Short-form insights and rapid-reaction analysis of breaking news and global events.
Overview On September 29, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden sparred in the first of three (now two) presidential debates. The event, which was labelled a “debacle” and a “total disaster” by the U.S. news media, unsurprisingl [...]
Overview On September 18, 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that new restrictions would be placed on WeChat and TikTok, two social media apps owned by Chinese companies, effectively banning the apps from being downloaded from U.S. app [...]
Thursday, October 1, 2020 | 10:00am-11:00am EDT / 4:00pm-5:00pm CEST / 5:00pm-6:00pm EEST Register here. Please join the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the European Centre of Excellence on Hybrid Threats in Helsinki for a virtual, interactive [...]
Attentive moviegoers who went to see Disney’s reimagined Mulan last week made an unpleasant discovery during the end credits, namely that the corporation thanked several government entities in Xinjiang, home to the Uighur minority that the Chinese g [...]
On Thursday, August 6, the Trump administration announced two executive orders that would bar any transactions with Chinese social media networks TikTok and WeChat by any person or involving any property in subject to the jurisdiction of the United [...]
ASD Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph gives readers a short introduction to his recently released paper Covert Foreign Money: Financial Loopholes Exploited by Authoritarians to Fund Political Interference in Democracies, co-authored with Resear [...]
Overview On August 11, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had approved the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, which it dubbed Sputnik V in reference to the Soviet Union’s famous orbital satellite—the world’s first in 1957. [...]
In August 2020, ASD joined the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) and its other supporting partners on #TrustedInfo2020, an education effort dedicated both to promoting election officials as the trusted sources of election informati [...]
Overview President Trump’s executive order last week outlining plans to effectively ban Chinese short-form video app TikTok from the U.S. market triggered a predictable backlash from China’s state media and government officials, who accused the U.S. [...]
This article was originally published as a GMF Transatlantic Take on July 31, 2020. After the United Kingdom’s parliament released its recent report on Russian interference in British democracy, front-page headlines howled that it damns the governme [...]
In May, just days before the Polish presidential election was scheduled, the coronavirus pandemic and a government-ordered lockdown threw preparations for the election into disarray. The conservative ruling party and its opponents could not agree on [...]
This article was originally published as a GMF Transatlantic Take on July 23, 2020. With mounting evidence that Russia regularly interferes in British democracy while the U.K. government “actively avoids” investigating, the country needs a proven pl [...]
The Trump administration has rhetorically embraced great power competition with the Chinese Communist Party, but last week it took a big step in the wrong direction by gutting the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) in what is being called the “Wed [...]
The Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Authoritarian Interference Tracker maps and catalogs over 400 instances of Russian state-sponsored efforts to undermine democracy in over 40 countries. The Tracker documents five tools authoritarian regimes use [...]
On Tuesday, June 2, 2020, eight states and the District of Columbia held primary elections—the largest number of states to hold elections since the coronavirus pandemic necessitated changes to some states’ planned primaries and voting procedures. In [...]
In November 2019, ASD partnered with Microsoft to launch the Community for Countering Election Interference, a multi-stakeholder forum dedicated both to raising global awareness of the threat cyberattacks pose to elections and other democratic insti [...]
When Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian began tweeting about the origins of the coronavirus in March, it marked a significant turning point in China’s social media disinformation operations. While China has long deployed widespread ce [...]
State and local leaders, in partnership with social media platforms, must prepare the information space for the onslaught of disinformation that epidemic-necessitated changes to the election process could generate. New York democrats may not be cast [...]
Since February of this year, as the coronavirus pandemic has swept the globe, China has been engaging in what media commentators are calling “mask diplomacy”—the sale or donation of medical supplies to countries battling the terrible disease. Russia [...]
On April 15, the French ministry of foreign affairs summoned the Chinese ambassador in Paris. After weeks of incendiary rhetoric from the Chinese delegation, French authorities were incensed by an article on the embassy’s website falsely claiming th [...]
The most recent coronavirus stimulus package signed into law includes $400 million in funds to support state and local government efforts to prevent the coronavirus from impacting the elections process. While more funding will be needed to address t [...]
Over the past three weeks, American and Chinese officials have employed escalating rhetoric in efforts to blame one another for the global coronavirus pandemic. High-ranking U.S. administration officials frequently and pointedly referred to the viru [...]
The coronavirus outbreak has opened up a new chapter in the global information contest between autocrats and democrats. In recent weeks, China has employed increasingly assertive tactics in its efforts to shape perceptions of the crisis. Data collec [...]
The global coronavirus pandemic has also spawned an epidemic of online disinformation, ranging from false home remedies to state-sponsored influence campaigns. In the confusing environment, false medical theories have even found accidental legitimiz [...]
As COVID-19 has spread around the world, the Chinese party-state’s international propaganda apparatus has swung into action. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda outlets are using declining numbers of COVID-19 sufferers inside China to por [...]
Beginning in late January, when news emerged of a “novel coronavirus” spreading through China, Beijing’s propaganda apparatus shifted into overdrive. The epidemic has also been heavily covered in externally-directed Russian state-backed media outlet [...]
Walking around China, the ubiquity of German cars on Chinese streets is astounding. Audi and Mercedes are everywhere in affluent cities; Volkswagens take their place in smaller municipalities. This anecdotal observation is reflected in the spectacul [...]
As has become the norm in moments of international crisis, the fallout from the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani last month unleashed a flood of disinformation onto social media. In crisis environments, where unconfirmed facts of even benign or [...]
Deepfake technology that uses artificial intelligence to create and modify videos, images, and audio recordings to place individuals in situations they were never in, or put false words in their mouths, has burst onto the scene as the latest technol [...]
Deepfake technology that uses artificial intelligence to create and modify videos, images, and audio recordings to place individuals in situations they were never in, or put false words in their mouths, has burst onto the scene as the latest technol [...]
Overview In a year featuring a presidential impeachment, Brexit, mass protests in Hong Kong, and widespread geopolitical turmoil, few topics dominated the Russian government-funded media landscape quite like the arrest and subsequent suicide of bil [...]
The United States Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, an annual bill designating funding for the Department of Defense, on a bipartisan basis. Priorities outlined in the NDAA will drive important elements of [...]
The Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Director of National Intelligence, Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Age [...]
There is an emerging recognition in Western capitals that Russian strategic economic coercion and malign financial activity threaten to undermine the rule of law, weaken democracy, and meaningfully affect American and European politics. This underst [...]
Overview On October 6, President Trump announced a U.S. withdrawal from northern Syria, leading to a week-long Turkish offensive against the Syrian Kurds. Since the announcement, Russian media and diplomats have doubled-down on their Syria coverage [...]
Last month, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released volume two of its investigation into Russian interference, which details an extensive campaign that aims to sow division and undermine American democracy via social media. One of [...]
Austrian voters delivered a heavy electoral blow to the Austrian far right Freedom Party (FPÖ) this weekend. According to the final result, the FPÖ ’s vote share dropped almost ten percentage points since elections last year. The FPÖ’s poor showing [...]
Overview The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has engaged in a prolonged effort to create a version of Russian history free “from internal contradictions and ambiguities.” But attempts to airbrush Russian history have recently become a messa [...]
Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $250 million in funds to support state and local government efforts to strengthen election security ahead of the 2020 elections. The Committee’s action is an acknowledgment that securing electi [...]
In March, the European Union passed a regulation, the most binding legal instrument at its disposal, to strengthen foreign-investment screening processes throughout the union. The law came into force in April, and member states have until October 20 [...]