and intimidation? -Nikki

I’m so sorry you’re in a space where you think that may have happened. Your question highlights one of the biggest issues in the online abuse and victim advocacy sphere: the lack of basic trust between police and victims. I’ve felt this when reporting crimes I’ve been targeted with—and I’ve had my private conversations leaked from federal law enforcement to antagonistic bloggers, too. The fact that some law enforcement officers weaponize their access to confidential information to perpetrate or amplify harm makes me nauseous and deeply, deeply sad.

To help answer this question, I turned to my friend . Ken is a former California police officer and former federal law enforcement Deputy Chief of Staff. He recently started volunteering with my non-profit, . Here’s his advice:

That’s a major, serious issue for a cop to engage in and is 100% worthy of filing a report with whatever oversight body exists for that department – it all depends on where you are. For example, in San Francisco, our Department of Police Accountability is extremely aggressive in pursuing complaints, which can be filed anonymously.

Other agencies have similar oversight organizations, but if you feel unsafe (or if the option just doesn’t exist), then the next best direction to go is up the ladder to a state law enforcement agency or accountability mechanism. In any case, I’d recommend getting a lawyer to walk through those things.

Either way, it’s a crime and essentially would count as stalking. Most local agencies I know take those kinds of allegations extremely seriously (because, well, so many cops have done it).

If you or someone you know is experiencing digital violence, whether law enforcement is involved or not, check out the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which may be able to help you identify pro bono or low bono legal support. I can also recommend Bloom by Chayn, which is an online platform to help survivors of gender-based abuse and trauma, as well as Pirth.org, a dashboard that helps you report online abuse and get the help you need.

Thanks for writing, Scott and Nikki. I know our toxic digital landscape can be confusing—it’s my privilege to help you through it. I’m looking forward to receiving more questions from other Wayfinder readers. Submit yours here.

The relentless enemies of truth, however, are profiting from their lies, and challenges to my family’s privacy and safety persist. My stalker continues to make frivolous legal filings; now, he is retaliating against me for obtaining a protective order against him in 2023. This has led to yet another large legal bill, bringing the total of my legal expenses since 2022 above $100,000.

I know times are tough right now—believe me, I feel it too. Supporters like you are the reason I was able to pay my bills after I was villainized for choosing to serve my country. If you can spare a few dollars to help me pay this latest bill, I would be really grateful. You can contribute directly to my legal aid fund here, or become a paid subscriber to this newsletter below. Thank you. Having thousands of you in my corner means more than you know!

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Over the past several weeks, Jim Jordan’s congressional subcommittee that weaponizes the federal government—oops, I mean the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, silly me!—has released a new set of bogus reports attempting to make the case that “Europe” is “censoring” online speech by enforcing its own sovereign regulations on tech companies.

This is patently false. Regulation is a government’s right. If American social media companies wish to do business in a given market, they need to comply with local rules, the same way American car manufacturers comply with local safety laws in the jurisdictions where they sell their vehicles. Further, Europe’s social media regulation—the Digital Services Act (DSA)—doesn’t compel any content-related takedowns, as Jordan alleges; it focuses on transparency. And finally, since the DSA came into force, 50 million content moderation decisions made by underpaid contractors employed by a few unelected billionaires have actually been reversed, because Europeans used their right to appeal those decisions over a hundred million times. Perhaps Jordan is upset that Europeans have more speech rights on online platforms than their American counterparts. The antidote would be to pass a bill, but Jim Jordan doesn’t do that.

The reports make plenty more insane allegations, and I’m not going to debunk all of them. Instead, I want to focus on a tactic that the Subcommittee—and others in the MAGA universe—have consistently used to intimidate: the deliberate non-redaction of names and personal information in official business.

When Jim Jordan first started bullying me to testify before his inchoate subcommittee in late 2022, his first letter to me included my home address, which he posted on his Twitter account. I had to get my lawyer to call his staff to compel them to take it down.

When Jim Jordan first started publishing documents from the Stanford Internet Observatory, he did not redact the names of undergraduate student researchers, and even attempted to compel the university to get them to testify.

And now, as he releases reports and contextless annexes of internal communications “proof” that “Europe” is “censoring” speech, civil society researchers find their names and emails unredacted throughout the report. We know Jordan’s staff can redact information, though, because they’ve taken great care to redact the personal information of tech company employees mentioned throughout.

This pattern of strategic non-redaction tells you everything you need to know about Jordan’s goals. He’s not trying to investigate anything, or get justice for anyone. He is knowingly unleashing online mobs against innocent people doing work they believe is in the public interest while protecting the interests of powerful tech companies, full stop.

If this reminds you of the much more famous scandal of strategic non-redaction currently playing out in the Epstein Files, you’re catching on. Here, Pam Bondi’s DOJ has protected interests and images of powerful men who sexually abused girls while neglecting to redact victims’ names or images of them, effectively retraumatizing them and replaying their personal horror for millions of Americans who are consuming the files like reality television. It’s gross, it’s unethical, and—in my experience and opinion—it’s deliberate.

Leaving the names of individuals unredacted—whether in the Epstein files or in Jordan’s “censorship” investigations—dangles red meat before the most conspiratorial, violent communities on the internet. In an information vacuum, these are the names that fill the void. Internet sleuths dive into their personal histories and fill up digital corkboards with decontextualized quotes and factoids and so much red string. They post megathreads and paywalled Substack posts and monetize their theorizing. And their victims are left to deal with abuse, harassment, and physical threats while those in privileged positions, like Jordan and Bondi, simply shrug and call it “transparency.” 🧭

Last weekend I went to Australia’s Blue Mountains, where I met a very persistent wild cockatoo who made me think about the importance of rules in democracies.

I was staying in a historic hotel built in the late 1800s. It had beautiful stained glass windows, plush carpeting, an old-timey elevator that was clearly haunted, and no air conditioning amid Australia’s record-breaking heat. It was, in a word, authentic. When I returned from a hike on Sunday, my room was stuffy—unsurprising for Australia in the summer—so I opened my windows. To my dumb American dismay, they only opened a few inches before some sort of hotel-imposed safety lock kicked in.

“Surely in a hotel with no A/C they should be more worried about people sweating to death than flinging themselves out windows,” I thought to myself, annoyed, while I cranked up the fan and lay down for a snooze. I was, of course, forgetting about the winged Australian creatures that might make their way through the window if it were fully open: fruit bats (far from a cute plot point on Bluey, they are basically flying puppies) and large birds.

A few minutes later, I woke up to a thunk and turned to see this sulphur-crested cockatoo staring at me:

Let me be clear: sulphur crested cockatoos are BIG birds. Their wingspan can top a meter. The first time one swooped over my head last week, I ducked; I thought a hawk was divebombing me, because THE ONLY BIRDS THAT BIG IN AMERICA ARE HAWKS. And here was one such large bird—who had clearly been fed by delighted Blue Mountains tourists for years—attempting to break into my room.

As he stuck his curious little head through the window, trying to ascertain whether he could squeeze through, I was very thankful the window didn’t open all the way; otherwise, I’d have had a sulphur-crested cockatoo as an uninvited roommate. (I prefer to admire wiley, naughty birds from a distance of at least a few feet).

“Hang on, Nina, how does this have anything to do with democracy?!” you ask. “I subscribed to this newsletter to understand our tech environment, not to read about your encounters with Australian animalia (however charming)!”

Calm the farm, folks (Australian for “chill out”).

Just as most people wouldn’t want a sulphur-crested cockatoo in their hotel room, they do not want to be poisoned by the food they eat, or the air they breathe. They want to get in a car, train, or plane, and have a reasonable expectation of leaving those vehicles alive. They want their children to use the internet without being groomed or trafficked or made to believe they need to starve themselves or commit acts of terror. They want to keep their hard-earned money and avoid being scammed. And some portion of people throughout the world believe that it is the duty and purpose of governments to protect them from those things.

The hotel knows that clever cockatoos frequent its garden and prey on tourists. Therefore, it only allows guests to open their windows to a smaller-than-cockatoo-sized sliver.

The Australian government has seen its children preyed upon online. It has seen adults abused and driven to suicide for harassment and threats they have received. So the Australian government passed the world’s first laws protecting people online—and they work.

As I’ve spoken to policymakers here, I’ve been struck by this fundamental pact between the Australian government and its citizens. Protecting people—taking care of them— is seen as the government’s core responsibility. And as one former cabinet minister from the center-right liberal party—not a so-called “left-wing lunatic!”—told me, it’s not just a responsibility, it’s what citizens expect. When something goes wrong, Australians “want the government to do something about it.”

At a moment when the U.S. government is actively endangering—not protecting—ordinary citizens, that feels like a radical concept. The Trump Administration kills protestors and jails innocent people of color while protecting its own: the powerful men who have sexually abused girls, the tech companies that profit from polarization, the doctors who peddle snake oil cures, and the business tycoons destroying our planet. Worse, they’ve convinced their supporters that safeguarding the reputations and fortunes of these criminals is somehow helping the little guy, that wanting protection from your government is somehow weak or emasculating. You don’t need the government to help you—you can protect yourself. You’re the good guy with the gun—until legally carrying that gun gets you killed by an unaccountable paramilitary force that is flouting our democratic society’s remaining rules.

Maybe I’m extending the metaphor too far, but the second year of the Trump administration feels less like hotel management allowing cunning cockatoos to prey upon unsuspecting Americans and more like the cockatoos are running the government, gleefully ripping off bird spikes and shitting on the people on the pavement.

When you demonize rules, when you deliberately break the social contract, you aren’t championing freedom, you’re capitalizing on chaos—and spreading it. Look at the ongoing measles outbreak in the United States; mocking vaccine mandates as government overreach has led to the deaths of three people in 2025 and over 800 people infected in 2026 alone.

To be clear, I’m not arguing for a Russian or Singaporean style of government. I don’t think we should fine people for chewing gum or neglecting to flush a public toilet. But after two weeks in a country where the government is trying hard to protect its people and its land while preserving personal freedoms—sometimes overstepping, sometimes not quite meeting the mark—I feel an immense sense of loss for the United States. Our basic understanding of the relationship between a people and its government have been so thoroughly perverted that most Americans now believe Ronald Reagan’s famous line: “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” That’s not a good thing.

We’ve not only let the cockatoo into our room, we’ve invited a whole flock in, and are headed toward a Hitchcock-style scene of horror.

G’day from Brisbane, Australia, where this morning a bin chicken (ibis) stole a potato gem (also known as a tater tot) off my plate while I ate an al fresco breakfast (sorry, not sorry, it’s summer here). Later, I delivered a keynote at the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Center Summer School.

My speech at QUT was an anomaly for this particular trip; while I’m here, I’ll mostly be listening, not talking, collecting interviews toward a project I’ll be announcing soon.

Drawing on those conversations, in my next issue I’ll bring you my first “bright spot” dispatch: reporting about a country, person, or organization that gives us reason to hope, beginning with a a look at Australia. While I don’t agree with every decision the Australian government has made regarding online harms, it approaches technology regulation as a tricky, but not unsolvable problem. In an age where powerful governments are too frequently working in concert, rather than at odds, with the tech broligarchy, that alone is worth celebrating.

As background, today I’m republishing an edited excerpt from a 2024 paper I led for Columbia University’s Institute for Global Politics and Vital Voices. It examines global regulatory approaches to technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and uses the experience of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to illustrate the phenomenon’s effects. It also introduces some of the novel ways Australia approaches oversight of technology platforms. I hope you enjoy—and I’ll be back with more from down under on or around February 14.

ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 22, Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, woke up for the seventh day in a row as the target of technology-facilitated gender-based violence. The abuse had begun a week earlier, on April 15, when she issued a takedown notice to the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), requiring that the platform remove a video of a violent stabbing of a bishop that had taken place at a church in Wakeley, Australia. The graphic video was in violation of both the platform’s own terms of service and Australian law. The irony that the public servant in charge of implementing Australia’s online safety laws would be targeted with the very harm she was charged with ameliorating was not lost on Inman Grant.

“She’s a goner,” read one tweet mentioning her in the early hours of that morning. “Not long before we round up these [World Economic Forum] scumbag traitors.”

In the 48 hours that followed, Inman Grant’s personal information was released publicly. The identity of her children was exposed. Tens of thousands of instances of abusive content—including rape and death threats—would be directed toward her and her family. Over 10 percent of the negative content directed at Inman Grant was gendered narratives and slurs.

Inman Grant, a technology policy professional who served as an executive at Microsoft, Twitter, and Adobe, was appointed as eSafety Commissioner of Australia in 2017 and has since served three Australian Prime Ministers. The eSafety Office was established in 2015, when the Parliament passed the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Act. Its powers were expanded in 2022 when the Online Safety Act of 2021 came into effect, covering Australia’s regulatory response to a broad array of online harms, including adult cyber abuse, cyberbullying, image-based abuse, and illegal and restricted content. On its website, the Office of the eSafety Commissioner writes: “eSafety’s purpose is to help safeguard Australians at risk of online harms and to promote safer, more positive online experiences.”

Among the eSafety’s regulatory mechanisms are transparency powers to ensure that online service providers, including social media platforms, are adhering to the country’s “Basic Online Safety Expectations.” Under this scheme, the eSafety Commissioner can issue notices “requiring online service providers to report on their compliance with the Expectations,” publish providers’ responses to such requests, and issue fines to those who are found to not be in compliance.

In 2023, Inman Grant issued two such transparency notices—relating to child sexual abuse material and online hate—to X. In both cases, she found the platform to be in non-compliance, “providing responses that were incorrect, significantly incomplete or irrelevant,” and in other cases “[failing] to provide any response to the question, such as by leaving the boxes entirely blank.” Inman Grant issued a non-compliance notice to the platform and fined it 610,500 AUD (about 412,000 USD).

According to Inman Grant, the implementation of her office’s regulatory powers angered Elon Musk, who had purchased the platform in 2022. “We used our transparency power very effectively to highlight [X’s] trust and safety issues,” she said, and Musk had a pattern of using vexatious litigation against regulators and advocacy groups to “take on any entity that was critical.”

When a video depicting a stabbing of a priest in Wakeley, Australia was uploaded to X and Meta-owned platforms in April 2024, Inman Grant issued another takedown notice to the platforms. These powers are derived from Australian law, which prohibits content depicting “acts of terrorism,” and allows her to subsequently request certain illegal content be removed from online platforms. Meta complied with the request within the hour, Inman Grant said, but X kept the content up, despite the fact that it violated the platform’s violent content policy. When the Federal Court of Australia granted an interim injunction compelling X Corp to hide the violent material, Musk began tweeting about Inman Grant on April 22nd, 2024, calling her an “unelected official,” and “eSafety Commissar,” evoking authoritarian sentiments. A further disinformation ploy to exorcize the global masses was to allege that Inman Grant wanted to censor the global Internet, though she clearly stated that she was seeking removal to protect Australians from accessing the gratuitous violence, as laid out in the Online Safety Act. These dog-whistles to his 192 million followers led to increased targeted harassment against Inman Grant.

On April 23, 2024, there were 73,694 total mentions of Inman Grant or the eSafety Commissioner’s office on X. By comparison, the office and Commissioner’s average daily mentions on X for April through December 2023 were 145. An analysis of a subset of these tweets showed that 83 percent was negative or harassing content, with more than 10 percent of that being gendered slurs or hate. These included attacks on Inman Grant’s physical appearance or adherence to beauty standards and claims she had negative characteristics often associated with women such as a lack of intelligence or aggression. Many falsely claimed Inman Grant was a part of a global censorship regime, rather than a domestic regulatory agency focused on online safety. Inman Grant was nicknamed “e-Karen.”

Some content claimed that Inman Grant was emotionally-driven in her work, and that she was seeking revenge for an unnamed slight when she had worked at Twitter eight years prior to the Wakely stabbing; still others falsely claimed that Elon Musk—who did not own Twitter when Inman Grant worked there from 2014-2016—had fired her and she had an “ax to grind.” All of these narratives—that Inman Grant was allegedly entitled, selfish, power-hungry, emotional, or seeking revenge—are frequently deployed against women in public life.

Inman Grant was labeled “Big Mother” (a gendered take on Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984), and “left-wing Barbie,” “feminazi,” “eNazi,” or “Stasi cunt.” One tweet read: “captain tampon is a nazi dictator.” She was compared to a “terrorist” or “Hitler,” a “humanoid lizard,” and “pig.” Sexist slurs were common, targeting Inman Grant’s appearance, intellect, and gender identity. She was labeled a “dominatrix,” “eProstitute,” “eSlut,” or told to “get stuffed.” The dataset also includes common slurs such as “bitch,” “slag,” and “cunt,” as well as assertions that women are less intelligent than men or not fit for government roles. One user wrote: “Males to boot these brainwashed females out, and start governing.”

The harassment also changed Inman Grant’s life offline; Inman Grant’s family members were doxxed and users directed credible death threats at her, necessitating the involvement of the Australian Federal Police.

In early June 2024, eSafety discontinued its legal action on the Wakeley stabbing against X Corp in Australia’s Federal Court to focus on other litigation, including matters involving X. Inman Grant wrote:

I have decided to consolidate action concerning my Class 1 removal notice to X Corp in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. After weighing multiple considerations, including litigation across multiple cases, I have considered this option likely to achieve the most positive outcome for the online safety of all Australians, especially children. As a result, I have decided to discontinue the proceedings in the Federal Court against X Corp in relation to the matter of extreme violent material depicting the real-life graphic stabbing of a religious leader at Wakeley in Sydney on 15 April, 2024.

Attacks against Inman Grant remained high even after Musk ceased actively mentioning her; her daily mentions averaged 2,585 daily between May and mid-June 2024. The harassment she faced continues today. eSafety continues taking action against X, while users attempt to continue to—at their own admission—tie up eSafety resources. This has resulted in newly-established local organizations starting a campaign to drown eSafety with Freedom of Information requests resulting in more than a 3000% increase in such requests. Sadly, the resources these campaigners are tying up exist to help Australians experiencing online abuse.

Inman Grant’s experience at the center of a harassment campaign instigated by a billionaire tech mogul demonstrates how pervasive online abuse of women can be, targeting even those charged with making the internet safer. She told my research team: “There is now a growing awareness that the way online abuse manifests against women is different.” However, she noted that the lack of regulation, particularly in the United States, is hurting women around the world. “Until the U.S. actually regulates,” she said, “the rest of the world is going to be fighting a losing battle.”

Since that paper was published, Julie Inman Grant has been targeted—like me and other advocates for a safer internet—by Republican Jim Jordan, who called her a “zealot” for doing her government-appointed job. Jordan falsely claims she is attempting to infringe on Americans’ rights to access political content and is seeking her testimony in his politically-motivated “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government”. The gendered narratives we saw in our 2024 research persist. Check out the comments on a SkyNews video related to Jordan’s request:

What questions do you have about Australia’s approach to online safety, including its recently-implemented restrictions on social media companies’ access to users under 16? Let me know in the comments and I’ll try to address them in my next dispatch. 🧭

📺 Tonight, at 8pm ET, join me and right here for a live chat on Trump’s ongoing censorship crusade. Just open up your Substack app or navigate to thewayfinder.net at 8pm to join.

We watched another American die in an extrajudicial execution this weekend.

We read the witness affidavits, corroborating what we had already seen from multiple angles on the tiny screens in our hands: Alex Pretti was a helper, the proverbial “good guy with a gun.”

He was killed because he had the temerity to assist a woman who had been thrown to the ground by a power-hungry paramilitary member, because he confronted masked thugs about their inhumane behavior, because he dared to document it.

The Trump administration moved quickly to get in front of the video they knew would emerge from the scene, tweeting a picture of a handgun they had allegedly recovered from Pretti, claiming Pretti had wanted to “massacre” federal agents. Pretti was carrying a permitted, open-carry gun—one that agents disarmed him of before they repeatedly shot him.

We know this because the people of Minnesota have been bravely documenting ICE and CBP’s actions in their state, and because a community of open-source investigators quickly analyzed their footage to prove the administration was lying.

The visual evidence of the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good—as well as other videos and photos of the Trump administration’s lawlessness as it assaults blue states—has reminded me of Ukraine, where since 2013, the increasing prevalence of mobile phones and high-speed internet connections has resulted in social media content documenting Russia’s crimes, allowing open-source analysts to hold the Kremlin to account.

Since then, general awareness of open-source intelligence—“the process of gathering and analyzing publicly available information to assess threats, make decisions or answer specific questions,” also known as OSINT—has grown. This sometimes puts more eyes on a particular problem, which can mean more accountability. But there are also folks claiming to be open-source investigators who are either (1) well-intentioned but inexperienced, drawing conclusions unsubstantiated by evidence or (2) malicious, using the veil of OSINT to deliberately spread a false narrative.

To sort these motivations out, I asked for help from two of the best in the business: Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using OSINT for good, and Lou Osborn, the co-founder of INPACT, a group of investigators known for their work exposing the crimes of Russia’s Wagner group. Their advice has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Trustworthy Investigators Show Their Work

Eliot: Good investigators walk you through where the information came from, what steps they took, what bits they’re unsure about, and what they simply couldn’t verify. It’s a red flag when anyone just declares “this is what happened” without explaining how.

Lou: You should be able to reproduce the investigation yourself. Good investigators lay down all of what they have, what is the reasoning and what do they follow to come to the results. There is no “insider source” or “special source.”

Trustworthy Investigators Welcome Discussion

Eliot: They’re transparent about sources; if they’re using open source evidence and they’re not sharing the sources, or are unwilling to do so when asked, then they’re more interested in farming engagement than collaboratively finding the truth.

They also correct themselves when they’re wrong. When genuinely trying to get to the truth, people will update their assessment or even retract things when better evidence shows up. Accounts that are mainly chasing clicks and engagement tend to just dig in harder and deflect instead. Also look at the account’s past behavior. If it’s all about getting engagement then you know you shouldn’t rely on their claims.

Lou: They are open to discussion and are happy to re-demonstrate how they do their work. This may seem basic but it can be a giveaway that an investigator isn’t trustworthy.

Trustworthy Investigators Don’t Overstate Their Case

Eliot: Serious work tends to be careful and measured, with lots of caveats. When someone makes very confident, black-and-white statements based on partial video or a few photos, you should be skeptical.

Anyone who’s relying on a single video or image to make grand claims is usually unreliable. An individual image or video on its own almost never tells the full story, especially about motive or broader context. The strongest investigations combine the footage with other things: timestamps, geolocation, witness accounts, documents, known facts about weapons/vehicles/uniforms, etc.

There’s Reason for Hope

Open source investigators from Bellingcat provided crucial material to the international Joint Investigative Team that prosecuted the case against those who shot down MH17 with a Russian missile, killing hundreds of civilians. Open source evidence helped establish culpability for the Kremlin’s war crimes in Bucha. It has proven, beyond even a shadow of a doubt, that Russia is responsible for bombing playgrounds, children’s hospitals, maternity wards. It has tracked down children Russia kidnapped from Ukraine and returned them to their homes. While Putin’s Russia has yet to face full accountability for its crimes, open source material will help in prosecuting that case for years to come.

The same can happen in the United States. Everything feels bleak right now, but I have hope that thanks to the bravery of those putting their bodies on the line to document the Trump administration’s depravity—along with the ingenuity of people like Eliot, Lou, and their colleagues—the arc of history will bend toward justice for Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and all those whose lives have been unjustly upended by Trump and his thugs. 🧭

Have a personal question about disinformation, online safety, or digital harms? Submit it to my advice column here!

I’ve been writing about non-consensual image abuse for nine years.

Nine years of ruffling feathers, pointing out that half of the world’s population was suffering while the other side spent their time making policy around harms that hadn’t yet happened.

Nine years of being told the systematic objectification of women online was the domain of gender equality organizations, not the governments that represented them or the tech companies that made it possible.

Nine years of being told that the so-called speech rights of anonymous men who want to undress us and insert us into sexual situations we never consented to are more important than our bodily autonomy, our privacy, our personhood.

Nine years of profound disappointment that deepened this week as governments around the world finally seemed to recognize the nature of the problem—all it took was thousands of women, girls, and men (!) per hour being abused by Elon Musk’s bangified chatbot, Grok. Too little, too late.

I am tired of writing piece after piece about deepfake image abuse. It’s complex, but it shouldn’t be intractable for the big brains and big salaries in Silicon Valley. How many more women and girls need to bear their scars to the world before someone with real power in the tech industry stands up for us?

A Retrospective

In 2017, I met Svitlana Zalishchuk, then a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, at a trendy cafe in Kyiv. I was on a reporting trip for my first book, How to Lose the Information War. Zalishchuk had been instrumental in a communications campaign in the Netherlands that I was planning to write about. We were a few minutes—and a glass of wine—deep into our interview when she stopped me. There was something else she wanted to tell me, something that felt urgent to her, something she hadn’t previously shared publicly. Because of her public profile in the heady years after the Euromaidan protests:

Zalishchuk also became a target for a new kind of disinformation. A screenshot began appearing on posts about her speech showing a faked tweet claiming that she had promised to run naked through the streets of Kyiv if the Ukrainian army lost a key battle. To underline the point, the message was accompanied by doctored images purporting to show her totally naked. “It was all intended to discredit me as a personality, to devalue me and what I’m saying,” says Zalishchuk. (Click to read.)

This was before deepfake technology was accessible or convincing, when “cheap fakes”—convincingly edited images—were the worst that a woman in public life might encounter. But as generative AI grew cheaper, more widespread, and more realistic, the problem ballooned:

These images look real, and to the untrained eye, they may as well be. In 2018, investigative journalist and Post contributing columnist Rana Ayyub was targeted with a deepfake porn video that aimed to stifle her. It ended up on millions of cellphones in India, Ayyub ended up in the hospital with anxiety and heart palpitations, and neither the Indian government nor social media networks acted until special rapporteurs from the United Nations intervened and called for Ayyub’s protection. (Gift link.)

Forums where men gave each other pointers on how to convincingly create such images—and Telegram channels where those who were too lazy to learn could buy them—proliferated. I was targeted as part of the widespread public hate campaign against me because of my job in the Biden Administration. When I looked more deeply at the marketplace that had flourished in the absence of regulation, I was disgusted:

Some creators who post in deepfake forums show great concern for their own safety and privacy—in one forum thread that I found, a man is ridiculed for having signed up with a face-swapping app that does not protect user data—but insist that the women they depict do not have those same rights, because they have chosen public career paths. The most chilling page I found lists women who are turning 18 this year; they are removed on their birthdays from “blacklists” that deepfake-forum hosts maintain so they don’t run afoul of laws against child pornography. (Gift link.)

I wasn’t alone. found that one in six women Members of the United States Congress were targeted by deepfake sexual abuse material when we took our research snapshot at the end of 2024. We worked with those targeted to get the material removed, in a grotesque game of Whack-a-Troll that you could play for your whole life and never win. Meanwhile, social media platforms profited from abuse of women and girls all over the world. In September, we discovered that Meta was running thousands of ads for nudifying apps that were defying the European Union’s transparency regulations—and running afoul of the platform’s own rules.

That brings us to the current moment, where Elon Musk is facing widespread public outcry for providing free access to a powerful technology that can violate anyone’s basic rights. His response? He initially made the service available only to paid subscribers. As my former colleagues at the Centre for Information Resilience point out, this could allow X/Grok to more easily track down who is creating illegal content. But these are the same guys who were recently stunned when a bunch of “verified” accounts posing as MAGA influencers turned out to be based almost anywhere but the United States. I’m not holding my breath for a sudden change of heart or self-regulation from the man whose initial reaction to the problem was the ROFL emoji. According to reporting from The Guardian, X continues to allow users to post such content.

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Why (Almost) Nobody’s Done Anything About It

After Grok undressed tens of thousands of people (by the most conservative estimates) without their consent, advocates like me were gratified to see countries around the world take serious action against Musk and his companies. (Tech Policy Press has a regularly-updated list of those actions here.)

But why did it take so long to reach the critical mass necessary for action? There are two key reasons: lack of awareness and greed.

Take this gentleman, for example, who had responded to a post I made on Substack outraged Musk would monetize access to Grok’s nudification features:

Unfortunately, this attitude persists among many who don’t understand the problem. Fox’s Jesse Watters (hardly a paragon of tech policy prowess) referred to deepfake sexual abuse as “sexy memes” on his primetime show when the TAKE IT DOWN Act—a bill that criminalized deepfake sexual abuse and required platforms to take down instances of it within 48 hours of victim notification—was included for passage in 2024’s National Defense Authorization Act. Elon Musk, at the time readying himself to slash and burn the US Government, first had a go at the NDAA, getting the bill shunted to the next legislative session. This move benefited him; if TAKE IT DOWN had passed in December 2024, its takedown provisions would have come online in late 2025 or early 2026, and X would have been responsible for the fallout of this scandal. Because of the delay, the law was passed five months later, and the takedown provisions now come online in May. In the meantime, Musk issued a mea culpa from a chatbot and hoped he’d receive a get out of jail free card in return.

What Watters, and Musk, and this Substack rando don’t understand is that the harm from deepfake sexual abuse is real. Take a look at the impacts reported by targets of image-based sexual abuse (including both deepfakes and authentic images) in a multinational study conducted in 2025:

We shouldn’t need to prove harm to protect our basic rights. If a man can’t undress me on the street without my consent, he can’t do it online, either. Yet that’s exactly what the current paradigm incentivizes and encourages today.

There are some people at the platforms who understand and care about this issue. These are people who want to make a positive difference in the lives of victims, but they’re working against a system that sees us as a cost. Creating policy and taking proactive measures to identify and stop deepfake sexual abuse before it’s created? Responding to takedown requests once victims issue them? Those are expensive propositions.

In the meantime, a lot of companies are making a lot of money on nudification—not just the Groks and the nudifying apps of the world, but the infrastructure that supports them. All of these tools depend on hosting services to keep their websites and apps running. All of them have bank accounts. All of them rely on third-party payment processors like Paypal or Stripe to receive money. Many of them—including Grok—are still available on the Apple and Android app stores. To them, we do not represent bodies that have been violated, but dollars and cents added to their bottom lines.

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How You Can Help

You might feel powerless in the face of this disgusting explosion of misogyny. It’s understandable; even if you or someone you love never posts a picture of themselves online, someone can take a photo of you in a high school yearbook, pay a few dollars, and publicly undress and sexualize you.

Shame is still a powerful tool, though, and it might be just what we need to finally wake up the companies that aid and abet the creators of deepfake sexual abuse material. In a moment where the broligarchs and the autocrats are so well-aligned, people power is more important than ever.

Here are a few ways you can use your speech rights to pressure technology companies to take the threat Grok poses seriously:

• If you’re an Apple user, ask Apple to remove Grok from their app store here.

• If you’re an Android user, ask Google to remove Grok from their app store here.

• Contact Microsoft and urge them to end their partnership with Grok.

• Complain to Visa and Stripe, which have both partnered with X on payment services.

• If you live in the United States, ask your Representative to pass the DEFIANCE Act, which just passed the Senate via voice vote. This bill gives victims a civil right of action to sue deepfake creators. Find your Representative and get their contact information here.

• If you live in Europe and see an ad for a nudifying website or app, report it here.

If you have been targeted by deepfake or other image-based sexual abuse, the following resources may help:

• StopNCII.org can help you remove sexually explicit images across the internet.

• This form allows you to remove sexual content associated with you from Google search results.

• The Online Ambulance at StopOnlineHarm.org is a support system for those experiencing online abuse.

• Cyber Civil Rights Initiative: offers a safety center that includes a directory of attorneys well-versed in this area.

• Bloom is an online platform that can support you in your healing journey.

Together, I hope we’re moving toward a digital future where users’ safety is taken seriously, so this can be my last column on deepfake sexual abuse. 🧭

Did I miss anything? Do you have questions? Leave them in the comments, or submit a more specific question to my online harms advice column. Thanks for reading and being an ally in this fight.

I really struggled to write this newsletter this week. I know, I know. It’s only the second week of the rebrand. C’mon, Jankowicz, get your big girl pants on.

But it was a rough ten days. The United States illegally invaded a foreign country. Thousands of users per hour, including underage girls, were deepfaked into pornographic content by Elon Musk’s Grok. (Musk then accused the governments that encouraged X to follow their laws of “censorship,” now a word that has entirely lost its meaning to the right-wing.) And most brutally, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother, Renee Good, was murdered by a paramilitary officer who appears to have let his misogyny get the better of him. The Trump regime then launched into a nationwide re-education campaign to convince us that a man with a gun is entirely powerless against a mom driving a car away from him at a few miles per hour.

All of these events weighed on me. I couldn’t get anything done; I felt lonely and scattered and small. What’s the point of the work I’ve dedicated my career to—helping people navigate their information environment—if two Americans can watch the same video and one sees a coward assassinating a fellow citizen while the other sees a hero eliminating an extremist?

I wrote 800 words on the famous Orwell quote—“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”—and deleted them. I would not be doing my job if I simply admired the problem, and none of you need me to tell you that the Trump regime is lying (though these lies are blatant and ghoulish, even by this administration’s standards).

When a protest popped up on Mobilize.Us at a nearby park, I bought some foam board and paint and made childcare plans with my husband. I needed to be there.

It was nothing like the massive events I’ve attended on the National Mall. A few hundred people gathered in a parking lot at a busy intersection. At the same time, over a thousand other events were held around the country.

We heard speeches from local leaders, including a rector who shared a blessing that began:

May God bless you with discomfort,
at easy answers, half-truths,
and superficial relationships
so that you may live
deep within your heart.

We booed, we screamed, we laughed, we mourned—both Renee Good and the 31 other individuals confirmed to have died at ICE’s hands since January 2025, the highest number in more than 20 years. Passersby honked their horns and flashed thumbs ups out their windows. I talked with other moms in their 30s and protestors in their 60s and 70s about my cheeky sign. (On the back, it riffed on the Orwell quote—“Believe the evidence of your eyes and ears.”) I left feeling energized and much less alone.

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Isolation is the poison that the Trump regime and the broligarchs that support it are counting on to win. In a 2023 Department of Health and Human Services survey, 29 percent of Americans aged 30-44 said they were “frequently” or “always” lonely, and 73 percent of those surveyed believe technology is to blame. When you are constantly ingesting a feed of horrible news, you can become convinced that you’re just one small person staring at a glowing box, that your action can’t amount to anything, that too few people feel the way you do. You keep scrolling. You become passive. You become meek.

So next time that loneliness starts to creep in, I challenge you to get out and do something in your community. As Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said in an interview before he returned to Russia, where the Kremlin murdered him in a hard labor camp:

“If they decide to kill me, it means that we’re incredibly strong. We need to use this power, to not give up, and remember that we’re a huge power…The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t do nothing!”

It’s a sentiment that applies to Good’s murder, too.

I put together a resource list so you can avoid doing nothing. Maybe protests aren’t your speed, but being a volunteer penguin caretaker is. Maybe you teach English to refugees, or you make a lasagna for someone in need. No matter what you choose, getting out and into community with your neighbors will be a reminder that no matter how much hate the other side harbors, there is still good in the world, and still something worth fighting for. 🧭

Resources for Community Engagement

These resources are U.S.-focused, but many other countries have similar services.

• Search for protest actions on Mobilize.Us; they include everything from rallies to postcard writing.

• Find volunteer opportunities on Idealist; who knows, maybe your local aquarium needs a volunteer penguin wellbeing monitor, too.

• Host dinners for friends and neighbors; did this every week in 2025 and reports that it was a wild success!

• Sign up for My Civic Workout, a newsletter that sends you 5, 10, and 30 minute tasks to stay civically active.

• See if your local faith-based community has upcoming volunteer opportunities or social events.

• If you decide to monitor ICE activity from a vehicle, check out ’s tips. (He also has an anti-fascist book club, if that’s your jam.)

• Check out Meetup for less-politically-oriented opportunities. Having fun and taking breaks is a key component of fighting fascism.

Did one of your friends just get very into a new yoga studio that has some questionable views on vaccines? Submit a question to my monthly disinformation and digital harms advice column here!

➡️ Submit a question to my disinformation and digital harms advice column here! ⬅️

Before I read a single headline about this weekend’s U.S. military operations in Venezuela, I saw videos of it: grainy shots of helicopters flying over a darkened city while plumes of smoke rose from targets below. At 6:30 ET, after my three year old climbed into my bed, the visual evidence of the Trump administration’s foreign adventurism far outpaced what scant facts the press could report in their live blogs.

It’s a familiar experience in our age of social media ubiquity. From Charlie Kirk’s murder to the January 6 insurrection, from Ukraine to Gaza, the technology that pervades every facet of our lives also allows us to experience disaster, tragedy, and trauma in real time. We tell ourselves that we doomscroll and expose ourselves to horrors in service of staying informed, in service of bearing witness.

But that’s a misguided intention. It is not the beleaguered populations of Gaza, Ukraine, or Caracas who benefit when we obsessively follow and engage online with the atrocities they’re experiencing, nor does it bolster democracy; it lines the pockets of the tech broligarchs and greases the wheels of the rage machine that brought Trump to power. Engaging more deliberately with our information environment, however, can keep you informed without dragging you down.

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Trauma and Desensitization

The content that makes its way to us in the early hours of a conflict or tragedy is raw and unfiltered, often filmed and posted by civilians with a direct view of the harm. When we view content like this over and over again we risk “experienc[ing] emotions and personal responses relating to the traumatic event on [our] computer screens.” The risk is more acute for journalists, creators, and open source researchers, who are exposing themselves to this content as a part of their work. Increasingly, however, I see concerned citizens consuming levels of content that would rival my colleagues in the media space, and they’re doing it without proper training or awareness. If you’re finding that your online consumption is leading to:

• intrusive thoughts or images

• hopelessness

• guilt

• irritability

• difficulty imposing boundaries on your media consumption habits

• withdrawal from social activities;

• unexplained fatigue

• and/or other symptoms as explained in this report from First Draft News

...you may be suffering from vicarious trauma.

We also risk desensitizing ourselves to violence as we obsessively scroll. When you see images of bombings and terrorism and the human suffering that comes in its wake so frequently, they become normalized. You may feel compassion fatigue—disengagement with crises of human suffering—or information fatigue—being overwhelmed by data and sources on a topic, sometimes leading individuals to be less discerning with their consumption.

Engaging Means Enraging

Of course, this is all by design. Social media platforms have been specifically engineered to make us feel strong emotions; the most engaging content is frequently the most enraging content. While user generated content uploaded to social media platforms has provided critical evidence that allows institutions to hold modern war criminals to account, social media platforms see such content primarily as disaster porn, driving clicks and advertising revenue. (If they cared about the evidence preservation aspect their platforms provide, they would not delete large swaths of content without archiving it or allowing human rights groups to access it.)

Unfortunately, news organizations and creators also have the same monetary incentives; though their underlying intention—to educate and inform their audience—is noble, they also benefit from the high views and engagement that come from sharing traumatic content. Their content might be shown to more people if a traumatic video goes viral. For creators, if their content is monetized, they may be paid for it. It may drive up their subscriber numbers, leading to valuable partnerships.

I want to be clear: news organizations and creators are not at fault here. They’re fighting to survive in a broken system. But as consumers, we need to understand the motivations that animate all the actors in our information ecosystem.

The Trump Administration Plays the Game

That includes the Trump Administration, which exploits the symbiotic relationship between enragement and engagement better than any other government in the world. There is a reason President Trump (and his aides) keep sharing juvenile AI-generated images. There is a reason he—not a media outlet—shared the first photo of Maduro in custody on Truth Social. There is a reason his administration continues to include popular songs in videos of its shocking actions without permission of their creators. It leads to more rage and polarization, emboldening the MAGA base by projecting the idea that the administration is “owning the libs” while stoking both anger and feelings of hopelessness in the opposition. It also ensures that MAGA propaganda is landing at the top of your feed, whether you support the Trump administration or not.

The Veracity Crisis

Beyond the incentive structures undermining deliberate, responsible information consumption, we’re also contending with disinformation and AI slop. You want to stay informed, but can you even believe what you see?

Take a look at this thread of fact-checks on the events in Venezuela from the BBC’s Shayan Sardarizadeh: AI-generated images of Maduro in custody, misattributed videos of missile strikes and popular celebrations, a real video of a the U.S. strikes in Caracas manipulated with AI to make it seem more spectacular.

Why do people share such falsehoods? For power and for profit. It helps them amplify a narrative that shapes their worldview. MAGA influencer Nick Shirley (whose “investigation” of Minnesota daycare fraud led to a withdrawal of federal funding and violent threats against childcare providers across the country) shared a video of Venezuelans in Miami celebrating Maduro’s arrest, but claimed it was a video of people in Caracas. “Wait a minute the MSM media lied to us again?” he wrote on X, in a post with 3.5 million views. Shirley’s content on YouTube and X is monetized; he also launched a “creator coin” after his Minnesota video went viral, generating an estimated “$41,600 to $65,000 in creator royalties tied to trading activity.”

Tips for Navigating Breaking News Online

The realities of our information ecosystem may make you want to throw your phone into the nearest body of water, and I know it would be impossible to disengage entirely. You can still be informed and bear witness. You just need to do it deliberately.

In the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a country I love dearly, I was online constantly. I needed to keep up with every development, as I was doing multiple media hits a day. I was also pregnant, exhausted, and deeply affected by images of Ukraine under attack. I knew I was close to burnout, so I changed how I consumed information to protect myself. I recognized that I was a better advocate for Ukraine if I were functioning than if I were catatonic in bed.

Similarly, developing better information consumption habits is a form of democratic resistance. It means you are actively making judgements about information quality instead of passively getting sucked into a feed curated to keep you scrolling, to rot your brain, and make you catatonic and obedient. You don’t need to be an expert on the information environment to be more deliberate about which information you consume, how you consume it, or why.

1. Be cognizant of whether you’re consuming the information passively or deliberately. Did you seek this information out, or has it been algorithmically served to you? If the latter, consider why it might have ended up in your feed. Who benefits from your engagement?

2. Watch with the sound off as a default. Particularly when we are viewing videos of atrocities or violence, sound can increase the likelihood of experiencing vicarious trauma.

3. Be patient. Recognize that verified information takes time to confirm. While both media outlets and influencers are incentivized to be the first to post or comment on breaking news, they’re often working with few verified facts. Be cautious in the early hours after a breaking news event.

4. Curate a list of trusted sources rather than doomscroll. While you may want to follow every update as it happens, you’re more likely to be sucked into a neverending engagement loop when you do. My solution is to keep a small, curated list of trusted sources I consult when news breaks on certain topics. It might include mainstream news outlets, reporters, outside experts, and in some cases, even influencers. If it’s a topic I don’t have a stable of go-to sources lined up for, I check out coverage from PBS, NPR, the BBC, or wire services like AP or Reuters. They’re not perfect, but they’re not owned by billionaires or incentivized to post hot takes. Wait for them to digest, analyze, and confirm before engaging.

5. Set a timer for engagement, take breaks, and touch grass. When you need to scratch the scrolling itch, set a timer. I often find myself mindlessly scrolling Instagram in bed, but I know I feel much better when I read fiction before sleeping. I give myself a few mindless minutes and then switch to my book before lights out. You can try to break your own doomscrolling patterns the same way. Spending time in nature (as Gen Z calls it, “touching grass”) is a great way to reset your nervous system.

There might be guilt that comes with setting these boundaries. I’ve struggled with it, too. You are (probably) not currently being bombed by a major military power, but you don’t need to make yourself suffer to prove you care deeply about the people who are. You’re more of an asset to democracy when you’re informed, engaged, and energized—all characteristics that are under threat in today’s information ecosystem. 🧭

Have a follow up? …or an uncle falling victim to online conspiracies? Submit a question to my monthly disinformation and digital harms advice column here!