🧵Here's a little thread on the campaign exposed by @whljustin.bsky.social, and the interesting, if surreal, figure that apparently runs it.

This must be the weirdest disinformation network and actor I have seen in a long time. Glad I could comment on @whljustin.bsky.social ‘s story about it. Ever see pro-China disinfo sites run by a supposed priest/diplomat/journalist who once posed as a NZ spy and triggered a fake scandal? Read on.

🧵Remember PAPERWALL, the sprawling disinfo network we @citizenlab.ca exposed in 2024 as run by a Chinese firm, Haimai? 2 full years later, it's still very active and expanding. In its quest to cover the whole globe, it is now focusing also on Australia, New Zealand, and India. Readers? Still zero.

As many are aware by now, @accessnow.org 's annual @rightscon.org was cancelled because of pressure on the host govt Zambia 🇿🇲 by China 🇨🇳 www.rightscon.org/rc26-stateme... In their statement, @accessnow.org rightly flags this is as an example of transnational repression

New: Access Now says its RightsCon conference in Zambia was cancelled following pressure from Beijing. Our story: www.reuters.com/world/china/... Access Now statement: www.rightscon.org/rc26-statement

Let’s hope Apple’s Next CEO doesn’t take @wired.com literally

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

“TikTok said in a statement that it conducted a careful review of the 304 accounts and found “zero indication of covert influence operations.” […] the accounts were spammers attempting to mine engagement.” And in terms of their generated damage, the difference is?

"that other stuff" probably includes deep analysis and reflection on whether we should indiscriminantly surveil fellow human beings

Influence ops aren’t only done to win elections - or wars. [Whispers] Maybe not even mainly for that. And social media… have almost nothing “social”, or real, left.

11/ Help starve the ADINT dragnet. Do this now: iPhone: ⚙️Settings➡️Privacy & Security➡️ Tracking Turn off "Allow Apps to Request to Track" Android: ⚙️Settings➡️Privacy ➡️ Ads ➡️Delete Advertising ID It's only a beginning, but you don't owe any of these companies a drop of your data.

💥Orbán’s intelligence agencies have been secretly using Webloc — a mass surveillance tool that tracks hundreds of millions of people via smartphone advertising data — making Hungary the first confirmed EU country to deploy it, in likely violation of GDPR.

“Mossad’s intel indicated that […] with the impetus of the spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the IR opposition to overthrow the regime.” Who was the intended audience of PRISONBREAK and other ops? Iranians, or Americans?

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...