1/ I spoke with The New York Times for their new story on the “liar’s dividend” in times of war — the ability not to trick audiences with AI-generated content, but to dismiss real one as AI-generated.

1/ I have a huge amount of respect for my former colleagues investigators at Meta who did the hard and smart work behind this new Adversarial Threat Report. And I find what’s in it really important and interesting. But I have questions for the company.

More spyware fallout in Italy 🇮🇹 following WhatsApp & Apple notifications & @citizenlab.ca investigations Prosecutors' team confirms journalist @fcancellato.bsky.social's phone hacked with Paragon spyware @lorenzofb.bsky.social with details; stay tuned for more techcrunch.com/2026/03/05/i...

Trump has invoked Iran’s past attempts to influence US elections as a justification for war. But his administration has decimated CISA and stopped the FBI from investigating foreign election interference, writes Paul M. Barrett. Is Trump building a case to intervene in future elections?

“Look what we found after having wiped out our Trust & Safety guardrails, the teams deploying them, and all connections with civil society!” Note: all accounts we reported on (#JUICYJAM, #PRISONBREAK, even older #HKLEAKS stuff) are still visible on the platform — some also very active to this day.

Several years from now, a thoughtful scholar will write a book called “Trump’s Willing Executioners” about how a nation of 340 million descended into abject depravity.

If only regular people would read this and realize “Well, maybe he’s not really in it for my best interest.”

An ICE detainee in Arizona has died of a TOOTH INFECTION after it went untreated for weeks, a local official says. He was a Haitian asylum seeker imprisoned in Florence, Arizona. @emilybregel.bsky.social reports. tucson.com/news/local/b...

1/ NEW: There’s currently a heavy push over X in support of (1) the ongoing attacks on Iran (2) Reza Pahlavi. It’s hard to quickly quantify this wave, but anecdotal evidence shows that the main support hashtags - as well as by the *real* people promoting them - are also pushed inorganically.

It is just a half sentence, but I still find it strangely infuriating that Trump is using the argument that Iran could threaten 'our good allies in Europe' as part of the reasoning for this war he started.

NEW – “Not Safe for Politics: Cellebrite Used on Kenyan Activist and Politician Boniface Mwangi” New research shows that Kenyan authorities used Cellebrite’s forensic extraction tools to access activist Boniface Mwangi’s phone. Read: citizenlab.ca/research/cel...

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns”.

Every now and then we should pause and wonder: was the internet supposed to be this? Do I really need *this* internet in my life?

We also happen to know this about Homan: abcnews.go.com/Politics/doj...

I truly wonder if the many decent, honest people serving in any capacity under this draft-dodging coward realize how his vileness reflects on them in the eyes of the many countries who gave lives, limbs, blood, and suffering fighting along and for them. And when they’ll make their voice be heard.

PM Carney 🇨🇦gave a courageous speech with a lot of real-talk about the "rupture" in the international order. But he left something out: the values that define us as a country & distinguish us from the fascist train wreck in the US 🇺🇸 My oped w Jason Stanley www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

NEW 🚨 @citizenlab.ca report: Cellebrite forensic data extraction tool used against Jordanian civil society citizenlab.ca/research/fro...

Citizen Lab sr. researcher @fittarelli.com speaks with the @tbij.bsky.social about ‘wikilaundering’ by bad actors intending to spread #disinformation. Read the article: www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026...

I struggled for a while with the meaning of “less-lethal”, then realized it’s the same hypocrisy as “alt right”.

Our PRISONBREAK report @citizenlab.ca is cited in this new NYT story on the manipulation of narratives surrounding the Iranian protests.

Wikipedia was created 25 years ago, today – since then it’s become the largest collection of relatively reliable knowledge in history But how vulnerable is it to those willing to pay top dollar to polish their reputations? And how do British PR firms help them do it?

If you want to know about the future of AI, take a look at the kaleidoscope of disinfo and psychological operations underway in Iran 🇮🇷 This excellent piece by @mahsaalimardani.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com is a great start www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

True leadership - right here.

Great investigation by Claire Wilmot at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism on Portland, a firm specializing in “reputation management”… by hiding negative stories through surreptitious editing of Wikipedia articles. Glad to have contributed with a couple of quotes on this one.

Let me be *really* clear. Confirmation bias is NOT believing your eyes when you have multiple clear data sources *all* confirming what they see. Check the bodycam footage. Check the NYT multi-angle reconstruction, and the witnesses statements. This was plain murder.

The Trump regime's withdrawal from international "cyber" orgs will weaken cybersecurity coordination and help spread authoritarianism. [precisely what they probably want to happen] My comments to @timstarks.bsky.social @cyberscoop.bsky.social cyberscoop.com/trump-pulls-...

“It is about preventing the world from turning into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want.”

Neat idea for sure, but too bad about the censorship on the backend b/c it uses China's 🇨🇳 DeepSeek

1/ Russian disinfo sponsors can’t believe their luck at the chaos spurred by their American counterparts. Not only politicians, but their tech enablers too, of course. Meet “Budjetti”. “She” is on X, of course. Openly antisemitic, racist, anti-Ukraine. And completely unchallenged.

Bloomberg's X account has more than 800k followers. Their most recent post was shared five times It would basically come at close to zero cost for outlets like Bloomberg to delete their X accounts, and "We don't want to use a non-consensual deepfake abuse app as a comms platform" is a fine excuse

Nazis don’t know decency.

Two stories side by side in WashPost

MIT Technology Review profiles @rondeibert.bsky.social, who understood that civil society needed digital defense long before just about anyone else and has been doing it ever since. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/24/1...

I’ll just note that the US didn’t do this to China, which outright bans US social media websites

"There's basically an economy around disinformation now" Maybe now could be the right time to start asking politicians and your organisation's social teams why they're actively assisting monetised disinformation schemes by retaining their accounts at X and doing free volunteer work by posting there

“Report on that fact”. That’s all that needs to be said.

Just to be clear: if 'no one was ready' a lot of people fucked up, bc those of us who work on this laid out what was going to happen 8yrs ago. The twofold issue that 1)it's not just a tech problem, and 2) Big Tech allowed itself to be ref-worked into spinelessness. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/t...

OpenAI's Sora 2 ultrarealistic (but fake) AI videos used by Russian disinformation operations, who could have predicted it?!? www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-...

Get off X. If you’re there for the audience, you’re just damaging your own optics.

1/ Yesterday’s Q2-Q3 Adversarial Threat Report by Meta was interesting in many ways. For us @citizenlab.ca, it was a blast from the past. For the first time, Meta’s investigators attributed what in 2019 we had named Endless Mayfly - a relentless, sophisticated influence op targeting Iran’s enemies.

In 2019, we @citizenlab.ca published an investigation into a disinfo / influence operation we called "Endless Mayfly", and which we attributed at the time to an "Iran-aligned entity" citizenlab.ca/2019/05/burn... Now, Meta's latest adversarial threat report showing we were spot on 👇

We condemn the ongoing targeting of exiled #HongKong activist #CarmenLau, who has faced persistent transnational repression since fleeing her home four years ago. Most recently, her neighbours were sent fake, sexually explicit images of her: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Textbook transnational repression targeting @carmenlau.bsky.social and once again, belittling *women* who bravely stand up to autocracy.

Can disinformation become sabotage? Yes. I posted about the Syrian Electronic Army yesterday: remember when they crashed the Dow Jones with a single tweet in 2013? Disrupting financial markets and rail infrastructure doesn’t differ in principle. Unrestrained AI use makes it only much easier now.

There goes “Th3 Pr0”, lead in one of the earliest online influence ops to catch the attention of the “West”. “Ahmad Al Agha, one of the purported leaders of the hacker group, Syrian Electronic Army, appeared in federal court last month after being pursued by the law enforcement for eleven years.”

It is good to see enforcement of the EU Digital Services Act against X. We need more principled democratic governance of tech platforms, and penalties for non-compliance 1) Elon Musk’s X Hit With $140 Million Fine in Europe www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/t...

While "peace" negotiations continue, remember that Russia could simply stop the war at any time.

Press friends, please. Whenever you see a new report on [hundreds of] false news websites run by [foe], before typing that headline, ask: what’s their impact? I.e.: did they fail at attracting anyone like #PAPERWALL, for example? Make it clear. Their first goal may be to be amplified by *you*.

#TaiPo fire: Took 4 days to arrive here: Man arrested for sedition. HKFP understands is the student who made "4 demands" of the authorities: hongkongfp.com/2025/11/30/h... Beijing warns "anti-China disrupted" they'll face the "full force" of the security law: hongkongfp.com/2025/11/29/b...

“DARVO (an acronym for "Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender") is a reaction that perpetrators of wrongdoing may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior.”