New: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is" www.404media.co/it-is-trivia...

"Man posted support for Ukraine days before leaving trash in park" vibes from Overload.

Russian IOs are impersonating soccer players. The World Cup has kicked off!

Bummed by this OpenAI report. It's Spamouflage. It's not new and it's not impactful. If I was cynical, which I'm not, I'd say this report was just meant to stir up anti-China sentiment. openai.com/index/prc-li...

Wonder if this says anything about the ops production timeline. I remember its Kirk narrative coming about 2 months after that incident, too.

Reuters reported that Russia plans "to transport tens of thousands of Russian-Armenians to sway ‌the vote." Here's a screenshot of Mika Badalyan, a pro-Russia blogger with links to Ilhan Shor, offering to pay for that transportation. www.reuters.com/world/import...

Great piece on Russian IOs targeting Armenia. We're about to publish an in-depth look at these ops and others. But I have to say, @antibot4navalny.bsky.social Matryoshka monitoring is absurd. The amount of energy and expertise needed to find all those posts is wild www.euronews.com/my-europe/20...

My first quote in the New York Times is just me being shocked about something I had no idea was happening. I've done a lot of Overload watching but hearing that it had hijacked accounts for well-known individuals was new--and really concerning. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/b...

You have to pay attention. Russian disinformation can be very subtle.

Shout out to @indicator.media for its guide on Skills in Chrome. I customized a prompt and made this great Obsidian network map in like 5 minutes.

It's nice of TikTok to give us something on the influence operations it sees. But this is as close to nothing as possible.

Gotta love a cross over episode

Stoked to see the New York Times cite our research! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

NEW Conspiracies claiming the attack at the White House Correspondents dinner on Saturday night was STAGED were everywhere online within minutes of the incident happening Like Butler, most of it is coming from the left.... www.wired.com/story/staged...

Iranian embassies and officials on X have shifted from formal diplomatic messaging towards viral “shitposting,” using absurdity, humor and provocation to capture attention. New ISD analysis highlights the significant impact of this shift 👉 www.isdglobal.org/digital-disp...

Put all the stats on Iranian embassies’ shitposting campaigns into one place. Since the war, embassy accounts have increased their volume of posts by 4X, likes by 30X, shares by 16X, and views by 14X. We're talking 900,000 views in 50 days. They found the formula www.isdglobal.org/digital-disp...

Explosive Media seeming a little desperate of late. LEGO videos are only novel for so long.

Iranian diplomats using X to crowdsource soldiers seems bad? Also, spotted some unimpressive CIB around this effort, apparently tied to the Ahlulbait Indonesia.

The Economist cited our findings. On an unrelated note, I'll be retiring now. www.economist.com/culture/2026...

I'm going to continue live tweeting my spreadsheets. Collectively, Iranian diplomats on X have received 30 times more likes since the war began than during the same period before it. It jumped from 660K likes to 21M likes. Stunning numbers.

Iran’s embassy in South Africa gained more views on X in the first 49 days of the war than 150 diplomatic accounts did in the 49 days before the war. A masterclass in shitposting (and potential bot use).

Something big funky going on with Iranian embassy posts. Iran's embassy in Tajikistan posted an AI video of Jesus knocking Trump's head off. It gained 13 million views in a single minute.

Messed around and found a couple pro-Iran networks on X that gained more than a billion (with a B) views in a month. They were boosted by X's For You feed and alerts. Iranian and Russian diplomats reshared them. These are great examples of small networks gaming X. www.isdglobal.org/digital-disp...

Iranian diplomats on X are going insane and putting up insane numbers. It's a total reversal of what they were doing pre-war. Here's the numbers for 125 embassy / diplomatic accounts: 46 days before the war: ~ 500K likes on 9K posts 46 days since the war: ~ 18M likes on 39K posts

I usually don't like to brag, but I can spend full days pulling data, adjusting the query, and pulling it again. That's probably my most valuable skill.

Iranian diplomats on the blockade

BREAKING: Orbán defeated in Hungary after 16 years in power

I'm a huge fan of PBS. It's so cool to see our research, which we'll published a piece on in the next couple days, highlighted in this piece. www.pbs.org/newshour/nat...

Spoke to AFP about how Iran has crafted a wartime propaganda strategy tailored for the age of AI slop. It's amazing how shitposting (and bad US policy) has helped recast one of the world’s most repressive regimes as a witty underdog. www.france24.com/en/live-news...

The numbers in my first post were for the past week. Since the start of the war, Iranian diplomats on X have had 193 posts with 1M+ views. State media has had 14. Wolf warriors are looking very quaint these days.

Very cool minute-by-minute breakdown of how Iran spread a claim that it shot down an F-18. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

1516 is going pretty hard at the Hungarian election. By my count, its volume of campaigns targeting Hungary is roughly on par with the number it carried out ahead of the 2024 US presidential election.

Iranian diplomats are shit posting their way to massive engagement numbers. The Iranian embassy accounts we track on X have nearly 50 distinct posts with over a million views. Iranian state media accounts have hit that number just four times.

SCOOP The Iranian group producing the Trump LEGO videos have a secret weapon.....Americans who send them tips and ideas to make their content better www.wired.com/story/inside...

Iranian diplomats are taking a victory lap

Russia, if you're listening, LEGO videos are big right now, not whatever this animation is.

He's back! And with more 1516

Someone is paying YouTube accounts to post AI-generated videos of Iranian women telling people to visit Iran. There are so many of these.

Spoke to the Observer about the pro-Iran content we're seeing spread across platforms. This is the first time I've worked the word "vibes" into an interview. I'm officially hip and young. observer.co.uk/news/interna...

Iran's LEGO videos put up numbers. But that's an anomaly. Their propaganda and IOs before the war consistently fell flat. So, before we give them credit for studying and learning how to exploit American culture. Maybe we should consider how we've become such an easy target over the past few years.

its_The_Dr's X account is no more. It was one of the most popular accounts that consistently shared Storm-1516 content. But it's not the only one. Last week on a whim, I looked at accounts that shared links to a sample of Copy Cop articles. 50+ accts with over 100K followers that had done so.

It’s a huge moment for pro-BRICS grifting on X. We’re looking into two separate networks: one with ~50 accounts and over 750M views since the war, and another with only 9 accounts and 145M views. Crazy numbers.

This post kinda explains why YouTube did that

Spamouflage finally did it

I just reviewed the 20 most-liked X posts about the bombing of the Iranian girls’ school for each day during the two weeks following the attack. RT appeared on that list more often than any other media outlet. The next closest was Al Jazeera, followed by Reuters.

this is just open and abject corruption, but the way U.S. journalism frames it you'd not really understand that there's anything untoward

Wow, the Russians were only paying $100 a post ahead of the 2024 election. Crazy inflation.

If any of my 16 followers are tech geniuses with a lot of resources, please build a social listening tool that allows people to put images into queries.

X appears to be more responsive to media reports on CIB than in the past. There has been a lot of reporting on Iran's Storm-2035, including from companies like OpenAI, but named X accounts largely stayed up. Many of the accounts cited in Clemson's Storm-2035 report have been taken down, though.

I guess all those people on X who claimed it was an Iranian missile and Bellingcat had lied about it being a Tomahawk are rushing to correct themselves - U.S. at Fault in Strike on School in Iran, Preliminary Inquiry Says www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/u...