Amazing work by @mantzarlis.com at @indicator.media finding the first evidence of Community Notes manipulation predicted and described in our paper (cited within)!

Washington will require labels on AI images, rein in chatbots New laws will require AI labels on altered media and set limits on chatbot interactions with minors.

Washington state to require AI labels and set limits on chatbots
www.axios.com/local/seattl...

Important report on misinformation on major platforms in Europe: TikTok has the highest prevalence, but things are getting worse on all platforms with growing premium for low-cred accounts, monetization, and unlabeled AI-generated health disinfo.
science.feedback.org/second-measu...

Pro-Kremlin bots cry ‘murder’ ahead of Hungary vote Disinformation watchers warn of an unusually inflammatory campaign ahead of the April 12 election.

Pro-Kremlin bots cry ‘murder’ ahead of Hungary vote
www.politico.eu/article/pro-...

Having "in the era of __" in paper titles has become a cliché in the era of people using chatbots to suggest paper titles.

How cognitive manipulation and AI will shape disinformation in 2026 Advanced AI and synthetic media are spreading disinformation, creating a global crisis that threatens to destabilize modern democracies.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report placed disinformation among the top global risks again in 2026, alongside geoeconomic confrontation and societal polarization. Disinfo catalyzes or worsens all other risks on the list.
www.weforum.org/stories/2026...

Congratulations to my PhD student Isuru Ariyarathne for his #WebSci26 paper. Thank you @osome.iu.edu @fil.bsky.social & Sandro Flammini for their valuable contributions.

Behavior change can be used for identifying social media manipulation
arxiv.org/abs/2603.03128
github.com/wm-newslab/b...

Join us Wednesday at 12pm ET for our final OSoMe Awesome Speaker talk!

🎙️ Alissa Cooper (Knight-Georgetown Institute)
📌 Better Feeds: Algorithms That Put People First

🗓 March 4 | 12pm ET
🔗 Register: iu.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Tapping into his favorite "rigged election" frame, yesterday Trump repeated allegations of Iranian intereference in U.S. elections to justify US/Israeli strikes on Iran. The hypocrisy of those allegations is telling — and hints towards his own interference plans. I wrote this thread into a blog:

This AI-generated podcast network publishes 11,000 episodes a day. It also ripped off media outlets Daily News Now tops search results for local news podcasts with AI content

Rewriting other people's original reporting and clickbait-wrapping the "new" story is not new. But a scumbag operation called "The Daily News Today" is doing it at AI-juiced scale.

Alexios Mantzarlis, one of journalism's expert observers of this stuff, explains here:

How AI is supercharging Russia's online disinformation campaigns Security experts have warned that Western governments are poorly equipped to counter a new frontier of online disinformation.

The AI videos supercharging Russia's online disinformation campaigns
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Epstein who?

OFFS. When Iran tried to interefere in 2020, researchers caught them and called them out. Then the Benz-Weiss-Taibbi-Musk-Jordan-Trump axis labeled those researchers "censors" ... and set about defunding them and dismantling their organizations.

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...

Important experiment showing that social media algorithms do have political effects.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Swarms of AI bots can sway people’s beliefs – threatening democracy A simulation shows that social media bots powered by today’s AI can infiltrate human networks on social media and influence what people believe.

This story via @theconversation.com weaves together research done with @yang3kc.bsky.social @baottruong.bsky.social and several others: 🧪 Swarms of AI bots can sway people's beliefs – threatening democracy

theconversation.com/swarms-of-ai...

Hawaii Deepfake Election Law is Unconstitutional, Court Says (1) Conservative satirical news publication The Babylon Bee LLC won a court order Friday striking down Hawaii’s law regulating AI deepfakes during elections as an unconstitutional violation of the First A...

Is it acceptable to use AI to impersonate a candidate during an election and make it appear as though they did or said something they did not, without disclosing that the video is AI-generated or satire?

news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/h...

An important argument: Internet platforms must be held accountable for their actions, and US attacks against EU transparency and accountability regulations, equating them to "censorship", are ironic given the Trump administration’s own vast record of censorship.

Professors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance’

"Professors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance’"
"Scrutiny of university classrooms is being formalized, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain."
Gift link 🎁
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/u...

Effects of antivaccine tweets on COVID-19 vaccinations, cases, and deaths - EPJ Data Science Despite the wide availability of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States and their effectiveness in reducing hospitalizations and mortality during the pandemic, a majority of Americans chose not to be ...

The link seems to be working now, alternatively you can try link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Fig 1 showing temporal and geographic patterns of antivax tweets from https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00606-1

Fig 2 showing model and results plots from https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00606-1

Does health misinformation kill? Yes.

Our latest paper w/@jmbollenbacher.bsky.social is finally out with evidence of a causal link between exposure to antivax content on Xitter and deaths.

🧪 Effects of antivaccine tweets on COVID-19 vaccinations, cases, and deaths.
doi.org/10.1140/epjd...

Offene Stellen / Open Positions

🚨Job alert 🚨

I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026.

If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026.

📤 Please share widely!

www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...

Targeted digital voter suppression efforts likely decrease voter turnout | PNAS In light of continued foreign interference in the US presidential elections, where undisclosed digital voter suppression advertising has been deplo...

Research showed that political disinformation on social media had negligible effects, but I always wondered if such tiny effects, when targeting battleground states, could influence close elections. A new paper analyzing voter-suppression ads shows this was the case in 2016:

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...