My interest is attention.
Its manipulation, commodification, and use as a weapon.
Since 2019, I've served as resident senior fellow and in various leadership positions at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, where I direct efforts to identify and disrupt hostile state influence operations. I've also worked to increase the accountability and transparency of large technology companies, and most recently to ensure that the AI revolution advances the public interest.
I regularly write and speak on topics relating to US defense policy, information warfare, and AI. I am the coauthor of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (2018). From 2022 to 2023, I served as cyber policy advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the US Department of Defense.
I try to take a long view of technological developments. Things can always get weirder or worse. Indeed, they often do both.
NPR · JUN 2026
Kalshi and Polymarket crack down on paid influencers claiming election fraud
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR · MAY 2026
With viral ‘Lego’ videos, Iran stakes claim as a propaganda power player
THE INTERCEPT · APR 2026
These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations
| FEATURE | Exploitable by Design: Social Media and the AdTech Threat Argues unregulated ad-targeting, not the platforms, let Russia’s 2015-2017 Facebook campaign reach 126 million Americans for about $100,000, and that Congress banning TikTok while letting the Honest Ads Act die every session since 2017 is a double standard, not a security policy. | AMERICAN AFFAIRS (external) JUN 2026 |
| REACTION | Experts react: Hungary just voted out Viktor Orbán. Here’s what to expect in Europe and beyond. Brooking’s section, “Europe has dodged a bullet,” argued Russian intelligence had interfered extensively for Orbán through astroturfing and social-media manipulation, and that only the scale of Tisza’s landslide victory averted the political chaos Moscow and Trump-aligned Americans were positioned to exploit. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) APR 2026 |
| REACTION | Fast Thinking: Orbán’s out in Hungary. Now what? Under “The losers,” Brooking reported that Russian intelligence had interfered extensively for Orbán via astroturfing and social-media manipulation; under “The aftermath,” he warned that the sixteen-year regime’s networks would likely try again despite Magyar’s decisive win. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) APR 2026 |
| INVESTIGATION | Pravda in the Pipeline: Early Evidence of State-Adjacent Propaganda in AI Training Data A Common Crawl audit finds Pravda propaganda archived 40,000 times by late 2025 (up from 37 a year earlier); Llama 3.1 405B reproduced a false RT bioweapons-lab claim from the archive nearly verbatim. | DFRLAB (external) APR 2026 |
| REACTION | Eight ways AI will shape geopolitics in 2026 Opening the roundup under “AI poisoning goes mainstream,” Brooking argued that Russia’s Pravda network, which publishes millions of articles across more than eighty countries to target AI training data rather than human readers, has already gotten its content cited in Wikipedia, X Community Notes, and chatbot answers — a problem he predicted would break into the mainstream in 2026. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) JAN 2026 |
| REACTION | In Brief: Balancing Speed and Security in Defense Communications Three experts on how the defense enterprise should weigh speed against security in its communications, in War on the Rocks’ members-only In Brief exchange. | WAR ON THE ROCKS (external) APR 2025 |
| INVESTIGATION | Cross-Platform Campaign Sows Anti-Europe Division in Moldova A Telegram hub called ‘Forbidden Channel’ coordinated 4,484 fake Facebook and Telegram accounts posting 15,000+ comments to brand President Maia Sandu corrupt and cast EU integration as a threat to sovereignty. | DFRLAB (external) MAR 2025 |