The US Agency for Global Media’s closing aids authoritarian interference. Two days after the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, Soviet television broadcast a 20-second report acknowledging that a minor “accident” had occ [...]
This is part two of a two-part series on how RT Deutsch content is evading domain bans and sanctions published in partnership with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Find part one here. Germans head to the polls on Sunday not only to decide who [...]
Introduction It is easy to dismiss foreign information operations as playing out at the national level, designed to influence federal policymakers and Beltway insiders. But these threats transcend the “Beltway Bubble”. Increasingly, foreign nation [...]
Senior Fellow Bret Schafer joined NBC News to react to Meta's decision to change its fact-checking policy in the United States. watch here The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone. [...]
Senior Fellow Bret Schafer joined CBS News to discuss faux bomb threats at US polling places that originated from Russian domains. watch here The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone. [...]
The Kremlin is known for testing disinformation strategies in its “backyard” before applying them globally. Last week in Moldova, the presidential election and constitutional referendum on EU membership presented Russia with such an opportunity. Rus [...]
Senior Fellow Bret Schafer joined CNN to discuss the evolving information space around the 2024 US election, including false, manipulated videos of alleged election irregularities which have been traced back to Russian threat actors. watch here [...]
In May, ASD, along with our partners at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA), published a report documenting roughly 400 domains that had published identical or nearly identical copies of articles original [...]
Americans vote in this year’s consequential presidential election in an environment marked by growing threats, including the weaponization of artificial intelligence, influence campaigns run by foreign authoritarian adversaries, and false election n [...]
In the polarized political landscape of the United States, few words carry as much weight or evoke as much passion as “democracy”. As the cornerstone of American political identity, democracy is both revered and contested by citizens across the ideo [...]
The Ukrainian president’s visit to a Pennsylvania arms factory was partisan but not election interference. On September 27, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed an indictment against three Iranian intelligence agents accused of running a “hac [...]
This is the first in a series of reports covering online conversations related to the security and administration of the 2024 US elections. These reports are meant to highlight key narrative trends in the election space, including but not limited to [...]
Senior Fellow Bret Schafer discussed the US Department of Justice's recent indictment of two RT employees for funneling millions of dollars to a Tennessee-based media company. watch here The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are [...]
In May 2024, ASD, along with our partners at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the University of Amsterdam, published a report documenting roughly 400 domains—ranging from mirror sites and content aggregators to faux local news outlets and si [...]
Senior Fellow Bret Schafer joined CNN to discuss the DOJ's recent indictment of two RT employees for financing Russian disinformation in the United States. watch here The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the au [...]
Senior Fellow Bret Schafer joined FOX 8 Live to discuss the impact of AI-generated disinformation on elections and how local and state election officials can best prepare for it. read more here The views expressed in GMF publications and comment [...]
Introduction In the days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a torrent of false and misleading information about the attack flooded social media. While the majority of these claims see [...]
Senior Fellow Bret Schafer spoke to CBS News about how Russian propaganda works and how Europeans and Americans can help stem its tide. watch here The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone. [...]
Senior Fellow Bret Schafer joined Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox News to discuss the significance of a recently dismantled Russian influence network on X. watch here The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of [...]
“This old-fashioned, sort of low-level kind of manipulation has been perfectly capable of misleading and manipulating people for quite a long time,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow for media and digital disinformation for the Alliance for Securin [...]
“This is really the tip of the Russian propaganda iceberg,” said Bret Schafer, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at German Marshall Fund. “It was quite evident when we were running the search results in the E.U. that if Russian propagand [...]
Executive Summary Over the past year, ASD at GMF, the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) have collaborated to develop the Information Laundromat, an open-source tool to uncover content and metadata simila [...]
More than half the world’s population will head to the polls this year in the largest display of democracy in human history. This series of elections is also the first to unfold in an era in which advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) [...]
The presidential campaign season in Russia has shown a stark turn from the themes that dominated—and were absent from—last September’s regional elections in Russia. With the war then at a stalemate, even the ruling United Russia party avoided any me [...]
Researchers from two European universities with support from ASD have uncovered evidence that a small network of Polish news blogs—Lega Artis, News na Dziś, and Daily Blitz—may serve as pathways for Russian state media and pro-Kremlin media to reach [...]
“Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?” tweeted Rudy Guiliani, then-US President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, in the weeks after the 2020 US presidential election. It was part of a broader campaign to delegitimize the election by castin [...]
Tuesday, February 27, 2024 10:00 - 11:00am ET 1600 - 1700 CET In the two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Russia’s and the People’s Republic of China’s use of disinformation has increased along with Moscow and Beijin [...]
This year’s US presidential primaries will determine who will lead the country come January 2025 amid growing autocratic threats to American democracy. Experts from the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund are monitoring and a [...]
The intensification of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks has forced liberal democracies to carefully craft a message that balances their support for Israel with growing domestic criticism over civilian casualti [...]
Since 2019, the Alliance for Securing Democracy at GMF has operated the Hamilton 2.0 dashboard, an online tool to track messaging originating from Chinese, Iranian, and Russian state media and government officials. In its time, the dashboard collect [...]
Introduction “Would you rather have the bitter truth or more sweet lies?” This is the question posed by an assertive series of videos produced by the State Department in recent months, targeting Russian audiences, that juxtapose statements by Russ [...]
Introduction As the de facto gateway to the vast troves of information available online, search services play a critical role in the modern information ecosystem. They are often the starting points for people’s questions about the world around the [...]
Introduction In recent years, political podcasting has boomed in the United States, with new series emerging across the political spectrum. Due to the medium’s decentralized nature, it is difficult to grasp the total audience for these shows, but [...]
Over the course of the war in Ukraine, a loose network of Russian military bloggers on Telegram have provided a fervently nationalistic, though at times highly critical, view of Russia’s “special military operation”. Providing more unfiltered covera [...]
In this episode of "Disinformation," ASD's Bret Schafer and Peter Benzoni discuss ASD's tools and the rise of disinformation online. [...]
NATO’s role in countering Russian aggression during the war in Ukraine has made the alliance a repeated target of Kremlin-linked propaganda campaigns. Central to this effort is an attempt by Russian state-affiliated media and diplomats to exploit or [...]
Introduction Prior to the war in Ukraine, Russia was perceived to be an unrivaled power in the information domain, and its ability to conduct sophisticated information operations was considered a distinct strategic advantage in the event of a war. B [...]
Hamilton 2.0 is an interactive tool that monitors the outputs of Chinese and Russian state media and government officials across a range of social media platforms. The weekly report provides a summary analysis of the most salient topics and narrative [...]
Hamilton 2.0 is an interactive tool that monitors the outputs of Chinese and Russian state media and government officials across a range of social media platforms. The weekly report provides a summary analysis of the most salient topics and narrativ [...]
At the start of the new year, we asked our experts to each put forth one recommendation that would strengthen democracy during a period of declining trust, emboldened autocrats, and war. Their answers touch on a variety of issues—from the war in Ukr [...]