Disinfo Docket 13 August
DisinfoDocket curates influence operations-related academic research, news, events and job opportunities.
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Highlights
- Don't fall for AI-powered disinformation attacks online - here's how to stay sharp (ZDNet, 11 August)
- A Healthy Information Ecosystem (Dog Shirt Daily, 11 August)
- 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (US Department of State, 12 August)
- Human Rights Report Under Trump Blunts Language on Israel and El Salvador (NYT, 12 August)
1. Academia & Research
- Foiling espionage and foreign interference is a national, not just government, task (ASPI, 12 August)
- How the Right-Wing Outrage Machine Invents Liberal Fury — and Sells It Back to You (Weaponised Spaces, 12 August)
We analysed 11M posts on hostile narratives about NATO, UA, EU & US: AI drives faster, cheaper manipulation—mass text, deepfakes, cross-platform bursts. Kremlin-led campaigns used these tools to intensify Baltic targeting; US elections spiked traffic ×39. https://t.co/lTYyGavvWy pic.twitter.com/yNEpOEUn3T
— STRATCOMCOE (@STRATCOMCOE) August 12, 2025
2. Platforms & Technology
- Reddit will block the Internet Archive: The company says that AI companies have scraped data from the Wayback Machine, so it’s going to limit what the Wayback Machine can access. (The Verge, 11 August)
- Wikipedia operator loses court challenge to UK Online Safety Act regulations (Reuters, 11 August)
- TikTok Shop faces rocky start in Japan amid seller skepticism (Nikkei Asia, 10 August)
- Who Will Run a U.S. TikTok? (The Information, 12 August)
- Meta hires far-right influencer to help end 'Woke AI' (Mashable, 12 August)
AI
- Anthropic offers AI chatbot Claude to US government for $1 (Reuters, 12 August)
- A.I. Start-Up Perplexity Offers to Buy Google’s Chrome Browser for $34.5 Billion (NYT, 12 August)
- Why A.I. Should Make Parents Rethink Posting Photos of Their Children Online (NYT, 11 August)
- Three big lessons from the GPT-5 backlash (Platformer, 11 August)
- Musk says he plans to sue Apple for not featuring X or Grok among its top apps (AP, 12 August)
- Elon Musk’s xAI Releases Grok 4 For Free Globally, Challenges OpenAI’s GPT-5 Launch (Mashable, 11 August)