Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American millennials By Donie O’Sullivan, Drew Griffin, Curt Devine and Atika Shubert, CNN, February 16, 2019 Three online video channels designed to appeal to millennials have collected tens of millions of views on Facebook since September. But the pages pushing the videos do not disclose that they […]Read More

A Newsletter of Political Warfare, Influence, and Information Campaigns from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University Sign up for the Active Measures Newsletter here.  Top stories for this week: Private Mossad For Hire | Adam Entous & Ronan Farrow | The New Yorker Russia is Backing a Viral Video Company Aimed at American Millennials | Donie O’Sullivan, Drew […]Read More

Lithuania fears Russia will attempt to sway its elections Andrius Sytas, Reuters, February 5th 2019 VILNIUS (Reuters) – Lithuania’s intelligence agencies fear Russia will interfere in its forthcoming elections, including one in May to find a successor to the staunchly anti-Kremlin president, Dalia Grybauskaite. The Baltic state, ruled from Moscow for much of the 20th […]Read More

Researchers create ‘malicious’ writing AI Dave Lee, BBC News, February 15, 2019 The article follows – see an example at the bottom of this post. A team of researchers who have built an artificially-intelligent writer say they are withholding the technology as it might be used for “malicious” purposes. OpenAI, based in San Francisco, is a research institute backed by Silicon Valley luminaries including Elon Musk and […]Read More

Facebook Toughens Political Ad Policies in India Ahead of ElectionReuters on the New York Times, February 7th, 2019Facebook Inc is toughening up the rules governing political advertisements in India to create more transparency ahead of the country’s general elections due before May, the social media giant said late on Thursday. A Call to Putin, and […]Read More

Fake news threatens our businesses, not just our politics Matthew F. Ferraro and Jason C. Chipman, Outlook Section of the Washington Post, February 8th, 2019How trolls and profiteers use disinformation to affect the market. We’ve now begun the second presidential campaign of the “fake news” era. Fake news — intentionally misleading misinformation dressed up like […]Read More

Dispatch from the Alliance for Securing Democracy Our Take:Updates to the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Authoritarian Interference Tracker highlight Russian state-sponsored media outlets’ efforts to discredit adversaries and to manipulate social media using inauthentic accounts. News and Commentary: Federal, state officials ramp up efforts to secure 2020 elections: U.S. officials from the Department of Justice […]Read More

Former Fox News reporter named to lead counter-propaganda efforts at State By Kylie Atwood, Michelle Kosinski, and Jennifer Hansler, CNN, February 7th, 2019 The State Department on Thursday announced that a former Fox News reporter would lead its agency in charge of efforts to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation. Lea Gabrielle will become the special […]Read More

Trends in the Diffusion of Misinformation on Social Media Three researchers, Allcott, Hunt & Gentzkow, Matthew & Yu, Chuan just published this article. The authors took a look at 569 sites previously identified as sources of fake news from January 2015 to July 2018.  They measured the volume of Facebook engagements and Twitter shares for […]Read More

Case Studies of Malicious Social Media Use BBC Monitoring tracks thousands of international media outlets, including hard-to-reach broadcast sources, to report news from and about the world’s media and social media. NATO’s Center for Excellence for Strategic Communication highlights the work of BBC Monitoring (BBCM) in a recently released report. Set up at the outbreak […]Read More