Work

SEP 2026

Anthropic’s pledge to host embedded outside evaluators is a transparency commitment without precedent in tech, even as the rest of Dario Amodei’s call to “pace the frontier” stays aspirational. The risk is cultural capture: the best-qualified evaluators will have close ties to the firms they judge.

WITH GRAHAM BROOKIE, SAFA SHAHWAN EDWARDS, KENTON THIBAUT ET AL.

JUN 2026

For hostile states, social media ad targeting is a weapon, and US law has never given foreign governments such open access to American information infrastructure. The fix is old: the disclosure rules that have governed broadcast advertising since 1971.

APR 2026

Russian intelligence interfered extensively for Viktor Orbán, and only the scale of Tisza’s landslide averted the months of post-election chaos that Russian propagandists and far-right American provocateurs were positioned to orchestrate.

WITH DANIEL FRIED, JÖRN FLECK, EMMA NIX ET AL.

APR 2026

Russian intelligence backed Orbán with astroturfing and social media manipulation, less subtle than usual. Péter Magyar’s decisive win averted an immediate crisis, but a sixteen-year regime takes time to dislodge, and the networks behind it are likely to try again.

WITH DANIEL FRIED, JÖRN FLECK, AND EMMA NIX

APR 2026

State-adjacent Pravda content has reached the Common Crawl archive that feeds large language models, growing from 37 English-language items in late 2024 to roughly 40,000 a year later. Llama 3.1 405B reproduces a false RT biolabs claim from it almost verbatim.

JAN 2026

Russia’s Pravda network publishes millions of articles aimed at AI training data rather than human readers, and its content already turns up in Wikipedia, X Community Notes, and chatbot answers. Nobody can reliably audit what sits inside a deployed model.

WITH TESS DEBLANC-KNOWLES, KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS, RYAN PAN ET AL.

APR 2025

Three experts weigh how the Defense Department should trade speed against security in its communications, after the “Houthi PC small group” Signal chat showed both the appeal of consumer apps and their risk. Behind War on the Rocks’ membership wall.

WITH MACKENZIE EAGLEN AND ERIK SCHUH

MAR 2025

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.

WITH VICTORIA OLARI

JAN 2025

The case for forcing TikTok’s divestment rests on fears of Chinese information manipulation that were never substantiated: only one fake CCP-adjacent account is known to have targeted the 2024 US election. TikTok has failed at transparency, and so has every American platform.

WITH GRAHAM BROOKIE, SHELLY HAHN, KENTON THIBAUT ET AL.

NOV 2024

Foreign interference in the 2024 election already surpasses 2016 and 2020 in sheer volume, led by Russia’s Doppelganger network and its staged videos aimed at the swing states. The election-day falsehoods Americans spread among themselves remain more viral and more dangerous.

WITH DINA SADEK, GRAHAM BROOKIE, AND KENTON THIBAUT

OCT 2024

An open-source database cataloging allegations of foreign interference in the 2024 U.S. election, tracking claims involving Russia, Iran, and China across major platforms. Each entry is scored against an 18-point attribution framework and DFRLab’s six-category Breakout Scale for reach and impact.

WITH MAX RIZZUTO ET AL.

JUL 2024

Kremlin spokespeople and pro-Russian Telegram channels spun the Trump shooting within hours, pushing a Ukrainian link and predictions of American civil war. No large-scale coordinated campaign was found. The propagandists mostly amplified speculation Americans were already producing.

WITH ETO BUZIASHVILI, ANDY CARVIN, AND RUSLAN TRAD

MAY 2024

The State Department’s first cyberspace strategy states the US position clearly against the Chinese and Russian models, but it remains more a statement of purpose than a record of results. Annotated line by line by Atlantic Council technology experts.

WITH SAFA SHAHWAN EDWARDS, ROSE JACKSON, KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS ET AL.

DEC 2023

How platform design shaped the first days of the Israel-Hamas war. Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades posted 6,000 Telegram messages in 72 hours as its subscriber base grew 50 percent; Telegram, X, Meta, and TikTok each produced a distinct, distorted version of the conflict.

WITH LAYLA MASHKOOR AND JACQUELINE MALARET

DEC 2023

The stronger side in a modern war uses conventional power to take the weaker one offline, as Israel did in Gaza by bombing cell towers and winning platform compliance with 94 percent of its takedown requests. Chinese military researchers are studying the same playbook.

WITH P.W. SINGER

OCT 2023

Israel’s information blockade on Gaza will cut off more people at once than any previous wartime shutdown, including Russia’s siege of Mariupol. It will obscure primary-source material from the ground without reducing the volume of pro-Palestinian speech, which will rise as ground operations begin.

WITH DAVID DAOUD, WILLIAM F. WECHSLER, DAVID MACK ET AL.

SEP 2023

The 2023 DoD Cyber Strategy, argue its own drafters, quietly drops decades of “cyber Pearl Harbor” alarmism for modest aims: the Pentagon can’t defend every network, and cyber works only alongside other tools of power.

WITH ERICA LONERGAN

APR 2022

A December 2020 draft executive order would have had the Pentagon seize voting machines nationwide, on the fabricated ground that Dominion Voting Systems was foreign-controlled. Allegations of foreign interference make a better pretext than domestic fraud because they cannot readily be checked.

MAR 2022

Meta’s leaked guidance briefly allowed Ukrainians to call for violence against invading Russian soldiers. A garbled Reuters headline turned it into a pretext for Russia to ban Instagram. No content policy can be precise enough for a war.

DEC 2021

Palestinian speech online is suppressed by a mix of Israeli arrests, platform pressure campaigns, and an expansive definition of antisemitism. The remedy proposed is for social media companies to treat the State of Palestine, recognized by 138 countries, as they treat other states.

WITH ELIZA ASPEN

AUG 2021

The Taliban won a twenty-year information war, moving from night letters and cassettes to coordinated multimedia campaigns while its fundamentalist goals stayed fixed. The militants who entered Kabul in 2021 believed what the ones who fled it in 2001 believed.

MAR 2021

The declassified intelligence assessment of 2020 election interference shows the threat evolving: Russia dropped the WikiLeaks-style cutouts and pitched influence directly to Trump allies, Iran grew more aggressive, and China judged meddling not worth the risk.

MAR 2021

The Election Integrity Partnership’s flagship report on misinformation and the 2020 election, drawing on 859 million collected tweets and 639 incident tickets to trace how the “stolen election” meta-narrative built toward January 6. Brooking co-led DFRLab’s contributing team, one of the partnership’s four institutions.

FEB 2021

A DFRLab timeline tracing the “Stop the Steal” movement from its 2016 origins under Roger Stone to the January 6 Capitol attack: how false claims of a stolen 2020 election, amplified by Donald Trump, converged with hyperpartisan media, the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, QAnon, and the Boogaloo Bois. Written by Jared Holt and edited by a DFRLab team including Brooking.

JAN 2021

The collapse of a shared American political reality, not foreign trolls, is the country’s gravest information threat, and years of domestic disinformation built the “tinderbox of rage and delusion” that produced January 6. Addressing it without overcorrection will be harder, and the United States has a poor record there.

WITH JACOB SHAPIRO

JAN 2021

Facebook and Twitter locked Donald Trump’s accounts only around 4pm on January 6, after the Capitol had already been breached. Flagging posts rather than removing them has limited utility, least of all in fast-moving events where the posts themselves pour gasoline on a fire.

WITH JARED HOLT AND GRAHAM BROOKIE

JAN 2021

The Capitol attack was a victory for the far right, and its images will recruit for a generation. What January 6 produced is a post-Trump extremist movement, more likely than its predecessors to undertake acts of violence.

OCT 2020

The debate over foreign influence operations has hardened into two camps, one warning of an information conflict between democracies and autocracies, the other of a “disinformation industrial complex.” What the field needs is better research standards, less hyperbole, and attention to elections beyond the United States.

OCT 2020

Coverage of the unverified Hunter Biden laptop story reached a partisan audience almost exclusively: 85 percent of the 33 million shares the top stories drew in five days went to adamantly pro-Trump websites. That lopsidedness exceeds even the antifa coverage of June 2020.

SEP 2020

The first FIAT: an interactive, open-source database cataloging allegations of foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Each claim ran through a six-part assessment of its credibility, bias, and evidentiary basis, letting contradictory attributions be weighed side by side.

WITH ALYSSA KANN ET AL.

AUG 2020

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s four-volume report laid out bipartisan recommendations for resisting foreign interference, while a separate Senate probe led by Ron Johnson gave Kremlin-linked operatives a channel for laundering disinformation about Joe Biden. Congress itself has become a vector of attack.

WITH GRAHAM BROOKIE

JUL 2020

Foreign actors adapted American disinformation about antifa during the 2020 George Floyd protests, with an Iranian opposition group seeding claims of Tehran funding and Turkish state accounts tying antifa to Kurdish militants. Both were lobbying efforts built to bypass the US bureaucracy.

WITH ALYSSA KANN AND ZARINE KHARAZIAN

JUN 2020

Far-right activists recast peaceful George Floyd protesters as antifa terrorists, and three-fourths of the 27 million shares of antifa-related content came from right-leaning publications. Trump declared antifa a terrorist organization while the FBI reported no evidence of its involvement.

FEB 2020

How Iran built a digital influence apparatus atop the IRIB’s $750 million broadcasting empire: by January 2020, platforms had attributed 766 Facebook pages with 5.4 million followers and 7,896 Twitter accounts pushing 8.5 million messages to Tehran.

WITH SUZANNE KIANPOUR

FEB 2020

A classification framework comparing 60 political disinformation campaigns across 150 variables spanning target, platform, content, method, and intent. Facebook hosted the most cases; Russian campaigns ran nearly three times the 2.5-year average.

WITH ALYSSA KANN ET AL.

OCT 2019

A new Russian influence operation reached roughly 147,000 US Instagram users and concentrated on the swing state of Florida, running the 2016 playbook of infiltrating both sides of contentious political debates.

AUG 2019

Act.IL, an app that assigns pro-Israel social media “missions” to 17,500 registered users, produced an average of twelve retweets per target during the May 2019 Gaza escalation. Its main effect has been to cast doubt on authentic expressions of Israeli support.

WITH MELISSA HALL

MAY 2019

The United States refused to sign the 2019 Christchurch Call against online extremism, abandoning commitments it had made against ISIS content two years earlier. The only apparent difference is that the terrorists in question are now white ethno-nationalists.

APR 2019

John Earnest posted his manifesto and an 8chan announcement two hours before the April 2019 Poway synagogue shooting, copying the Christchurch attacker’s playbook down to the meme-laden writing and attempted livestream.

APR 2019

Twitter mentions of Candace Owens outpaced mentions of white nationalism after she sparred with Rep. Ted Lieu at an April 2019 hearing on hate crimes, drowning out Google and Facebook testimony on content moderation.

WITH MELISSA HALL

OCT 2018

In 1979, a chain email asking ARPANET researchers their favorite science fiction authors became, in Vint Cerf’s words, proof ‘we had a social medium on our hands’ — the direct ancestor of the internet we know today.

WITH P.W. SINGER

OCT 2018

Clausewitz’s center of gravity, a people’s spirit and will, explains why social media succeeds at wartime persuasion where WWII radio and Vietnam-era leaflets failed. Adapted from LikeWar.

WITH P.W. SINGER

OCT 2018

Americans have stopped paying attention to the longest war in their history. A Taliban assault on a strategic city 75 miles from Kabul drew almost no notice, and the conflict’s one viral moment was mockery of the MOAB’s nickname.

WITH P.W. SINGER

OCT 2018

Michael Flynn grasped early that open-source data had overtaken secrets as the raw material of intelligence. The same online battlefield later helped bring him down. Excerpted from LikeWar.

WITH P.W. SINGER

OCT 2018

The Kavanaugh fight ran on information-war tactics: crowdsourced OSINT into his finances, a doppelganger theory echoing Russia’s MH17 disinformation, and a Wikipedia entry rewritten during his testimony. Such tactics will become the norm.

WITH P.W. SINGER

OCT 2018

How social media changed war and politics — and how war and politics changed social media. LikeWar follows the weaponization of online attention from ISIS’s viral conquest of Mosul through Russia’s operation against the 2016 election, and sets out the rules of a battlefield where virality beats veracity.

WITH P.W. SINGER

JUL 2018

Twitter banned a crowdsourced database of ICE agents, built from public LinkedIn profiles, as “doxing,” then suspended accounts that shared Stephen Miller’s phone number. The platforms already make political choices and should stop pretending otherwise.

WITH P.W. SINGER

DEC 2016

Presidents expect fast, iterative options; the military delivers fully staffed plans on a slower clock. This CFR report addresses the mismatch with six fixes, from terminology training to clearer lines between formal orders and informal requests.

WITH JANINE DAVIDSON AND BENJAMIN FERNANDES

NOV 2016

ISIS’s #AllEyesOnISIS propaganda, Russian troll farms and RT disinformation, and China’s two million internet censors are converging into a new kind of information warfare, echoing the nationalism that preceded 1914.

WITH P.W. SINGER

DEC 2015

ISIS uses social media to intimidate with execution videos, reassure with photos of fighters and their cats, and recruit through the glossy Dabiq magazine. Platforms, hackers, and activists are trying to counter all three.

WITH P.W. SINGER

NOV 2015

Hacktivists descended from Anonymous, among them GhostSec and the bot-driven @CtrlSec, have spent a year flagging Islamic State accounts and passing leads to US intelligence. Banning accounts will not stop the group. The point is to push back.

SEP 2015

A law written for nineteen 9/11 hijackers now underwrites counterterrorism operations in a quarter of the world’s nations. It needs an open congressional debate and a rewrite, not indefinite renewal.

APR 2015

Gallipoli was doomed before the landings began, by Churchill’s unearned faith in naval bombardment and a commander whose only contingency plan assumed success. Eight months of fighting gained four miles of ground.

MAR 2015

A nonprofit foundation sponsored by the anti-Islamic State coalition should pay hacktivists bounties in Bitcoin for identifying and disabling the group’s accounts, recruiting sites, and VPN channels. Washington has armed irregular partners before.

OCT 2014

The Afghan visa program for interpreters who served alongside US forces awarded 32 visas in 2012 against more than 5,700 applicants. It was due to lapse at the end of 2014, with two extension bills stalled in Congress.

WITH JANINE DAVIDSON

JAN 2014

A review of Defense Logistics Agency fuel procurement, covering market engagement, governance structure, and final product distribution. Assesses previously proposed reforms and recommends new ones, drawn from consultation with petroleum industry leaders.

NOV 2013

Post-9/11 veterans aged 18 to 24 face unemployment above 20 percent. The Pentagon’s deepest personnel cuts in decades will send many more of them into that market as federal hiring and the GI Bill erode.

MAY 2011

An evaluation of Roman anti-revolt strategy, 216 BC to AD 72, read through the lens of contemporary counterinsurgency theory. Roman history, economy, values, force disposition, and acculturation practices are weighed in turn, supported by fourteen case studies.