In the past decade, we have seen a significant shift in how governments talk about misinformation. Many countries now consider or intentionally frame misinformation as a matter of national security or public safety in order to justify the passage of new laws that impose penalties for the spread of information deemed false or other administrative… Read more »

A sustained, coordinated social media harassment and doxxing campaign – which we codenamed JUICYJAM – targeting the pro-democracy movement in Thailand has run uninterrupted, and unchallenged, since at least August 2020. Through our analysis of public social media posts we determined that the campaign was not only inauthentic, but the information revealed could not have been reasonably sourced from a private individual.

In an opinion piece in the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, Noura Aljizawi, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, sheds light on the growing threat of disinformation in Syria, even after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. While the end of Assad’s authoritarian rule was celebrated as a victory, Aljizawi warns that disinformation—once the… Read more »

A network of at least 123 websites operated from within the People’s Republic of China while posing as local news outlets in 30 countries across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, disseminates pro-Beijing disinformation and ad hominem attacks within much larger volumes of commercial press releases. We name this campaign PAPERWALL. We attribute the PAPERWALL campaign to Shenzhen Haimaiyunxiang Media Co., Ltd., aka Haimai, a PR firm in China based on digital infrastructure linkages between the firm’s official website and the network. These findings confirm the increasingly important role private firms play in the realm of digital influence operations and the propensity of the Chinese government to make use of them.

Endless Mayfly is an Iran-aligned network of inauthentic websites and online personas used to spread false and divisive information primarily targeting Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel. Using this network as an illustration, this report highlights the challenges of investigating and addressing disinformation from research and policy perspectives.

This report describes an extensive malware, phishing, and disinformation campaign active in several Latin American countries, including Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil. The nature and geographic spread of the targets seems to point to a sponsor, or sponsors, with regional, political interests. The attackers, whom we have named Packrat, have shown a keen and systematic interest in the political opposition and the independent press in so-called ALBA countries (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas), and their recently allied regimes.