Short-form insights and rapid-reaction analysis of breaking news and global events.
In her last State of the European Union (SOTEU) speech for this Commission mandate, Ursula von der Leyen expectedly stayed mum on whether she intends to stand again. But it is difficult to take her address as anything but a carefully calibrated effo [...]
Meta’s recent report on the company’s takedown of a Chinese government information campaign that was the “largest cross-platform operation” ever, and of several smaller influence campaigns that originated in Turkey, Iran, and Russia, named hundreds [...]
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 [...]
Overview Congress has approved more than $100 billion in aid for Ukraine since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Throughout that time, lawmakers have taken to X, formerly known as Twitter, to defend that funding, to call for more assistan [...]
Meta’s Twitter-alternative, Threads, became the fastest app to reach 100 million users. It took five days. The app itself only took seven months to build, a remarkably short start-to-launch period that did not allow the few dozen engineers working o [...]
In the May 2023 Turkish elections, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan failed to secure enough votes to win a majority in the first round outright, forcing a run-off election where he ultimately held on to power. Like other recent elections in Türkiye, t [...]
Thanks to the European Union, this week’s Ukraine Recovery Conference in London will prove to be the most significant international event of the year to rally support for a thriving Ukraine. Indeed, the EU’s showing was so robust that it signals Ukr [...]
Overview In the early hours of June 6, an explosion collapsed the Kakhovka dam, releasing a torrent of water across the Ukrainian countryside and igniting a blame game across social media. Evidence collected by the New York Times indicates that Russ [...]
How did President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan prevail in the face of a terrible economy, his government’s disastrous handling of the February earthquake, numerous corruption scandals, and a unified opposition? Turkey’s election was partly free, but deeply [...]
In the end, it was not so close. Turkey’s most tightly contested election in a generation ended up giving the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a new mandate to extend his unbroken and unprecedented 20-year hold on power. This victory will [...]
What happened in the first round? In Turkey’s first round election held on May 14, tens of millions of voters turned out for both sides. There was intense competition on a playing field that the incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan skewed heavi [...]
This blog is an adaptation of the chapter on transparency and accountability from “Toward a Marshall Plan for Ukraine: New Ideas and Recommendations”, by Norman Eisen, Alina Inayeh, Jacob Kirkegaard, Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, Josh Rudolph, and Bruce [...]
For a country long inured to hardship and crisis management, the upcoming election taking place in Greece on May 21st feels like a transition back to “normal”. Gone are the extraordinary conditions of supervision and oversight by the troika of inter [...]
Elections in Turkey had high turn-out, meaningful results, and little violence, but that doesn’t mean they were free from autocratic manipulation on the part of the regime. On Sunday, Turkish voters went to the polls in a mostly free but highly unf [...]
In Erdoğan’s Turkey, anti-government trolls get arrested, while pro-government trolls get paychecks. Social media has become a major source of information for Turkish people, thanks in large part to the Turkish government’s strict control of tradit [...]
Overview On April 13, the FBI arrested Jack Teixeira for his alleged involvement in leaking hundreds of classified documents. Teixeira, a member of the Air National Guard, reportedly shared the US intelligence assessments with his friends over the c [...]
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared on Capitol Hill on Thursday 23 March to testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where lawmakers peppered him with questions about TikTok’s Chinese ownership, effects on youth, and practices aroun [...]
Overview TikTok has been central to the world’s understanding of Russia’s war in Ukraine. It was particularly valuable in the conflict’s early days when people were desperate for news and able to find real-time updates about military maneuvers and o [...]
At the beginning of 2023, Japan assumed the presidency of the Group of Seven (G7) from Germany. This puts Tokyo, already a prime target of Chinese information manipulation, at the helm of a body that has drawn significant and sustained criticism fro [...]
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 [...]
Overview YouTube was essential to RT’s early success, helping the Russian propaganda network expand its audience across the globe. YouTube’s decision to ban Russian state media channels after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine thus marked a sig [...]
US President Joe Biden’s Ukraine, Poland, and NATO meetings last week in the run up to the one-year mark of Russia’s attack on Ukraine was historic—and effective. He shored up support among Ukraine’s allies, undercut adversaries abroad and critics a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Earlier today, a court in Turkey sentenced the sitting mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, to two years and seven months in prison for calling members of the Supreme Election Council “idiots” in 2019 after they vacated his first election to the offic [...]
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 [...]
Days after an errant Ukrainian missile tragically killed two civilians in Poland, Russian state-sponsored media began reporting on a strange conspiracy theory—that Poland wants to annex three counties in western Ukraine. ASD at GMF’s Yandex Dashboar [...]
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 [...]
This report highlights and analyzes key trends and takeaways from data collected by the Hamilton 2.0 dashboard during the previous month. Unlike ASD’s weekly Hamilton reports, which analyze the main topics and themes promoted by monitored Russian an [...]
While Russian information operators in government and state-sponsored media presented a relatively united front at the onset of the renewed invasion of Ukraine, setbacks during the war have caused significant divergences in messaging. Ukraine’s succ [...]
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 [...]
Despite fears of political violence and deepening societal divisions, the United States appears to have avoided the worst-case scenarios in the lead-up to and immediately following the midterm elections. Election officials and local law enforcement [...]
Russia Monitored Russian accounts tweeted 17,045 times from November 2 to November 8, earning 185,885 retweets and 539,333 likes. Kremlin-linked Twitter accounts did not conduct a large-scale messaging push around the US midterm elections. Even on t [...]
Tomorrow’s midterm elections will be a benchmark for the state of American democracy. As early voting surges, people around the country (and the world) are watching to see what happens in what is perhaps the most important midterm election in recent [...]
Using our interactive tool to examine social posts, we found numerous false claims of election fraud and differences in the online conversations in English versus Spanish. The Midterm Monitor is a joint project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy [...]
Russia Monitored Russian accounts tweeted 17,095 times from October 26 to November 1, receiving 185,704 retweets and 555,136 likes. Russian propagandists posted more than 1,400 tweets mentioning “Putin” last week after the Russian president gave a [...]