Tootfinder

No, SNAP Benefits Aren’t Mostly Used by Immigrants | WIRED #SNAP

No, SNAP Benefits Aren’t Mostly Used by Immigrants
SNAP benefits are set to run out on Saturday. Far-right influencers and extremists are incorrectly claiming that immigrants are the main recipients of food stamps.

Prominent Leaders Amplify Disinformation About Brown University Shooting (Steven Lee Myers/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/technology/brown-university-shooting-disinformation-politicians.html?unlocked_article_code=1._U8.4uF6.M0aepu_W5qgM&smid=url-share
http://www.memeorandum.com/251226/p52#a251226p52

Rumors flew in the hours after a shooting at Brown University killed two students on Dec. 13.
One falsehood had it that one of the victims, a leader of the college Republican Club, was “targeted for her conservative beliefs, hunted, and killed in cold blood.”
Another was that it had been a terrorist attack, a claim that made the rounds when a Palestinian student was identified as a possible suspect two days later and hounded on the internet.
⭐️A churn of disinformation after…

Prominent Leaders Amplify Disinformation About Brown University Shooting
Prominent business and government figures spread rumors about the attack on Brown University’s campus this month, reigniting questions about accountability in online discourse.

Finally!
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/dutch-public-broadcaster-nos-quits-x-over-disinformation-2025-11-25/

“[open social] must be funded like infrastructure, not consumer apps. In fact, given the scale of hybrid threats, it should be funded from defense budgets, not innovation leftovers.
The strategic layer of democracy is the information layer. And right now, it is outsourced.” @seabass.bsky.social
<…

The Trump administration's travel ban on five Europeans includes researchers working to tackle online disinformation and abuse, like CCDH founder Imran Ahmed (Adam Satariano/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com…

They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.
The Trump administration said five regulators and researchers who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet had been barred from entering the United States.

Dutch public broadcaster Nos quits X, citing the "amount of hateful responses and disinformation" on the site; The Guardian quit in 2024 and NPR in 2023 (Bart Meijer/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-tel

"Despite widespread belief in climate policy, disinformation still seeds doubt ahead of COP30"
#COP30 #ClimateSummit

Climate disinformation surges ahead of COP30
A new report looks at the climate disinformation online ecosystem

For your Thanksgiving reading pleasure, check out Metacurity's selection of the week's best infosec-related long reads that cover
--Scammers who go to unbelievable lengths,
--How to expose a DPRK hacker seeking IT work,
--A Kiwi hacker conference installed a literal anti-virus system,
--Trump is turning his back on supercharged disinformation,
--How the EU and the US acted differently to the Collins Aerospace hack
Sign up for a free subscription to…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 11/15/25
Scammers who go to unbelievable lengths, How to expose a DPRK hacker seeking IT work, A Kiwi hacker conference installed a literal anti-virus system, Trump is turning his back on supercharged disinformation, How the EU and US acted differently to the Collins Aerospace hack

Meanwhile, in extinction-stage capitalism… https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/115430539119947586

⚯ Michel de Cryptadamus ⚯ (@cryptadamist@universeodon.com)
Attached: 1 image new startup idea from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz's a16z¹: a tool to let you control thousands of #socialmedia accounts that look "as human as possible" ¹ Owners of large stakes in #Substack, The Privatized Public Square (AKA “X” AKA “The Everything App”), and (soon) #TikTok #DoubleSpeed #AI #grok #psyop #a16z #MarcAndreessen #SlugsOfA16z #uspol #disinformation #BenHorowitz #nerdreich #broligarchy #broligarchs #X

The state department has barred five Europeans from the US, accusing them of leading efforts to pressure tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints
“These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states – in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” Rubio said in an announcement.
Neben Thierry Breton trifft das u.a. Josephine Ballon und Anna-Lena von Hodenberg von @…

They Seek to Curb Online Hate.
The Trump Regime Accuses Them of Censorship.
Five Europeans who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet
were barred from entering the United States
after Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them
“radical activists”
who undercut free speech.

They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.
The Trump administration said five regulators and researchers who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet had been barred from entering the United States.

Einreiseverbote auch für Musk-Kritiker

Sanktionen verhängte die US-Regierung auch gegen die Gründerin des britischen Global Disinformation Index (GDI), Clare Melford, und gegen den Gründer des in den USA und Großbritannien tätigen Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Imran Ahmed. Der Brite lebt der Organisation zufolge in Washington, ihm droht nun die Abschiebung aus den USA.
X-Eigentümer Elon Musk hatte das Center for Countering Digital Hate vergangenes Jahr …

Researchers say Russia-aligned Pravda network is engaging in "LLM grooming", flooding the internet with disinformation to influence chatbots like ChatGPT (Aisha Down/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov

The Trump administration's travel ban on five Europeans includes researchers working to tackle online disinformation and abuse, like CCDH founder Imran Ahmed (Adam Satariano/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/business/europe-us-onl…

They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.
The Trump administration said five regulators and researchers who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet had been barred from entering the United States.

Germany summons Russian ambassador over cyberattack, election disinformation https://therecord.media/germany-summons-russian-ambassador-cyberattack-disinformation

U.S. Bars 5 European Tech Regulators and Researchers (Steven Lee Myers/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/technology/trump-rubio-european-tech-disinformation-digital-services-act.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251223/p105#a251223p105

"When news becomes an extension of political and corporate power, democracy loses its immune system. The Fourth Estate collapses. And disinformation rules.
This is what happens when billionaires control information. They decide what you see, what you don’t, who becomes a villain, who gets rehabilitated, and whose death is worth remembering"
#kleptocracy
Legacy Media…

Legacy Media's License To Kill
We've lived to see the day when a newspaper excuses the man who butchered their journalist By November, 2018, the CIA had concluded that Saudi Arabia was responsible for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And moreover—that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the killing.

It wasn’t a myth. It was a deliberate disinformation campaign by Fossil Fuel companies.
Just like the “evs are bad cuz mining is bad” is disinformation propaganda. The advantages over burning the planet with CO2 emissions are factually inescapable.
Tell me I’m Wrong.
#endfossilfuels #ev #cars #battery #climateCatastrophe #climateChange
https://universeodon.com/@wolfnowl/115449301400784313

A British anti-disinformation campaigner who was told by the Trump administration that he faces possible removal from the US
said he is being targeted by arrogant and “sociopathic” tech companies for trying to hold them to account.
Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH),
is among five European nationals barred from the US by the state department
after being accused of seeking to push tech firms to censor or suppress American v…

Meta AI adviser spreads disinformation about shootings, vaccines and trans people https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/12/meta-ai-adviser-robby-starbuck?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

There is a non-zero chance these dumbasses will accidentally kill themselves, triggering all sorts of assassination disinformation.
“Artillery shrapnel hits vehicles on California highway during Marines celebration”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c051p3981m4o
This wa…

A US judge temporarily blocks the Trump administration from detaining CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed, one of the Europeans the US barred on claims of promoting censorship (Aishvarya Kavi/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/us/politics/imran-ahmed-judge-order.…

Judge Blocks Detention of British Researcher Who Scrutinizes Online Hate
Imran Ahmed, who runs an organization that chronicles disinformation, was among five Europeans the State Department had barred, claiming they promote censorship.

France Steps Up Fight Against Disinformation as U.S. Pulls Back, Official Says (Julian E. Barnes/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/us/politics/france-disinformation.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251117/p140#a251117p140

Researchers say Russia-aligned Pravda network is engaging in "LLM grooming", flooding the internet with disinformation to influence chatbots like ChatGPT (Aisha Down/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov

@… do not pretend that there's no reason.
That's troublemaking, shit-stirring, disrespectful.
Equal to your freedom to speak and spread disinformation, there's the freedom for anyone – not a moderator – to block you in Reddit and Mastodon. This is not the first time.

⏰ Taiwan reports surge in Chinese cyber activity and disinformation efforts
https://therecord.media/taiwan-nsb-report-china-surge-cyberattacks-influence-operations

Taiwan reports surge in Chinese cyber activity and disinformation efforts
Taiwan’s National Security Bureau says network intrusions and influence operations by China have increased this year, with critical infrastructure drawing the most attention.

Each week, Metacurity offers our free and premium subscribers a weekly digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush.
This week's selection includes,
--A journalist's talks with an Iranian hacking leader ended with murder,
--Hackers attacked Aeroflot's still-insecure infrastructure,
--The war on disinformation has been dismantled,
--Trump's DOJ uses Americans' own data …

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 12/6/25
A journalist's talks with an Iranian hacking leader ended with murder, Hackers attacked Aeroflot's still-insecure infrastructure, The war on disinformation has been dismantled, Trump's DOJ uses Americans' own data to limit voting rights, The Wassenaar Arrangement can help limit spyware exports

Außerdem:
#GiveMeAFuckinBreak

X exposing political accounts' location shows why trust and safety teams mattered: to combat coordinated inauthentic behavior, not "censorship" of viewpoints (Mike Masnick/Techdirt)
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/24/xs-new<…

X’s New Feature Reveals Why Trust & Safety Work Was Never About The ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’
For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety te…

A US judge temporarily blocks the Trump administration from detaining CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed, one of the Europeans the US barred on claims of promoting censorship (Aishvarya Kavi/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/us/politics/imran-ahmed-judge-order.…

Judge Blocks Detention of British Researcher Who Scrutinizes Online Hate
Imran Ahmed, who runs an organization that chronicles disinformation, was among five Europeans the State Department had barred, claiming they promote censorship.

EU issues €120 million fine to Elon Musk’s X under rules to tackle disinformation https://therecord.media/eu-fines-x-under-digital-services-act-disinformation-transparecy-rules

Some fun talking points for your upcoming family gatherings. https://www.wired.com/story/disinformation-conspiracy-theories-snap-benefits/

The EU could “respond swiftly and decisively” against th
“unjustified” US visa bans on five Europeans involved in combating online hate and disinformation,
a European Commission spokesperson has said.
European leaders including Emmanuel Macron accused Washington of
“coercion and intimidation”,
after the visa ban on the figures who have been at the heart of campaigns to introduce laws regulating American tech companies.
Justifying the visa bans, the US secr…

Grok admits spreading Islamophobic disinformation over stabbings
https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2025/11/03/grok-huntingdon-stabbings/

Must read: "Flight Tracking, OSINT, Roblox: The Cyber frontline of Gen Z's Revolution in Madagascar" by @andrinivo
#Madagascar

SBS Examines Sa Wikang Filipino
a podcast that focuses on identifying and clarifying misinformation and disinformation that affects Australia's social cohesion...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/sbs-examines-sa-wi…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/opinion/politics/how-to-save-the-american-experiment.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rU8.cLIO.j0JwjaQk2D41&smid=url-share

Opinion | Political Violence. Threats to Free Speech. A Disinformation Crisis. We’ve Been Here Before.
To see a way out of our destructive spiral we should look to the innovation of the 1920s.

DITTO: A Spoofing Attack Framework on Watermarked LLMs via Knowledge Distillation
Hyeseon Ahn, Shinwoo Park, Yo-Sub Han
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10987 https://

DITTO: A Spoofing Attack Framework on Watermarked LLMs via Knowledge Distillation
The promise of LLM watermarking rests on a core assumption that a specific watermark proves authorship by a specific model. We demonstrate that this assumption is dangerously flawed. We introduce the threat of watermark spoofing, a sophisticated attack that allows a malicious model to generate text containing the authentic-looking watermark of a trusted, victim model. This enables the seamless misattribution of harmful content, such as disinformation, to reputable sources. The key to our attack…

X exposing political accounts' location shows why trust and safety teams mattered: to combat coordinated inauthentic behavior, not "censorship" of viewpoints (Mike Masnick/Techdirt)
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/24/xs-new<…

X’s New Feature Reveals Why Trust & Safety Work Was Never About The ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’
For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety te…

Quietly gathered some fire starter from the counter of a local restaurant.
#misinformation #disinformation #racism #antiimmigration #vaccines #rightwingextremism

SocialHarmBench: Revealing LLM Vulnerabilities to Socially Harmful Requests
Punya Syon Pandey, Hai Son Le, Devansh Bhardwaj, Rada Mihalcea, Zhijing Jin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04891

SocialHarmBench: Revealing LLM Vulnerabilities to Socially Harmful Requests
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in contexts where their failures can have direct sociopolitical consequences. Yet, existing safety benchmarks rarely test vulnerabilities in domains such as political manipulation, propaganda and disinformation generation, or surveillance and information control. We introduce SocialHarmBench, a dataset of 585 prompts spanning 7 sociopolitical categories and 34 countries, designed to surface where LLMs most acutely fail in politically charge…

Inspections by Taiwan's National Security Bureau (NSB) of five Chinese generative AI apps -- Deepseek, Doubao (豆包), Yiyan (文心一言), Tongyi (通義千問), and Yuanbao (騰訊元寶) -- found violations of users' communication security across several indicators.
https://focustaiwan.tw/cross-strait/2025…

Taiwan warns of biases, data breach in Deepseek, other Chinese AI - Focus Taiwan
The National Security Bureau (NSB) has urged Taiwanese people to be on alert when using Chinese generative artificial intelligence (AI) language models due to potential security breaches and the spread of "disinformation" following recent inspections of five such apps.

🙋‍♂️ What the fuck is wrong with you?
❓ Have you ever seen a bandwagon you didn’t want to jump on?
💩 Can you please be less shit? https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/115643458015221823

Taiwan reports surge in Chinese cyber activity and disinformation efforts https://therecord.media/taiwan-nsb-report-china-surge-cyberattacks-influence-operations

A look at the top data journalism projects of 2025, including stories on conflict, climate, AI, and social media and disinformation (Hanna Duggal/Global Investigative Journalism Network)
https://gijn.org/stories/2025-editors-picks-data-journalism/

Editor’s Pick: Best of Data Journalism from 2025
Our roundup of standout data journalism from the past year highlights projects that delve into conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Africa, that explore the rise of AI, and interrogate global trade wars.

SBS Examines Dalam Bahasa Indonesia
A podcast dedicated to dispelling misinformation and disinformation that has an impact on Australian social cohesion...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/sbs-examines-dalam-bahasa…

UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper will unveil a new £4 million project to reinforce cyber defenses in the Western Balkans, and share expertise in countering disinformation and other malign activity from hostile actors.
Foreign Secretary to put boosting security and tackling illegal migration at the heart of foreign policy during meeting of European partners

Foreign Secretary to put boosting security and tackling illegal migration at the heart of foreign policy during meeting of European partners
Foreign Secretary hosts meeting in Northern Ireland, focused on preserving security and stability in the Western Balkans. 

Stephen Miller has a theory about this political moment.
As President Trump expands his lawbreaking and dictatorial rule,
the powerful MAGA disinformation apparatus
—at Miller’s direction
—is supercharging public attention to the debate over Trump’s conduct in a way that’s designed to deeply polarize it.
That will force Americans to take a side in that standoff, Miller clearly believes,
driving them to embrace authoritarian rule,
though perhaps witho…

Inside Stephen Miller’s Secret Plan to Normalize Trump’s Dictator Rule
He wants to supercharge searing civil tensions to get low-information voters to embrace their inner authoritarian. Exactly two Democrats appear to fully grasp this.

Sora 2 Watermark Removers Flood the Web https://www.404media.co/sora-2-watermark-removers-flood-the-web/

There were actually a lot of good recommendations from that Committee report, the one on PR was just the final one! Here's a few more.. including some that local #Fediverse proponents could dig into! @… was on the Committee.
—>FEDI ADVANTAGE<— “The Committee heard about a number of issues related to
the electoral information environment. Members recommend
that the provincial government collaborate with Elections
BC and the federal government to review existing legislative
and regulatory measures related to misinformation,
disinformation, and hate speech during elections, including
**mechanisms to ensure the timely removal of harmful content** (**emphasis added)”
—> FEDI ADVANTAGE<— “To better address challenges associated with social media and emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence, Members recommend establishing a working group to propose amendments to BC’s privacy and election legislation. To better protect all users, the Committee recommends requiring digital platforms to act with a duty of care and establish clear safety-related requirements such as data privacy, platform design, and content policy. The Committee also heard about concerns regarding foreign interference, and recommends that these be considered by the Electoral Integrity Working Group.”
—The Committee heard about the critical importance of
civic education to ensure the public’s understanding of
democratic institutions, processes, and participation. The
Committee recommends strengthening civic education
in the K-12 school system with input from experts and a
greater emphasis on applied learning.
— the Committee suggests enhancing data collection by requiring proactive enumeration on an annual basis and ensuring that registered parties and candidates can access poll-by-poll results. Elections BC should review and improve
voter registration practices and communication, as well as
access to and public awareness of voting opportunities. With respect to expanding voter eligibility, the Committee supports further examination of extending voting rights to 16- and 17-year-olds as well as permanent residents in BC.
— Committee Members recommend modernizing the candidate nominator verification process, requiring Elections BC to collect and share voters’ contact information with registered political parties and candidates, and strengthening measures related to access to multi-unit buildings for candidates and their campaigns.
Full report to the Legislature: #BCPoli #CanPoli #CdnPoli #ElectoralReform #Democracy #ProportionalRepresentation #Polarization