Writing

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.

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.

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

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.

WITH DANIEL FRIED, JÖRN FLECK, AND EMMA NIX

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.

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.

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

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.

WITH MACKENZIE EAGLEN AND ERIK SCHUH

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

Ten Atlantic Council experts split on the TikTok Supreme Court case: some cite a CCP-enabled backdoor and surveillance risk, others say the security case was never substantiated and a ban would harm the open internet.

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

DFRLab found 2024 foreign interference outpaced 2016 and 2020: Russia ran Doppelganger, China targeted down-ballot races on X and Facebook over TikTok, and domestic misinformation moved opinion more than either.

WITH DINA SADEK, GRAHAM BROOKIE, AND KENTON THIBAUT

Kremlin spokespeople and Telegram channels spun the Trump shooting within hours, forging a shooter-Ukraine link and reviving civil-war predictions — opportunistic exploitation, not a coordinated campaign, DFRLab found.

WITH ETO BUZIASHVILI, ANDY CARVIN, AND RUSLAN TRAD

The Atlantic Council’s line-by-line markup of the State Department’s first cyberspace strategy, endorsing its digital-solidarity framing while noting it remains, for now, more statement of purpose than actualized impact.

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

How the Israel-Hamas war fused physical and digital fronts: Israel’s 9,500 platform takedown requests (94% granted) and an 80% collapse in Gaza’s internet traffic, prefiguring China’s “cognitive warfare” doctrine.

WITH P.W. SINGER

In a curated X thread headed “Israel’s information blockade on Gaza will challenge how we think about war,” Brooking compared the blockade to Russia’s siege of Mariupol, arguing it would fragment public awareness and obscure primary-source material even as pro-Palestinian speech volume rose, not fell.

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

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

A December 2020 draft executive order would have had the Pentagon seize voting machines nationwide, using fabricated claims that Dominion Voting Systems was foreign-controlled as pretext to federalize the National Guard.

Meta’s leaked guidance briefly allowed calls for violence against Russian soldiers (not POWs) in Ukraine, echoing earlier carve-outs for the Taliban and ISIS — a policy a garbled Reuters headline helped Russia use to ban Instagram.

Israeli security services have arrested roughly 2,000 Palestinians for social media posts since 2017, while pressure campaigns pushed Facebook toward a definition of antisemitism that chills criticism of Israeli policy.

WITH ELIZA ASPEN

Traces two decades of Taliban propaganda, from 2005’s Al Emarah press releases through livestreamed 2015-2016 Kunduz battles, arguing the 2021 takeover was tactical modernization of one message, not a new ideology.

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.

Written in the wake of January 6: Americans spent 2020 fearing foreign election interference — 75 percent told Pew so — while years of domestic disinformation built the “tinderbox of rage and delusion” that produced the Capitol attack.

WITH JACOB SHAPIRO

Under “Are online crackdowns coming?” Brooking noted that Facebook and Twitter locked Trump’s accounts only around 4pm on January 6, after the Capitol had already been breached, and predicted Twitter would remove him outright on his next violation, calling earlier disinformation-flagging efforts “of limited utility” in fast-moving events like the riot.

WITH JARED HOLT AND GRAHAM BROOKIE

Written for the morning after January 6: the Capitol attack was a victory for the far right — a mythologized rallying point that will outlast Trump and pull the movement toward anti-state violence.

A synthesis of a Lawfare/Stanford debate on whether foreign influence operations are real or an overblown “disinformation complex” — both camps agree the core vulnerability is domestic polarization, not foreign meddling.

A DFRLab analysis of coverage of the unverified Hunter Biden laptop story in the closing weeks of the 2020 campaign, tracing how the same material split sharply along partisan media lines — a case study in the extremes of the U.S. information environment.

The Senate Intelligence Committee urged restraint on foreign interference, while Sen. Ron Johnson ran his own Ukraine probe that became a vehicle for Kremlin-linked operatives to launder disinformation targeting Biden.

WITH GRAHAM BROOKIE

How domestic disinformation about antifa during the 2020 George Floyd protests was repurposed by foreign actors: an Iranian opposition group’s false Tehran-funding claim drove 77 percent of related tweets in three weeks, while Turkish state media tied antifa to Kurdish militants.

WITH ALYSSA KANN AND ZARINE KHARAZIAN

Written as the George Floyd protests peaked: 12,000 antifa-referencing articles and videos drew 27 million shares in two weeks, three-fourths from right-leaning outlets, as tweets tying antifa to “terrorism” jumped from 21,000 to 173,000 in a single day.

A Russian Instagram operation reaching 147,000 US users, boosting Sanders while tarnishing Biden, repeats 2016 — but inside the primary, the meddling accusation itself becomes a weapon Democrats turn on each other.

A DFRLab audit of Act.IL, an app assigning pro-Israel social-media “missions,” found its reach thin during the May 2019 Gaza escalation: five targeted tweets averaged 12 retweets against 17,500 registered users.

WITH MELISSA HALL

The Trump administration cited free-speech concerns to skip the 2019 Christchurch Call on online extremism, then hours later attacked platforms for removing white nationalist content, reversing 2017 anti-ISIS pledges.

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.

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

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

Applies Clausewitz’s “center of gravity” — a people’s spirit and will — to explain why social media succeeds at wartime persuasion where WWII radio and Vietnam-era leaflets failed. Coins the term “LikeWar.”

WITH P.W. SINGER

By 2018, most Americans had tuned out the Afghanistan war — Trump tweeted about the NFL anthem six times more often than the conflict, and its most viral moment was mockery of the MOAB’s nickname.

WITH P.W. SINGER

Michael Flynn, interviewed as a former DIA director, describes intelligence’s shift toward open-source data — a conversation held before his fall as Trump’s National Security Adviser.

WITH P.W. SINGER

The Kavanaugh fight replayed information-war tactics: OSINT crowdsourcing into his finances, a doppelganger theory echoing Russia’s MH17 disinformation, and dueling Wikipedia edits over “Devil’s Triangle.”

WITH P.W. SINGER

During the family-separation protests, Twitter banned a crowdsourced ICE-agent database as “doxing” while suspending users who merely shared a journalist’s leaked phone number — proof its neutrality was always a fiction.

WITH P.W. SINGER

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

How ISIS built a social-media strategy of intimidation (viral execution videos), reassurance (Instagram’s Cats of Jihad), and recruitment (Dabiq magazine) — and the moderators, hackers, and spies working to counter it.

WITH P.W. SINGER

Profiles the Anonymous-descended hacktivists fighting the Islamic State online, including the bot-driven @CtrlSec Twitter operation and GhostSec, which fed leads to the FBI and claims to have downed 149 ISIS sites.

A law written to cover nineteen 9/11 hijackers now underwrites counterterrorism operations across a quarter of the world’s nations; with bin Laden dead, it argues the AUMF needs rewriting, not indefinite renewal.

Churchill’s faith in naval bombardment, a vague political mandate, and General Hamilton’s refusal to plan for failure turned the 1915 Gallipoli landings into an eight-month catastrophe costing 250,000 casualties for four miles of ground.

Proposes a Bitcoin-funded bounty system, run through an independent nonprofit, paying hacktivists like Anonymous to identify and disable Islamic State social media accounts, recruiting sites, and VPN channels.

The Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program is set to lapse Dec. 31 after granting just 32 visas to 5,700 applicants in four years, while two bills to extend it stall in Congress.

WITH JANINE DAVIDSON

As the Pentagon carries out its sharpest personnel drawdown in forty years, post-9/11 veterans face 10 percent unemployment, 20 percent among those 18-24, even as the GI Bill and federal hiring offer less of a safety net.