Field Notes: April 2026
Links to help you find your way in our polluted information environment
Happy spring! I am traveling to the Cambridge Disinformation Summit this week, so am bringing you a different sort of post, inspired by Emma Gannon’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
Anne Applebaum 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.
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! 🧭