The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, according to current and former U.S. officials. If approved, the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation.

In July 2021, as Covid-19 cases began to surge again, the surgeon general warned that misinformation had led to “avoidable illnesses and death” and urged the nation’s social media giants to do more to fight the sources of it.

“We’re asking them to operate with greater transparency and accountability,” the official, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said at the White House.

Soon after ChatGPT debuted last year, researchers tested what the artificial intelligence chatbot would write after it was asked questions peppered with conspiracy theories and false narratives.

The results — in writings formatted as news articles, essays and television scripts — were so troubling that the researchers minced no words.

Try to imagine having a young child die in a horrific mass shooting. Now, imagine spending a decade being attacked and mocked by a mob of nutjobs who claim your child never even existed. These people show up at your home, demanding to see your now-murdered child. Some even go so far as to make rape threats and desecrate your baby’s grave.

All of these things happened in real life. And responsibility for all of those horrors that came after the massacre can be attributed to the repeated actions of one man: Alex Jones.

In this country, there are only so many ways to deal with a man like Alex Jones.

On Wednesday, a jury in Connecticut tried its best to force the Infowars host and owner to face consequences for the hurt that his lies have caused others, ordering Jones to pay $965 million to relatives of victims of a 2012 mass shooting and an FBI agent he accused of all being actors.

In an interview with “PBS NewsHour,” trial lawyer Jesse Gessin described the nearly $1 billion judgment as “probably one of the largest defamation verdicts in U.S. history.”

James Madison never met Alex Jones. This side of heaven, we'll never know whether the author of the First Amendment would've listened to Jones' outlandish radio show. But Jones now knows that James Madison's hand-crafted First Amendment umbrella protects most—though not all—speech. On Wednesday, a jury awarded the parents of the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting $1 billion in damages; Jones had called the shooting a hoax and the parents crisis actors. The verdict followed a smaller but just as significant Texas jury verdict against Jones' lies about Sandy Hook.

As the midterm elections approach in the US, the wave of false claims surrounding the vote is a reminder of how hard it is to combat fake news. Does Finland have the answer?

A few hours after Vladimir Putin called up 300,000 military reservists in September, a video showing long queues of cars at the Finnish-Russian border started circulating on social media.

The Finnish Border Guard was quick to point out it was fake.

BitChute and Odysee serve up conspiracies, racism and graphic violence to millions of viewers. Taking advantage of Big Tech disinformation crackdowns and the rise of Trump, the sites reflect a new media universe – one where COVID-19 is fake, Russia fights Nazis in Ukraine, and mass shootings are ‘false flag’ operations.

A day after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York last May, the video-sharing website BitChute was amplifying a far-right conspiracy theory that the massacre was a so-called false flag operation, meant to discredit gun-loving Americans.

They couldn’t handle the truth.

The Biden administration has “paused” its controversial plans to create a Disinformation Board, causing its would-be leader to resign. 

The Department of Homeland Security will pause the work of a controversial board to coordinate efforts to battle disinformation, saying that while its work was “grossly and intentionally mischaracterized” the “false attacks have become a significant distraction.”

Its leader, disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, will also resign from the department.

Designed as a way to coordinate efforts across the department with disparate missions, the Disinformation Governance Board prompted attacks from Republicans and civil rights groups alike.