Politico:

A pro-Russian propaganda group is taking advantage of high-profile news events to spread disinformation, and it’s spoofing reputable organizations — including news outlets, nonprofits and government agencies — to do so.

According to misinformation tracker NewsGuard, the campaign — which has been tracked by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center as Storm-1679 since at least 2022 — takes advantage of high-profile events to pump out fabricated content from various publications, including ABC News, BBC and most recently POLITICO.

This year, the group has focused on flooding the internet with fake content surrounding the German SNAP elections and the upcoming Moldovan parliamentary vote. The campaign also sought to plant false narratives around the war in Ukraine ahead of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.

McKenzie Sadeghi, AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, said in an interview that since early 2024, the group has been publishing “pro-Kremlin content en masse in the form of videos” mimicking these organizations.’“If even just one or a few of their fake videos go viral per year, that makes all of the other videos worth it,” she said.

While online Russian influence operations have existed for many years, security experts say artificial intelligence is making it harder for people to discern what’s real.

Storm-1679 developed a distinct technique in 2024 for combining videos with AI-generated audio impersonations of celebrity and expert voices, according to Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center….

Glenn Kessler’s final WaPo column as their fact checker:

In reviewing many of the some 3,000 fact checks I have written or edited, there is a clear dividing line: June 2015, the month Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator and announced he was running for president….

In ending its work with fact-checkers, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg falsely claimed that fact-checkers censored free speech by being “too politically biased,” echoing Trump administration arguments. The Washington Post did not participate in the Meta program, but any Facebook user had the option to opt out of having posts fact-checked. Many fact-checkers would liken their work to nutritional labels on snack foods — providing more information about online content. People are free to ignore the warnings, just as people can ignore nutritional labels….

In 2016, Trump’s opponents still cared about the facts. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s (R) campaign had a wall where they posted positive fact checks. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) dropped a talking point simply in response to my question for a possible fact check. Hillary Clinton’s staff worked hard to find policy experts to vouch for her statistics. (Her comments on her private email server were less defensible).

But Trump didn’t care. He kept rising in the polls and eventually won the presidency. Other politicians took notice and followed his lead.

Besides Trump, something else changed the nature of truth in the mid-2010s: the rise of social media. The Fact Checker was launched in 2007, one year after the creation of Twitter and when Facebook had only 50 million users. By 2012, Facebook had 1 billion followers; it reached nearly 1.6 billion in 2015. Trump adroitly used Twitter — where he had 2.76 million followers at the start of 2015 — and other social media to spread his message. Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States was the most talked about moment on Facebook among the 2016 candidates in all of 2015, according to Facebook data.

Social media helped fuel the rise of Trump — and made it easier for false claims to circulate. Russian operatives in 2016 used fake accounts on social media to spread disinformation and create divisive content — tactics that led companies such as Meta to begin to use fact-checkers to identify misleading content. But the political forces which benefited from false information — such as Trump and his allies — led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship. Now tech companies are scaling back their efforts to combat misinformation….

During Trump’s first term, The Fact Checker team documented that he made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims. Week after week, I would write fact checks unpacking his latest misstatements, and Trump generally earned Four Pinocchios — the rating for a whopper. But I sense that the country has gotten so used to Trump exaggerating the truth that it no longer seems surprising. I chose not to repeat the exercise in his second term…

You can find the court’s opinion at this link. The sole basis for the reversal was lack of sufficient evidence that defendant Mackey had conspired with others to deprive people of their right to vote.

The Court did not address the substantive scope of section 241 or address the First Amendment issues with convicting people of depriving others of the right to vote by fraud. I filed an amicus brief with Protect Democracy and the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic on these issues.

I explained those issues in this post:

and in this piece at Slate.

So resolution of these constitutional and statutory issues will await another day.

Thomas Renault , Mohsen Mosleh, and David G. Rand in PNAS:

We use crowd-sourced assessments from X’s Community Notes program to examine whether there are partisan differences in the sharing of misleading information. Unlike previous studies, misleadingness here is determined by agreement across a diverse community of platform users, rather than by fact-checkers. We find that 2.3 times more posts by Republicans are flagged as misleading compared to posts by Democrats. These results are not base rate artifacts, as we find no meaningful overrepresentation of Republicans among X users. Our findings provide strong evidence of a partisan asymmetry in misinformation sharing which cannot be attributed to political bias on the part of raters, and indicate that Republicans will be sanctioned more than Democrats even if platforms transition from professional fact-checking to Community Notes.