Authoritarian regimes and their proxies use social media, other online information platforms, and traditional media to attempt to shape global and domestic narratives; to sow chaos and confusion in democracies; and to undermine democratic processes. Find ASD’s work on the many ways malign actors manipulate information to interfere in democracies, including by spreading disinformation, on this page.
Taiwan’s Election: 2024’s Canary in the Coal Mine for Disinformation against Democracy
As we step into 2024, an unprecedented four billion people globally are gearing up to participate in what is set to be the largest election year in history. At the forefront of this democratic marathon is Taiwan, whose January elections not only ina [...]
Push and Poll: How Search Engines Reflected and Relegated Polish State-Backed Media in the 2023 Election
Since coming to power in 2015, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party has eroded media freedom and pluralism, taking over public media and hindering independent outlets. While PiS’s control of the information environment via television, radio, and pri [...]
David Levine and Louis Savoia in the Fulcrum: Slovakia’s election deepfakes show how AI could be a danger to US elections
In the days leading up to Slovakia’s highly contested parliamentary election, deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence spread across social media. In one posted by the far-right Republika party, Progressive Slovakia leader Michal Šimečka appa [...]
Peter Benzoni at Politifact’s United Facts of America: How Russian falsehoods spread to U.S. through faux local news
Investigative Data and Research Analyst Peter Benzoni presented ASD's findings about Russian propaganda bypassing content bans and posing as local news sources at Politifact's 2023 United Facts of America. watch here The views expressed in GMF p [...]
An autocratic opening: Russian, Chinese, and Iranian messengers capitalize on the Israel-Hamas War
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 [...]
Nathan Kohlenberg in Haaretz: How Twitter’s Community Notes Accelerates Denialism About Hamas Atrocities Against Israelis
The Community Notes feature was supposed to shut down conspiracy theories on X, formerly Twitter. Instead Elon Musk's preference for crowdsourced moderation is allowing malicious users to weaponize hatred, lies and disinformation about the October 7 [...]
Key Findings from the New Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard
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 [...]
Assessing the Risk of Foreign Influence in UK Search Results
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 [...]
How Kremlin narratives about Ukraine spread (or don’t) on U.S. political podcasts
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 [...]
Meta Report Highlights Lack of Cross-Platform Coordination on Information Operations
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 [...]
5 Takeaways from the War in Ukraine: Military Bloggers Dashboard
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 [...]
Russian State Media Is Not Rushing to Threads Despite Platform’s Lax Regulations
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 [...]