NEW: A mass propaganda event is about to engulf the US news cycle and what, if anything, survives it will be a lesson for our times. But it’s what the rest of the world does now that’s key. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-threat...

Well, I have hit the wall. I do not want to be a “political communication” scholar anymore.

The most disturbing presidential press conference I have ever seen. fallows.substack.com/p/blind-into... (First 3/4ths before paywall.)

"The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable & most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him." apnews.com/article/trum...

I hope history remembers Jack Smith's succinct answer about what caused the attack on the US Capitol on Jan 6.

"Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power."

Scholars who do historical research, eat your Wheaties (or whatever else fuels you). In the year of the nation's 250th birthday, there will be all sorts of nonsense that we will counter-program with actual history.

This framework is very relevant now. With elections ahead in Bangladesh, uncertainty, low trust and emotion fuel rumors. For journalists, these 10 factors work as a practical checklist to avoid amplifying misinformation.

On Jack Smith deposition, now released: 100% obvious why GOP refused to allow this as open testimony, aired live. It's damning. Testimony from John Dean or Alex ("wiretaps") Butterfield in Watergate days would have 1/10th the impact if just in print. What Smith says is far more incriminating.

BREAKING: The House Judiciary Committee has released Jack Smith's 255-page deposition transcript: judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

Another great @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social investigation into Meta, this one about the company's secret playbook for deceiving and manipulating the regulators investigating its massive scam problem www.reuters.com/investigatio...

The rumors about daycare centers are extremely "fit" for virality: having both novelty & familiarity (drawing on anti-immigrant tropes of criminality & exploitation); making emotional/identity appeals; are *participatory* in that ppl can create their own “evidence” by investigating local centers.

An excellent op-ed by @attorneynora.bsky.social laying out the Trump admin’s campaign of censorship. In her full report (www.freepress.net/download/cho...), she chronicles ~200 instances of attempted censorship this year. It’s incredibly important reading. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/o...

Ruby on the Seattle waterfront on a perfect winter’s day.

Nick Shirley (producer of the video sparking the Minnesota daycare fraud GOP media bonanza) has had previous rounds of attention from right wing media and elites for his production of misleading anti-immigrant propaganda. Here's a story from ~2 years ago (when we were still anonymizing his name):

Banning people who study propaganda from the country, while bringing known propagandists back in. Merry Christmas, everybody!

Contrast this with how this same administration has revoked visas for researchers studying how information ecosystems are manipulated (including by foreign actors like Russia). Seems strange that they welcome back the manipulators and attack those working to identify and call them out.

Shirley honed his craft making misleading videos about immigrants in 2024, taking comments out of context, using deceptive cuts, and overlaying transcriptions/translations that often distorted what his subjects had actually said. Seems like he’s moved on to using unvetted (false) witness statements.

One of the most successful propaganda campaigns of our time is the right-wing claim that liberals dominate the media. The right has pushed this myth for decades on Fox and other outlets. You know about it because RIGHT-WING MEDIA HAVE A HUGE MEGAPHONE. My thread. 1/10 🧵

Requested a correction from @princetonupress.bsky.social. Let's see what happens.

Another example of how the U.S. political right appropriates digital tools, platforms, and data to create, (re)frame, and remix data visualizations to spread anti-immigrant propaganda. If you're interested in learning more, here's a paper from my research team: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

The celebration and digital metastasization of conspiratorial thinking culminating with the U.S. head of health and human services believing that and governing as if modern diseases don’t emerge naturally, pandemics are all manmade, and science (not the complexities of nature) is to blame.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stated that the 1918 flu pandemic was caused by a lab virus from vaccine research, a defective influenza vaccine. Let’s analyze what a lie this is. First, in 1918, 107 years ago, virology was in its infancy

Remember: When Tylenol was poisoned *by an outsider* and killed people, the company recalled all their products & redesigned them. When Intel’s Pentium had a bug so obscure it affected 1 in _9 billion_ long division calculations, they recalled their chips. ChatGPT was made deadly *by its team*.

Barely a blip in the news. 🦗from the New York Times editorial and opinion pages. Compare with days of Hunter Biden Hysteria about unprecedented abuse of the pardon power.

Make sure and support organizations in your state that do civic education and voter outreach! They are operating on limited budgets making a difference deepening democracy on issues just like this. #NewPAProject

Post-doc positions: "Academic freedom is under pressure today. This requires rescue havens of free research. ... [we] invite early career researchers, whose work is restricted due to political pressure in the USA..." uni-freiburg.de/frias/call-f...

Massive comms challenge for people who care about voting rights and 2026: make sure people understand these new voter suppression laws re: the timing of mail in voting so that their votes won't be lost — esp. difficult because the laws vary across states, creating ambiguity that can be exploited.

Until Trump began conspiracies about mail voting, Republicans were fully on board with GRACE PERIODS for ballots to arrive as long as postmarked by Election Day. They passed it overwhelmingly in KS, OH, & elsewhere. But now Trump hates it. So 4 red states—KS, OH, ND, UT—all banned it this year.

Some ~personal news~

The U.S. government bans 5 people from the country, alleging “Murthy-style speech suppression.” Masnick: “So the State Department is citing a case that disproved government censorship as evidence of government censorship. That’s not even creative lying — it’s just citing your own loss as precedent.”

Marco Rubio is using real censorship to fight fake censorship www.ms.now/opinion/marc...

Iowa-based journalist Laura Belin compares Bari Weiss' adventures at CBS to Putin's makeover of supposedly independent Russian media, which she covered for RFE-RL twenty years ago. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/25/o...

Good article, but I think we could add that many of the current government officials & influencers spreading political point-scoring falsehoods during crisis events HAVE BECOME gov officials & influencers BECAUSE of their bullshit-spreading talents. System effects of rotten attention dynamics.

Macedo and Lee misrepresent what happened during the pandemic and are unable to confront Covid's actual toll, presumably because it undermines their premise. A longer take here w/my colleague Greg Gibson: joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/revisionis...

For @rollingstone.com I wrote about the mass national movement to ban chemtrails...which don't exist. The movement is one of the ways in which MAHA is taking over the country. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

I did not understand this: one of the five Europeans the US has barred from traveling to the United States...is a permanent resident who lives with his family in the US. Now he is worried about being arrested and deported for the crime of monitoring online hate. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...

Good thing for her she’s not a disinformation researcher.

“The federal government can’t deport a green card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn’t like what he has to say,” the British researcher’s lawyer said. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...

I use the research by CCDH in my own work. This action by US government is shocking and unconstitutional. All researchers are in danger. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...

Former head of trust and safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, demonstrating the intellectual dishonesty of “In Covid’s Wake” by showing how they distorted his own words to make them say the opposite of what he was arguing.

There’s a lesson here about writing in the age of weaponized lies: Always precede false claims with giant red text, ideally wrapped in a <blink> tag, that says “THIS IS A LIE I AM REFUTING!!” But also, why is a book that makes this kind of lazy, bad-faith argumentation getting any accolades at all?

And yet, In Covid’s Wake quotes me as saying that “the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands” — literally the opposite of what I argue — to buttress their claim that the government was too busy censoring speech to adequately deal with the pandemic.

A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!

Behind the scenes of the U.S. government’s anti-immigrant propaganda machine.

Axios has learned the White House has begun managing the DOJ's account on X to respond to posts highlighting mentions of Trump in the Epstein files. In typical administrations, there is a wall between the White House and what is supposed to be an independent Justice Department.

After Jan 6, the U.S. far right had to find a frame that could distract and shift blame from their election fraud lies. They settled on “censorship” — which made their lying villains into “free speech” heroes, and allowed them to target all of the people and orgs that tried to hold them to account.

“I’m 84 years old. Threats against my life expectancy are kind of hollow. I don’t have much time anyway. I’m more concerned that our democracy is at risk because of the trends against the rule of law.” www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...

The US has sanctioned European researchers and policymakers studying misinformation, framing independent inquiry as a free speech violation. The Trump admin's refusal to allow regulation of platforms is US tech policy by other means—now being enforced through sanctions. Scholars must pay attention.