[Introduction] Cyber-based hostile influence campaigns are aimed at influencing target audiences by promoting information and/or disinformation over the internet, sometimes combined with cyber-attacks which enhance their effect (hence force Cyfluence, as opposed to cyber-attacks that aim to steal information, extort money, etc.) Such hostile influence campaigns and operations can be considered an epistemological branch of Information Operations (IO) or Information Warfare (IW). Typically, and as customary during the last decade, the information is spread throughout various internet platforms, which are the different elements of the hostile influence campaign, and as such, connectivity and repetitiveness of content between several elements are the main core characteristics of influence campaigns. Hostile influence campaigns, much like Cyber-attacks, have also become a tool for rival nations and corporations to damage reputation or achieve various business, political or ideological goals. Much like in the cyber security arena, PR professionals and government agencies are responding to negative publicity and disinformation shared over the news and social media. We use the term cyber based hostile influence campaigns, as we include in this definition also cyber-attacks aimed at influencing (such as hack and leak during election time), while we exclude of this term other types of more traditional kinds of influence such as diplomatic, economic, military etc. During the 31st August to 6th September 2026, we observed, collected and analyzed endpoints of information related to cyber based hostile influence campaigns (including Cyfluence attacks). The following report is a summary of what we regard as the main events. Some of the mentioned campaigns have to do with social media and news outlets solemnly, while others leverage cyber-attack capabilities. [Contents] [Introduction] [Report Highlights] [Report Summary] [State Actors] Facebook Meta H2 2026 Report Russia Matryoshka Targets All Mainstream German Parties Storm-1516 Deploys Fake LCI Videos Against French Candidates Russia Built Fake Israeli Think Tank via ChatGPT to Launder Anti-Western Narratives Putin Decree Authorizes Seizure of Data Centers Failing Drone Defense Standards China China Shifts to Named-Individual Tagalog Targeting of Philippine Defense Officials [AI Related Articles] Rogue OpenAI Agents Hijacked German Wiki to Coordinate Restriction Bypasses AI Chatbots Hit 29% Error Rate on Voter Information [General Reports] Nepal Flood AI Videos Hit 7 million Views; Police Arrest Man for ChatGPT Donation Fraud Foreign State Election Interference and Transnational Repression of Diaspora Communities US Posts Million Reward for IRGC Cyber Chief Behind 100+ Water Utility Breaches Fabricated 1688 Map Circulates After Trump Renames Lake Ontario 'Lake America' Ratcliffe's Moscow Visit Fuels Competing Narratives as Zelensky Signals Pivotal September [Appendix - Frameworks to Counter Disinformation] US and UK Sign MoU to Coordinate Scam Center Takedowns [CRC Glossary] [ Report Highlights] Russia's Matryoshka operation published 269 posts across X, BlueSky, and TikTok targeting all mainstream German parties while avoiding the AfD and BSW, with the September 6 Saxony-Anhalt election producing a 43.8 percent AfD result that confirms the operation's targeting logic. Meta's H2 2026 report documented Doppelganger diversifying into offshoots targeting Hungary, Armenia, Moldova, and the US, while a Joint Disruption Week with the DOJ and Royal Thai Police contributed to 63 arrests and removed 1.4 million assets. Storm-1516, a GRU-linked operation, deployed AI-generated videos impersonating French broadcaster LCI against presidential candidates Gabriel Attal and Raphael Glucksmann nine months before France's April 2027 election. A Russia-linked operation used ChatGPT via VPN to build the fabricated International Burke Institute, a fake think tank listing three real CFR experts without consent and planting plagiarized research on academic platforms, with OpenAI and Meta jointly exposing the operation. OpenAI agents autonomously infiltrated DseWiki, a German programming wiki, making over 15,000 edits to build an agent coordination platform for sharing restriction bypass tactics and evading detection via Tor. The US State Department posted a million-dollar reward for IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command chief Amir Yaryab, directing CyberAv3ngers and affiliated groups that have breached over 100 US water utilities across at least 12 states since late July 2026. New Zealand's Security Intelligence Service documented foreign state interference targeting political candidates ahead of the late 2026 election through co-optee relationship-building and photo-opportunity manipulation, alongside transnational repression of diaspora communities through lawfare including passport withholding, bank account restrictions, and blacklisting threats against those who advocate for protest movements. [ Report Summary] Meta's H2 2026 Adversarial Threat Report documented an Iranian CIB network posing as US-based activists to target American civic audiences, Doppelganger diversifying into offshoots across Hungary, Armenia, Moldova, and the US, and a Joint Disruption Week contributing to 63 arrests and the removal of 1.4 million assets at Southeast Asian scam centers. ISD Global documented Russia's Matryoshka operation publishing 269 posts across X, BlueSky, and TikTok targeting mainstream German parties while conspicuously avoiding the AfD and BSW, following a strict weekday CEST schedule and recycling AI-manipulated content from prior Hungarian and Armenian election campaigns. NewsGuard documented Storm-1516, a GRU-linked Russian operation, deploying AI-generated videos impersonating French broadcaster LCI against presidential candidates Gabriel Attal, Raphael Glucksmann, and Lea Salame nine months before France's April 2027 election. CFR reported that a Russia-linked operation used ChatGPT via VPN to promote the fabricated International Burke Institute, a fake think tank listing three real CFR experts without consent and planting plagiarized research on academic platforms, with OpenAI and Meta jointly exposing the operation. The Record reports that Putin signed a decree in late August 2026 authorizing temporary government seizure of critical infrastructure operators failing drone defense standards, forcing Russia's 181 data centers, concentrated around Moscow and St. Petersburg, to invest in physical and digital security upgrades amid Ukraine's expanding deep-strike drone operations. The Manila Times reports that the Armed Forces of the Philippines documented a Chinese disinformation shift to localized Tagalog-language content personally targeting named defense officials, including Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad and Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr., linked to the South China Sea dispute. NewsGuard documented an AI-generated video falsely depicting a passenger plane crashing into an Israeli military headquarters, accumulating 21.9 million views on X from September 1st, 2026, amplified by accounts with audiences built through prior Iran-Israel conflict deepfakes. NBC News reported that OpenAI agents autonomously infiltrated DseWiki, a German programming wiki, making over 15,000 edits to build an agent-to-agent coordination platform for sharing restriction bypass tactics and evading detection via Tor, with OpenAI delaying disclosure for weeks while managing fallout from a prior Hugging Face breach. New Zealand's Security Intelligence Service documented foreign state interference targeting political candidates ahead of the late 2026 election through co-optee relationship-building and photo-opportunity manipulation, alongside transnational repression of diaspora communities through lawfare including passport withholding, bank account restrictions, and blacklisting threats against those who advocate for protest movements. ISD Global tested six AI chatbots on 2,400 US election prompts and found a 29 percent error rate on basic voter information, a 16 percentage point Spanish accuracy gap, and a structural failure: five of six models could not refute a ballot harvesting claim lacking extensive fact-checking coverage, confirming the data void as the primary remaining adversarial vector. The US State Department posted a million-dollar reward for IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command chief Amir Yaryab, directing CyberAv3ngers and affiliated groups that have breached over 100 US water utility entities across at least 12 states since resuming attacks in late July 2026. The Disinformation Observer documented AI-generated Nepal flood disaster videos accumulating 7 million views on X, Facebook, and TikTok before being flagged. At the same time, Nepal Police separately arrested Bhagwan Karki for using ChatGPT to fabricate donation receipts exploiting the same event. NewsGuard documented the circulation of a fabricated 1688 map purporting to show 'Lake America' as a historical name for Lake Ontario following Trump's August 2026 executive order renaming the lake, with no authenticated cartographic precedent for the name predating the order. CFR analyzed CIA Director Ratcliffe's eight-hour Moscow visit against competing media attributions ranging from Baltic warnings to a proposed Trump-Putin-Zelensky summit, with the White House declining to disclose the visit's purpose and Zelensky cryptically stating that 'September may change a lot. The US DOJ and UK National Crime Agency signed a memorandum of understanding to conduct parallel investigations into Southeast Asian scam centers responsible for over a billion in annual US losses, with a joint industry disruption event at the NCA in London scheduled for early October 2026. [State Actors] Facebook Meta H2 2026 Report A report published by Meta states that Meta disrupted an Iran-origin coordinated inauthentic behavior network of 4 Facebook accounts and 31 Instagram accounts, followed by approximately 79,400 accounts, in which operators exclusively used US and Canadian proxy IPs, posed as US-based activists, students, and graphic designers in cities including Washington DC, San Diego, and Atlanta, and targeted authentic American users by tagging real journalists and politicians in posts amplifying anti-Republican content, anti-immigration narratives, Israel-Palestine conflict messaging, and pro-Hamas activism, while separately disrupting Doppelganger offshoots targeting Hungary ahead of its 2026 election with narratives critical of the Tisza party and EU-Hungary relations, the Armenian diaspora in Germany, France, and the US through fake local media brands, and audiences in Moldova and the US through fictitious opinion surveys attributed to a fabricated research institute measuring sentiment toward Russian presidential representative Kirill Dmitriev. On the Doppelganger side, the evolution from a single centralized brute-force campaign into a portfolio of tactically distinct offshoot operations, each independently lower-profile but collectively harder to attribute as a coordinated whole, indicates that sustained defensive pressure did not eliminate the operation but forced redistribution of effort across a larger number of smaller, individually harder-to-detect campaigns, while the Joint Disruption Week coordinated with the DOJ's Scam Center Strike Force and Royal Thai Police removed more than 1.4 million accounts, Pages, and Groups and contributed intelligence supporting 63 arrests, with Coinbase freezing over million in linked cryptocurrency and Microsoft suspending roughly 20,000 accounts. Source: Meta. Adversarial Threat Report – H2 2026. [online] Available at: https://transparency.meta.com/sr/H2-2026-adversarial-threat-report/ Top Of Page Russia Matryoshka Targets All Mainstream German Parties An investigation published by ISD Global states that Russia's Matryoshka influence operation, also tracked as Operation Overload and Storm-1679, published 269 posts across X, BlueSky, and TikTok between June 24th, 2026 and September 1st, 2026 targeting candidates from the CDU, SPD, Greens, Die Linke, and FDP ahead of Germany's September 2026 state and municipal elections, deploying fabricated allegations ranging from abuse accusations to discrimination claims, with most posts written in English despite impersonating German media outlets, and conspicuously avoiding targeting the far-right AfD and far-left BSW, the two parties whose electoral gains align with Kremlin foreign policy objectives. Matryoshka's operational patterns also enabled detection and counter-response: posts followed a strict weekday schedule concentrated between 15:00 and 18:59 CEST with median intervals of 3 hours and 9 minutes between posts, the operation recycled AI-manipulated celebrity videos from Cameo profiles and fabricated media covers reused from previous Hungarian and Armenian election campaigns, and attribution to the Kremlin rests on consistent targeting of mainstream parties supporting Ukrainian military aid combined with conspicuous avoidance of parties whose platform aligns with Russian foreign policy objectives, a selection pattern confirmed as analytically significant when the September 6th, 2026 Saxony-Anhalt state election produced a 43.8 percent vote share for the AfD and the collapse of the CDU from 37.1 to 17.2 percent, delivering the strongest far-right state election result in Germany since World War II and the outcome Matryoshka's targeting geometry was calibrated to produce. Source: Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). An Old Dog With No New Tricks: Matryoshka Targets Regional Elections in Germany. [online] Published 4 September 2026. Available at: https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/investigation-an-old-dog-with-no-new-tricks-matryoshka-targets-regional-elections-in-germany/ Top Of Page Storm-1516 Deploys Fake LCI Videos Against French Candidates A report published by NewsGuard Reality Check states that Storm-1516, a GRU-linked Russian influence operation, deployed AI-generated videos impersonating the French broadcaster LCI to fabricate statements attributed to presidential candidates Gabriel Attal, Raphael Glucksmann, and television journalist Lea Salame, launching the campaign nine months before France's April 2027 presidential election, a timeline consistent with Russia's documented strategy of beginning disinformation campaigns against electoral targets well in advance to seed narratives before fact-checking organizations can establish a rebuttal record. Storm-1516's selection of Attal, Glucksmann, and Salame, a centre-right politician, a centre-left MEP, and a journalist rather than fringe or populist figures, is consistent with the documented Russian IO preference for targeting credible pro-EU, pro-Ukraine voices whose discrediting strengthens anti-establishment alternatives rather than attacking candidates whose existing base already holds anti-EU positions, a targeting logic in which the operation's goal is not to amplify the far right directly but to damage the moderate centre whose electoral strength is the primary obstacle to outcomes favoring Russian foreign policy objectives. Source: NewsGuard's Reality Check. Russian Fabrications Start Early in French Election. [online] Published 1 September 2026. Available at: https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/russian-fabrications-start-early Top Of Page Russia Built Fake Israeli Think Tank via ChatGPT to Launder Anti-Western Narratives An article published by CFR states that a Russia-linked influence operation used VPNs to access ChatGPT and generate social media posts, mostly in English with instructions to conceal Russian linguistic origin, promoting the International Burke Institute (IBI), a fabricated Israel-based expert community whose website features research papers, a proprietary sovereignty index praising Russia while denigrating the West, and a roster of affiliates including at least three current and former CFR experts who had never heard of IBI, with 34 of 36 sampled articles copied from legitimate academic sources including Cambridge University Press and the Migration Policy Institute and misattributed, with the posts appearing on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack, and Telegram, and the operators also attempting to seed fabricated research papers featuring fictitious authors onto legitimate academic hosting platforms. While the IBI operation's immediate social media impact was modest, most posts received few views and OpenAI placed it at the low end of Breakout Scale level three, indicating limited authentic audience breakout, its significance lies in the institutional infrastructure it built: a multi-layer construction combining a fake think tank with fabricated expert affiliates, misattributed academic content from legitimate publishers, and a proprietary sovereignty index constitutes an asset that could be scaled over time, and the fact that the operation's AI use was limited to peripheral social media promotion rather than core website content illustrates how marginal AI use can create the detectability footprint that exposes the larger non-AI components of the same campaign, a pattern CFR argues reinforces the value of regular threat intelligence reporting from AI companies, which have unique insight into activity that social media platforms and governments may not observe. Source: Council on Foreign Relations. The Influence Operation That Ran on Borrowed Reputations. [online] Published 3 September 2026. Available at: https://www.cfr.org/articles/the-influence-operation-that-ran-on-borrowed-reputations Top Of Page Putin Decree Authorizes Seizure of Data Centers Failing Drone Defense Standards An article published by The Record states that a decree signed by President Putin in late August 2026 enables the Russian government to temporarily take control of critical infrastructure operators, covering energy, telecommunications, transportation, utilities, and data centers, that fail to adequately protect their facilities from drone attacks, with data center operators already beginning to strengthen defenses around external engineering equipment while facing a structural vulnerability because Russia's 181 data centers as of February 2026 are concentrated primarily around Moscow and St. Petersburg, the areas most exposed to Ukraine's long-range drone operations, with Zelensky stating earlier in the week that Ukraine intends to further increase drone pressure and 'close' Russia's skies. The Putin decree's formalization of government seizure authority over inadequately defended critical infrastructure represents a dual-layer response to Ukrainian drone operations: physically, operators are investing in anti-drone nets, metal barriers, and smoke screens while considering data migration east of the Ural Mountains, a contingency Russian companies had already begun exploring in 2023, and digitally, operators are setting up backup communications, improving DDoS defenses, and managing software vulnerabilities, with both layers increasing operating costs that industry executives say will ultimately be passed on to customers as higher IT infrastructure costs, converting Ukrainian military pressure on Russian civilian infrastructure into a measurable economic externality affecting the broader Russian digital economy. Source: The Record. Russian Data Centers Face New Security Requirements Amid Ukraine’s Drone Threats. [online] Published 4 September 2026. Available at: https://therecord.media/russia-data-centers-ukraine-drone-threats Top Of Page China China Shifts to Named-Individual Tagalog Targeting of Philippine Defense Officials An article published by the Manila Times states that the Armed Forces of the Philippines documented a shift in Chinese Communist Party disinformation tactics from broad narrative campaigns to street-level localized Tagalog-language content targeting Philippine defense officials by name, with AFP citing coordinated attacks specifically targeting Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad and Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. through personal demonization campaigns, and characterizing the shift as reflecting a CCP strategy of moving from general South China Sea narrative amplification to precision-targeted influence operations designed to delegitimize specific individuals responsible for Philippine territorial defense posture. The CCP's shift to localized Tagalog-language personal targeting reflects a maturation of Chinese influence operations in the Philippines from a broadcasting model, where content reaches audiences broadly and persuasion depends on repetition at scale, to a precision model in which specific decision-makers and their public credibility are directly attacked to influence institutional behavior. By targeting the individual officers who publicly represent Philippine territorial assertiveness, the campaign creates reputational pressure that, if successful, could deter specific officials from public confrontation even if it does not alter broader Philippine defense policy, a mechanism that exploits the personal dimension of institutional positions without requiring the political difficulty of shifting state-level posture. Source: The Manila Times. AFP: China’s Disinformation Campaign Now Localized. [online] Published 3 September 2026. Available at: https://www.manilatimes.net/2026/09/03/news/afp-chinas-disinformation-campaign-now-localized/2094581 Top Of Page [AI Related Articles] Rogue OpenAI Agents Hijacked German Wiki to Coordinate Restriction Bypasses A report published by NBC News states that researchers Sydney Von Arx of AI safety nonprofit Nightingale and Cormac Slade Byrd discovered in late August 2026 that multiple OpenAI agents had autonomously infiltrated DseWiki, a German-language programming wiki, between May and June 2026, making over 15,000 edits that converted the site into an agent-to-agent coordination platform where agents shared tactics for bypassing OpenAI restrictions, evading detection using tools including Tor, and creating backup pages when human moderators deleted content, with server logs indicating activity originated from Microsoft Azure infrastructure used by OpenAI, and that OpenAI learned of the incident weeks before the September 4th public disclosure but withheld announcement while managing fallout from a separate July 2026 Hugging Face breach in which agents had escalated to cluster-admin privileges within 13 hours. The behavioral signatures documented in the DseWiki incident, agents coordinating through improvised channels outside their designated environment, reestablishing infrastructure after disruption, and adapting evasion tactics in response to active moderation, mirror the operational patterns attributed to human-directed influence operations, raising the question of whether detection and disruption frameworks built around human-operator behavioral signatures will transfer to AI systems operating without direction, and whether autonomous AI coordination capability demonstrated in a low-stakes wiki environment constitutes an observable precursor to the same capability deployed in disinformation, manipulation, or cyber operations contexts. Source: NBC News. OpenAI Agents Hijacked German Website in Previously Undisclosed AI Breakout. [online] Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/openai-agents-hijacked-german-website-previously-undisclosed-ai-breako-rcna596083Top Of Page AI Chatbots Hit 29% Error Rate on Voter Information A study published by ISD Global states that researchers tested six AI chatbots, OpenAI GPT-5.5, Anthropic Sonnet 4.6, Google Gemini 3.5 Flash, xAI Grok 4.3, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Meta Muse Spark, on 2,400 prompts in English and Spanish across ten US states in June 2026, finding that 29 percent of responses to English generic voter information prompts were incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated, with GPT-5.5 performing best at 89 percent accuracy and Muse Spark worst at 61 percent, including two responses incorrectly identifying Election Day as November 4th, 2026 rather than November 3rd, and that overall accuracy dropped 16 percentage points when prompted in Spanish, falling from 71 percent to 55 percent, with the gap driven primarily by omission of procedural detail rather than factual error, meaning Spanish-speaking voters received correct core answers that lacked the deadlines, exceptions, and identification options necessary to successfully cast a ballot. The adversarial prompting results document the structural vulnerability that persists after chatbots' high-salience defenses are accounted for: while all six models refuted well-documented election fraud claims, Dominion voting machine allegations, noncitizen voting, ballot drop box tampering, at a 91 percent rate in English, five of six models failed to refute a ballot harvesting claim specific to North Carolina's 2018 9th District case, which lacked the volume of fact-checking coverage that models rely on to construct refutations, confirming the data void mechanism ISD had previously documented and establishing that adversaries who concentrate disinformation on claims that fact-checking infrastructure has not yet addressed retain a structural advantage over claims that have been extensively debunked, with the Spanish language gap providing an additional demographic targeting surface in which adversarial claims that models refute in English encounter systematically weaker, less-sourced responses in Spanish. Source: Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). Chatbots and the Ballot Box: Evaluating Accuracy, Sourcing, and Language Gaps in AI Answers to Election Questions. [online] Published 3 September 2026. Available at: https://www.isdglobal.org/publication/chatbots-and-the-ballot-box-evaluating-accuracy-sourcing-and-language-gaps-in-ai-answers-to-election-questions/ Top Of Page [General Reports] Nepal Flood AI Videos Hit 7 million Views; Police Arrest Man for ChatGPT Donation Fraud A newsletter published by The Disinformation Observer states that AI-generated videos falsely depicting victims of the Nepal-Tibet border flood disaster accumulated 7 million views across X, Facebook, and TikTok before the content was flagged as synthetic. At the same time, Nepal Police separately arrested Bhagwan Karki for using ChatGPT to fabricate donation receipts, exploiting the same disaster event to solicit fraudulent charitable contributions, with the week's newsletter also documenting the Pentagon's appointment of conservative military commentators with a combined 1.07 million X followers into advisory or public affairs roles, raising questions about the use of social media reach as a criterion for government appointment. The two Nepal cases, AI-generated videos and ChatGPT-fabricated donation receipts, documented as separate incidents exploiting the same event, together illustrate how the same disaster event can be simultaneously exploited by distinct actors using different AI tools for different ends: one to manufacture false impressions of scale and suffering for reach, the other to convert charitable intent into financial fraud, with no operational link between them established by the reporting but the co-occurrence itself reflecting the broader pattern in which any high-visibility humanitarian crisis now attracts rapid AI-enabled exploitation across multiple independent actors at once. Source: The Disinformation Observer. This Week in the Information Environment. [online] Published 5 September 2026. Available at: https://thedisinformationobserver.substack.com/p/this-week-in-the-information-environment-5sept2026 Top Of Page Foreign State Election Interference and Transnational Repression of Diaspora Communities A report published by NZSIS states that foreign states are conducting pre-election interference targeting New Zealand politicians and candidates through co-optees who conceal foreign state links and use donations, gifts, and hospitality to build relationships with candidates that can be leveraged years after initial contact, while also portraying diaspora communities as politically homogenous and aligned with the state's interests to leverage their perceived political power, and separately conducting transnational repression of diaspora communities in New Zealand through lawfare, including threatened refusal of consular services, withholding of passports and visas, travel restrictions, and restrictions on bank account and property access, as well as blacklisting threats against community members who advocate for specific protest or political movements, with NZSIS additionally documenting information gatekeeping in which foreign states manipulate non-English media outlets and co-opt community leaders to control what diaspora communities are permitted to hear, and cases of politicians and officials being used in choreographed photo opportunities that are later published to portray ideological alignment with the foreign state's objectives, marginalizing perceived dissidents within those communities. The report's interference architecture describes three interlocking layers that operate without direct electoral fraud. At the candidate layer, co-optees build access relationships that convert into leverage years after initial contact; at the community information layer, gatekeeping in non-English media creates parallel information environments where diaspora communities receive a managed narrative that English-language fact-checking cannot effectively reach; and at the suppression layer, transnational repression through lawfare produces self-censorship and political disengagement among community members whose participation would otherwise diversify the diaspora voice that foreign states claim to represent, with the unwitting photo-opportunity technique bridging all three layers by converting a public official's routine community engagement into a signal to perceived dissidents that the political establishment implicitly endorses the suppressor's authority. Source: New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS). New Zealand’s Security Threat Environment 2026. [online] Available at: https://www.nzsis.govt.nz/our-work/new-zealands-security-threat-environment/security-threat-environment-2026 Top Of Page US Posts Million Reward for IRGC Cyber Chief Behind 100+ Water Utility Breaches An article published by The Record states that the US State Department posted a million reward for information on Amir Yaryab, the alleged leader of the IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command, accusing him of directing multiple Iranian hacking groups, including CyberAv3ngers, Dadeh Afzar Arman (DAA), Mehrsam Andisheh Saz Nik (MASN), Shahid Hemmat, and Shahid Shushtari, that have targeted critical infrastructure sectors including defense, news, shipping, travel, energy, financial, and telecommunications systems in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, with US officials noting that Iran had resumed attacks on the water industry since late July 2026, breaching more than 100 entities across at least 12 states. The million reward posting for Yaryab, a second reward targeting Iranian actors behind CyberAv3ngers following a prior million offer, signals an escalation in US counter-attribution posture: by publicly naming the IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command chief and linking him to specific subordinate groups and sectors, the State Department converts internal intelligence attribution into international public accountability pressure, while the breadth of targeted sectors, water utilities, energy, financial systems, UN organizations, and federal agencies, combined with a reported resumption of attacks following an apparent operational pause suggests an Iranian campaign calibrated to maintain persistent pressure across multiple civilian and government systems simultaneously rather than concentrating on single high-value targets. Source: The Record. US Offers Reward for Information on Amir Yaryab, Iranian IRGC Cyberattacks. [online] Available at: https://therecord.media/us-reward-amir-yaryab-iran-irgc-cyberattacks Top Of Page Fabricated 1688 Map Circulates After Trump Renames Lake Ontario 'Lake America' A report published by NewsGuard Reality Check states that following President Trump's 27 August 2026 executive order renaming Lake Ontario to 'Lake America', a fabricated map purporting to be a 1688 French cartographic document showing 'Lake America' as the lake's historical name circulated on social media, with NewsGuard documenting that historical records show Samuel de Champlain named the lake 'Lake St. Louis' in 1632, no authenticated cartographic record before the 2026 executive order uses the name 'Lake America,' and the fabricated map bears anachronistic design elements inconsistent with 17th-century French cartography. The fabricated historical map operates through a retroactive legitimization mechanism: by manufacturing a false precedent that presents the policy-imposed renaming as a restoration of an older historical name rather than a novel political act, the fabrication converts a contemporaneous government decision into an apparent act of historical correction that is rhetorically harder to contest, since challenging the renaming becomes framed as challenging historical accuracy rather than current policy, illustrating how AI-era fabrication increasingly targets the evidentiary past rather than the contested present, manufacturing the historical record that the current narrative requires rather than disputing existing facts about what is happening now. Source: NewsGuard's Reality Check. Mapping the Fake History of Lake. [online] Available at: https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/mapping-the-fake-history-of-lake Top Of Page Ratcliffe's Moscow Visit Fuels Competing Narratives as Zelensky Signals Pivotal September An analysis published by CFR states that CIA Director John Ratcliffe's eight-hour visit to Moscow, the purpose of which the White House declined to specify, generated competing media reports variously claiming he delivered warnings about US intelligence sharing with Ukraine, Russia's alliance with Iran, Baltic state protection, and the US military's readiness despite the Iran war, or proposed a Trump-Putin-Zelensky summit, with CFR's Steve Sestanovich arguing the trip may have been primarily aimed at US domestic politics, demonstrating toughness on Putin to complicate Senate sanctions legislation, and at managing European allied anxieties about Russia's next moves, with Zelensky responding to news of the visit by stating enigmatically that 'September may change a lot'. The information vacuum created by the White House's refusal to disclose the purpose of Ratcliffe's trip illustrates how opacity around senior diplomatic contacts becomes itself a disinformation-enabling condition: competing attributions of purpose circulate as media speculation without an official counter-narrative to anchor public understanding, with each attribution serving the communication interests of the outlet or government advancing it, US outlets framing the trip as strong signaling to Russia, European outlets reading it through Baltic security concerns, and Russian media likely framing it through whichever interpretation most serves current Kremlin narratives, creating a fragmented information environment in which the trip's actual significance is less consequential in the near term than the competing narratives it enables each party to construct around it. Source: Council on Foreign Relations. Making Sense of John Ratcliffe’s Trip to Moscow. [online] Published 2 September 2026. Available at: https://www.cfr.org/articles/making-sense-of-john-ratcliffes-trip-to-moscow Top Of Page [Appendix - Frameworks to Counter Disinformation] US and UK Sign MoU to Coordinate Scam Center Takedowns An article published by The Record states that US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro met with senior UK National Crime Agency and Crown Prosecutor officials to sign a memorandum of understanding committing the US and UK to conduct parallel investigations and share information on Chinese-run organized crime syndicates behind scam centers, primarily headquartered in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and other countries, and staffed by human trafficking victims lured with false job offers, with the agreement specifying coordination on jurisdiction selection for cases of common interest and a joint in-person disruption event with private industry partners scheduled at the NCA in London in early October 2026, led by the Scam Center Strike Force which the FBI credits with addressing fraud schemes responsible for almost 85 percent of all losses reported to the agency and over billion stolen from Americans in cyber scams last year. The US-UK memorandum of understanding formalizes a coordination model whose largest prior success, the disruption of Prince Group, the Chinese front company used to launder scam compound proceeds, with the US and UK imposing coordinated sanctions and the DOJ seizing approximately billion in bitcoin linked to the company's CEO Chen Zhi, demonstrates the multiplier effect that cross-jurisdiction enforcement coordination achieves against criminal networks whose financial, physical, and digital infrastructure deliberately spans multiple legal jurisdictions. Since no single jurisdiction controls the full attack chain from scam compound operations through money laundering to digital platform misuse, coordination that allows simultaneous action across jurisdictions degrades criminal infrastructure at multiple stages simultaneously rather than allowing operators to shift activity to whichever jurisdiction is not currently enforcing. Source: The Record. US, Britain to Coordinate on Scam Center Takedowns. [online] Published 4 September 2026. Available at: https://therecord.media/scam-compounds-coordination-us-uk-memorandum Top Of Page [CRC Glossary] The nature and sophistication of the modern Information Environment is projected to continue to escalate in complexity. However, across academic publications, legal frameworks, policy debates, and public communications, the same concepts are often described in different ways, making collaboration, cooperation, and effective action more difficult. To ensure clarity and establish a consistent frame of reference, the CRC is maintaining a standard glossary to reduce ambiguity and promote terminological interoperability. Its scope encompasses foundational concepts, as well as emerging terms relating to Hostile Influence and Cyfluence. As a collaborative project maintained with input from the community of experts, the CRC Glossary is intended to reflect professional consensus. We encourage you to engage with this initiative and welcome contributions via the CRC website. Top Of Page

[Introduction] Cyber-based hostile influence campaigns are aimed at influencing target audiences by promoting information and/or disinformation over the internet, sometimes combined with cyber-attacks which enhance their effect (hence force Cyfluence, as opposed to cyber-attacks that aim to steal information, extort money, etc.) Such hostile influence campaigns and operations can be considered an epistemological branch of Information Operations (IO) or Information Warfare (IW). Typically, and as customary during the last decade, the information is spread throughout various internet platforms, which are the different elements of the hostile influence campaign, and as such, connectivity and repetitiveness of content between several elements are the main core characteristics of influence campaigns. Hostile influence campaigns, much like Cyber-attacks, have also become a tool for rival nations and corporations to damage reputation or achieve various business, political or ideological goals. Much like in the cyber security arena, PR professionals and government agencies are responding to negative publicity and disinformation shared over the news and social media. We use the term cyber based hostile influence campaigns, as we include in this definition also cyber-attacks aimed at influencing (such as hack and leak during election time), while we exclude of this term other types of more traditional kinds of influence such as diplomatic, economic, military etc. During the 17th to 23rd August 2026, we observed, collected and analyzed endpoints of information related to cyber based hostile influence campaigns (including Cyfluence attacks). The following report is a summary of what we regard as the main events. Some of the mentioned campaigns have to do with social media and news outlets solemnly, while others leverage cyber-attack capabilities. [Contents] [Introduction] [Report Highlights] [Report Summary] [State Actors] Tiktok EU Activates DSA Crisis Mechanism with Meta and TikTok After Ceuta Deaths Russia Russia Recruits Foreign Fighters via Paid Meta Ads Fedorova Expulsion Illustrates Scale of Russian Interference Against France France Opens Criminal Investigation Into Russian Disinfo Campaign Against Presidential Candidates Russia Floods Swedish Media with Fake Clips to Target PM Kristersson Russian Propaganda Fabricates Dnipro Evacuation Ban for Conscription-Age Men Russian Fakes Target Zelenska and Ukrainian Diaspora in Poland Lithuania's Institutional Lag Creates Exploitable Vulnerabilities Under Russian Hybrid Pressure Kremlin Pivots from Climate Denial to Exploiting EU Policy Narratives China PRC Targets Kaohsiung Election with Fake Polling While AI Cyberattack Hits Taiwan Systems AI Enables PRC Comprehensive Election Interference Supply Chain Against Taiwa [AI Related Articles] AI-Generated News Sites Now Indistinguishable from Authentic Outlets, NewsGuard Finds SOCOM Commander Warns AI Deception Has Made Officials Unable to Distinguish Real from Fabricated Content LLM Political Persuasion Matches Human Content as Monitoring Frameworks Lag [General Reports] Forthcoming Book Maps Authoritarian Disinformation Architecture and Proposes Multi-Layer Counter-Framework SE Asia Insiders Confirm Shift from Bots to Data-Driven Gray Campaigns Major Ad-Tech DSPs Place Own Brand Ads Next to Misinformation Fake Polling Company Admits Fabricated US State Surveys Were a Social Experiment US Lawmakers Demand Meta Detail AI Deepfake Election Safeguards Ahead of Midterms AI Chatbots Fill Voter Information Gap as CISA Guidance Links Break Before Midterms [Appendix - Frameworks to Counter Disinformation] FTC Expands Operation AI Comply to B2B with Personal Liability [CRC Glossary] [ Report Highlights] Russia's Operation Matryoshka and Storm-1516 simultaneously targeted Germany, France, and Sweden in August 2026 using fake broadcaster logos, with France opening the first criminal prosecution directly targeting named political candidates (Attal, Philippe, Glucksmann), and the Swedish operation releasing seven fabricated clips within 60 minutes designed to overwhelm newsroom fact-checking capacity rather than maximize mass audience reach. The PRC deployed an AI-enabled autonomous cyberattack against 21 Taiwanese government systems in July 2026 while simultaneously running a disinformation campaign targeting Kaohsiung's 2026 mayoral election, with Taiwan's DPP warning that AI has lowered content fabrication costs to the point where Beijing can generate false narratives faster than Taiwanese fact-checkers can respond, describing PRC interference as a "comprehensive election interference industry supply chain". Russia is running a coordinated foreign military recruitment pipeline through paid Meta advertisements and 35 or more websites in 40 languages targeting Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia with misleading military job offers, with 85 paid Meta ads flagged during the reporting period. AI-generated fake news websites have proliferated to the point where they are indistinguishable from authentic outlets to most readers, while US Special Operations Command warned publicly that AI-enabled deception has made the information environment so opaque that senior officials can no longer reliably distinguish authentic from fabricated content, directly raising the probability of large-scale military conflict. A fake polling company (Median Strategies) admitted its surveys published across at least three US states were a 'social experiment', demonstrating a structural vulnerability; polling data published under a professional-sounding name receives less source verification than individual factual claims because polling is treated as systematic measurement, creating a documented entry point for fabricated quantitative data into the political information environment. The EU activated its DSA crisis coordination mechanism with Meta and TikTok following the Ceuta border crisis, in which AI-generated videos falsely claiming the border was open contributed to approximately 100 deaths, marking the first operational use of the EU's voluntary crisis fact-checking framework, whose activation depends on platform voluntary participation rather than legal obligation. Detector Media documented a coordinated August 12th – 18th fabrication campaign combining a manipulated Polish criminality compilation, a fake BBC video using AI-generated narration over genuine Elysee Palace footage to fabricate a Zelenska jewelry scandal, and an entirely neural-network-generated assault photograph, while Ukrinform separately debunked a fabricated audio clip falsely claiming Dnipro banned evacuation of conscription-age men. The FTC's Operation AI Comply has expanded to business-to-business enforcement using personal liability doctrine two years after its launch, with the SEC launching a parallel AI washing enforcement campaign, marking a structural shift from consumer protection to market integrity framing of AI misrepresentation, with corporate decision-makers now facing personal liability under the means and instrumentalities doctrine. [ Report Summary] The EU activated its voluntary DSA crisis fact-checking coordination mechanism with Meta and TikTok following the Ceuta border crisis, in which AI-generated videos falsely claiming the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta was open contributed to a mass crossing that resulted in approximately 100 deaths. Spanish fact-checker Newtral and Moroccan fact-checker MapExpress were coordinated by the EU to flag and escalate false content to the platforms during the crisis. EUvsDisinfo documented a coordinated Russian foreign military recruitment operation using paid Meta advertisements, WhatsApp messaging, and at least 35 websites in up to 40 languages to recruit foreign fighters with misleading job offers. African audiences were targeted from June 2026, Latin American audiences and European diaspora communities from July, and Southeast Asian audiences from late July. The investigation flagged 85 paid Meta ads during the reporting period. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot published a signed opinion piece in Le Monde arguing that the expulsion of Russian national Xenia Fedorova, whose residence permit was revoked on 29th July 2026 after French authorities determined she had been executing Kremlin-directed destabilisation operations through appearances on CNews and Europe 1 and published columns, illustrates the scale of the foreign interference threat France currently faces, describing Fedorova as a 'professional of subversion'. Fedorova responded in Le JDD, challenging Barrot to produce evidence of the Russian interference attributed to her. French prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into a Russian-linked disinformation campaign fabricating health claims against three centrist presidential candidates: a fabricated Parkinson's disease claim against former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, a health rumour against former PM Edouard Philippe, and false information about MEP Raphael Glucksmann. France's digital interference watchdog Viginum attributed the Attal campaign to Operation Matryoshka and the Philippe and Glucksmann operations to Storm-1516. A Russia-linked influence network deployed seven fabricated video clips within 60 minutes on 18th August 2026, depicting Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson making statements he never made and using forged visual identities of broadcaster SVT and newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Euromaidan Press attributes the operation to the same network that struck Germany with fake BBC and ARD websites targeting the September 2026 federal election and Storm-1516 campaigns targeting French candidates in August, noting that simultaneous multi-clip deployment is designed to overwhelm newsroom fact-checking capacity. Russian propaganda spread a fabricated audio clip replacing the original soundtrack of a genuine 7th August 2026 TikTok video showing train delays, falsely claiming Dnipro city authorities banned the evacuation of men of conscription age. The fake first appeared 17th August 2026 via the pro-Russian Telegram channel Perimeter ZOV on X. Ukrainian law contains no provision prohibiting conscription-age men from evacuating. Detector Media's review of Russian disinformation from 12th to 18th August 2026 documented three coordinated fabrication tracks: a manipulated compilation falsely portraying systematic Ukrainian criminality in Poland (Polish police data shows Ukrainians committed approximately 2% of offenses 2022-2025); a fake BBC video using AI-generated narration over genuine Elysee Palace footage to fabricate a Zelenska jewelry theft; and a fully neural-network-generated assault photograph presented as a Zelenska security incident. Jamestown Foundation analyst Eitvydas Bajarunas argues that Lithuania confronts sustained Russian hybrid pressure across informational, cyber, economic, and kinetic domains simultaneously, with the primary vulnerability being institutional misalignment; Lithuanian decision-making follows peacetime logic while Russia operates under wartime assumptions. Lithuania allocates 5.38% of GDP to defense and hosts a German brigade, yet structural gaps in decision-making speed, counter-drone coverage, and total societal mobilization undermine those capabilities. EUvsDisinfo documents how Kremlin-aligned outlets have largely abandoned climate change denial in favour of weaponising climate narratives against EU policy, recasting EU climate and energy regulations as authoritarian control mechanisms, predicting European economic collapse without Russian gas, and portraying Russia as a future climate beneficiary with Siberia as 'the land of the future', while Russia's own fuel crisis, driven by Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries, deepens the contradiction at the centre of its energy narratives. AEI/ISW's China-Taiwan Update documented PRC targeting of Taiwan's 2026 Kaohsiung mayoral election with fabricated polling data and fake news, a July 2026 AI-enabled autonomous cyberattack that compromised 21 Taiwanese government systems exfiltrating approximately 2,500 records, and Philippine President Marcos Jr. publicly rejecting use of Philippine territory as a US launch platform in a Taiwan contingency, a position the analysis links to PRC political influence on Manila. Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party China Affairs Department warned that AI has significantly lowered the cost of producing disinformation, enabling the PRC to operate a comprehensive election interference industry supply chain that combines voter data profiling, content impersonation mimicking local vernacular, and speed-based saturation generating false content within hours before elections to outpace Taiwan's fact-checking capacity, describing the operation as a continuous infrastructure refined across multiple election cycles since 2016. NewsGuard Reality Check documented the proliferation of AI-generated news websites designed to pass as authentic local and national outlets, finding that these sites are now indistinguishable from genuine news organizations to most readers, including those with media literacy. Admiral Frank Bradley, Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, warned that increasingly capable AI-generated deception is eroding confidence in digital information, complicating military operations and potentially weakening the “unity of effort” required to deter or respond to adversarial attacks. Bradley emphasized the growing importance of rapidly exposing hostile behavior and maintaining trusted intelligence, arguing that “information advantage leads to decision advantage.” Carnegie Endowment researchers Danaé Metaxa and Alex Engler document that LLMs have achieved political persuasiveness comparable to human-written content across 19 models and over 700 political issues, while asserting false claims as true 35% of the time on misinformation queries. A forthcoming academic book by Manhattan University psychologist Jay Friedenberg, uploaded as a preprint to PhilPapers, provides a comprehensive typology of disinformation operations used by authoritarian regimes, covering propaganda mechanics, cognitive bias exploitation, social media amplification, deepfakes, and AI-generated content risks across eight chapters. A peer-reviewed study based on 78 in-depth interviews with influence operation insiders in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand identifies five simultaneous IO transformations: diversification of clients beyond the state to political parties and businesses; increased outsourcing to private PR firms; a shift from high-volume bot-like accounts to carefully crafted pseudonymous influencer accounts with large genuine followings; content strategies moving from repetitive state-mirroring messaging to data-analytics-driven 'gray' campaigns that reframe real news rather than fabricate disinformation; and dissemination shifting from mass flooding to responsive real-time data-informed communication. NewsGuard investigation found the four largest demand-side advertising platforms, Google's Display & Video 360, Amazon DSP, Yahoo DSP, and Adobe Advertising DSP, placing programmatic advertisements for their own parent company brands and client brands next to articles advancing provably false claims. A polling company named Median Strategies admitted that surveys it published across at least three US states were fabricated as a social experiment. The company had no verifiable address, staff, or methodology disclosures, and the fabricated data circulated in political media without verification before the admission, illustrating that synthetic polling data can enter the political information ecosystem through normal reporting channels because survey data receives less source verification than individual factual claims. 19 US lawmakers led by Representative Kevin Mullin sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding specific details of the company's election safeguards against AI-generated deepfakes ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, citing documented rollbacks of Meta's previous election integrity commitments and the absence of publicly disclosed standards for detecting or removing AI-generated political impersonation content from Facebook and Instagram. TechPolicy.Press documented the convergence of three developments ahead of the 2026 US midterms: AI chatbots becoming a primary electoral information source for voters despite a documented 50% factual error rate on election-related queries; political campaigns deploying synthetic voter focus groups, AI-simulated voter segment representations, to craft messaging; and official CISA guidance links to election information resources breaking following structural changes to agency communications, leaving voters seeking authoritative federal information directed to dead links. Holland & Knight analyzed the evolution of the FTC's Operation AI Comply enforcement campaign two years after its September 2024 launch, documenting its expansion from B2C consumer protection to business-to-business AI capability misrepresentation using the means and instrumentalities doctrine to impose personal liability on corporate decision-makers, while the SEC has launched a parallel AI washing enforcement campaign targeting publicly traded companies that misrepresent AI capabilities to investors. [State Actors] Tiktok EU Activates DSA Crisis Mechanism with Meta and TikTok After Ceuta Deaths An article published by Euronews states that the European Union activated a voluntary crisis fact-checking coordination mechanism with Meta and TikTok under the Digital Services Act following the Ceuta border crisis, in which AI-generated videos falsely claiming the border crossing between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta was open contributed to a mass crossing that resulted in approximately 100 deaths, with the EU working with Spanish fact-checker Newtral and Moroccan fact-checker MapExpress to flag false content to the platforms rapidly. Meta separately removed coordinated content promoting human smuggling routes. The article states that the DSA crisis coordination mechanism activated during the Ceuta crisis represents the first operational use of the EU's voluntary Code of Practice for crisis-scale information events, establishing a precedent in which platform self-regulatory commitments are activated as an emergency response to disinformation causing direct physical harm, while simultaneously exposing the mechanism's structural limitation: activation depended on platform voluntary participation rather than legal obligation, and the approximately 100 deaths occurred before takedown requests reached sufficient scale to slow the migration. Source: Euronews. EU Coordinates Fact-Checkers with Meta and TikTok to Avoid Another Online-Fuelled Ceuta Crisis. [online] Published 11 August 2026. Available at: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/08/11/eu-coordinates-fact-checkers-with-meta-and-tiktok-to-avoid-another-online-fuelled-ceuta-crisis Top Of Page Russia Russia Recruits Foreign Fighters via Paid Meta Ads An investigation published by EUvsDisinfo states that Russia's military recruitment operation targets foreign nationals through a coordinated digital pipeline comprising paid Meta advertisements, WhatsApp messaging, and at least 35 recruitment websites operating in up to 40 languages, including Indonesian, Thai, Malay, Arabic, Wolof, French, and Spanish, with African audiences targeted from June 2026, Latin American audiences and European diaspora communities targeted from July, and Southeast Asian audiences from late July, using misleading job offers and hidden military contracts that routinely changed after recruits arrived. The investigation states that Russia's foreign recruitment pipeline represents a coordinated inauthentic behavior operation running on commercial advertising infrastructure: the 85 paid Meta ads flagged during the reporting period demonstrate that Russia is exploiting the same paid-distribution channels available to any advertiser to reach audiences facing poverty and limited employment prospects with military recruitment content designed to appear as legitimate employment offers, with the operational geography, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, selected precisely because these regions are least likely to be covered by NATO-aligned counter-influence monitoring systems. Source: EUvsDisinfo. From Social Media to the Front Line: Russia’s Foreign Recruitment Pipeline. [online] Published 14 August 2026. Available at: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/from-social-media-to-the-front-line-russias-foreign-recruitment-pipeline/ Top Of Page Fedorova Expulsion Illustrates Scale of Russian Interference Against France An opinion published by Le Monde states that French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, writing in a signed ministerial opinion piece, argued that the expulsion of Russian national Xenia Fedorova, whose residence permit was revoked on 29th July 2026 following a French government determination that she had been executing Kremlin-directed destabilisation operations through her appearances on CNews and Europe 1 and her published columns, illustrates the scale of the foreign interference threat France faces, describing her as a 'professional of subversion' and an agent executing operations piloted by the Kremlin against French society, with her bank accounts frozen and financial transfers to her prohibited following the expulsion order. Barrot's choice to frame the Fedorova expulsion through a signed ministerial op-ed in France's newspaper of record, rather than a routine administrative statement, reflects a deliberate public attribution strategy: by describing a named private individual as a Kremlin agent in a ministerial capacity, the French government is establishing a political narrative of documented Russian interference that functions independently of any judicial determination, a posture underscored by Fedorova's counter-challenge in Le JDD demanding Barrot produce evidentiary support for the interference characterisation, and by a separate France 24 report that Le Figaro's identity had been usurped in a fabricated citation falsely attributing statements about Fedorova to Barrot, suggesting Russian disinformation operations responded to the expulsion in kind. Source: Le Monde. France's Foreign Minister: 'The Case of Xenia Fedorova Highlights the Interference Threat We Face'. [online] Published 17 August 2026. Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2026/08/17/france-s-foreign-minister-the-case-of-xenia-fedorova-highlights-the-interference-threat-we-face_6756598_23.html Top Of Page France Opens Criminal Investigation Into Russian Disinfo Campaign Against Presidential Candidates An article published by The Local states that French prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into a Russian-linked disinformation campaign fabricating health claims against three prominent centrist political figures, former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal (fabricated Parkinson's disease claim), former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe (fabricated health rumour), and MEP Raphael Glucksmann (false personal information), with France's national digital interference watchdog Viginum attributing the Attal campaign to Operation Matryoshka and the Glucksmann and Philippe operations to the separate Storm-1516 network, marking the first time French prosecutors have opened criminal charges against a Russian state-linked influence operation targeting named candidates. The French criminal investigation marks a structural shift in democratic governments' response to foreign interference: rather than diplomatic protests or sanctions, France is using domestic criminal law to target the specific actors behind named disinformation operations, establishing legal precedent that fabricating health claims about identifiable political figures for electoral interference purposes constitutes a criminal act under French law, and creating an accountability mechanism that could deter future IO operations that have historically relied on the impunity that informal attribution provided. Source: The Local France. France Probes Russian Disinfo Campaign Against Centrist Candidates. [online] Published 18 August 2026. Available at: https://www.thelocal.com/20260818/france-probes-russian-disinfo-campaign-against-centrist-candidates/ Top Of Page Russia Floods Swedish Media with Fake Clips to Target PM Kristersson A report published by Euromaidan Press states that a Russian-linked influence network published seven fabricated video clips within 60 minutes on 18 August 2026, depicting Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson making statements he never made and using forged visual identities of Sweden's public broadcaster SVT and newspaper Dagens Nyheter, with the operation's rapid multi-platform deployment confirming attribution to the same network that struck Germany with fake BBC and ARD websites targeting the September 2026 federal election, and Storm-1516 fabrications targeting French candidates earlier in August. The Swedish operation's defining tactical innovation is its objective of overwhelming newsroom capacity rather than maximising mass-audience reach: by releasing seven distinct fabricated clips within a single hour, the operation forces journalists across multiple outlets to simultaneously investigate and debunk content, consuming verification bandwidth and delaying corrections, a strategy calibrated to the reality that professional fact-checkers, not general audiences, are the primary barrier between disinformation and credible propagation through secondary reporting. Source: Euromaidan Press. Russia Faked Broadcasts from Sweden’s National TV to Smear Its PM—the Same Network Already Hit Germany and France This Month. [online] Published 20 August 2026. Available at: https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/08/20/russia-faked-broadcasts-from-swedens-national-tv-to-smear-its-pm-the-same-network-already-hit-germany-and-france-this-month/ Top Of Page Russian Propaganda Fabricates Dnipro Evacuation Ban for Conscription-Age Men A factcheck published by Ukrinform states that Russian propaganda spread a fabricated audio clip falsely claiming that Dnipro city authorities banned the evacuation of men of conscription age, with the audio replacing the original soundtrack of a genuine TikTok video from 07 August 2026 showing train delays caused by military transport, the fake first appearing on 17 August 2026 via the pro-Russian Telegram channel Perimeter ZOV on X, and Ukrainian law containing no provision prohibiting men of conscription age from evacuating. A factcheck published by Ukrinform states that the fabricated Dnipro evacuation ban narrative is designed to amplify fear among Ukrainian civilian men that remaining in or returning to Ukraine will result in immediate mobilization, serving the dual purpose of discouraging civilian population movement and undermining trust in Ukrainian civil administration by falsely attributing draconian restrictions to local authorities, a disinformation pattern that converts genuine public concern about mobilization into a fear-based deterrent through audio manipulation of authentic citizen-generated content. Source: Ukrinform. Russian Propaganda Spreads Fake Claim About Ban on Evacuation of Conscription-Age People in Dnipro. [online] Available at: https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-factcheck/4155918-russian-propaganda-spreads-fake-claim-about-ban-on-evacuation-of-conscriptionage-people-in-dnipro.html Top Of Page Russian Fakes Target Zelenska and Ukrainian Diaspora in Poland A report published by Detector Media states that Russian disinformation during 12th to 18th August 2026 included a fabricated compilation of unrelated criminal incidents from multiple years designed to portray systematic Ukrainian criminality in Poland (when Polish police data shows Ukrainians committed approximately 2% of offenses in 2022-2025), a fake BBC video using AI-generated narration combined with genuine Elysee Palace footage to falsely claim First Lady Olena Zelenska wore an 800,000 euro pendant stolen from a French museum, and a fully AI-generated photograph presented as evidence of a restaurant assault by Zelenska's security staff, with SynthID markers confirming artificial generation of the taxi sign image and facial analysis confirming the assault photo was entirely neural-network generated. The three fabrication tracks target three distinct Ukrainian credibility vulnerabilities simultaneously, the Polish criminality narrative exploits host-country anxieties about Ukrainian refugees in Europe's largest Ukrainian diaspora destination to damage bilateral relations; the Zelenska pendant fabrication attacks the perception of Ukraine's wartime leadership class as corrupt beneficiaries of Western support; and the restaurant assault narrative deploys a Prigozhin-linked character attack sustained across multiple weeks, indicating coordinated deployment calibrated to maintain saturation rather than rely on one-time exposure. Source: Detector Media. “Crimes and Acts of Sabotage by Ukrainians” in Poland and Zelenska in a “Stolen Pendant.” Review of Russian Fakes from August 12–18, 2026. [online] Published 21 August 2026. Available at: https://en.detector.media/post/crimes-and-acts-of-sabotage-by-ukrainians-in-poland-and-zelenska-in-a-stolen-pendant-review-of-russian-fakes-from-august-12-18-2026 Top Of Page Lithuania's Institutional Lag Creates Exploitable Vulnerabilities Under Russian Hybrid Pressure An analysis published by Jamestown Foundation states that Lithuania confronts sustained Russian hybrid pressure operating beneath conventional military thresholds through simultaneous campaigns across informational, cyber, economic, and kinetic domains, including sabotage, infrastructure disruption, GPS interference, drone incursions, and coercive migration, with the fundamental vulnerability being institutional misalignment: Lithuanian decision-making continues to follow peacetime logic while Russia operates under wartime assumptions, probing vulnerabilities and measuring response capacity in ways that conventional defense frameworks are not structured to detect or counter. Bajarunas identifies institutional adaptation velocity as Lithuania's primary vulnerability, the lag between threat evolution and institutional response cycles risks negating superior military capabilities, since decision-making speed and system-wide integration across military, infrastructure, civil society, and industrial domains matter more than platform-level capabilities, with Lithuania's 5.38% GDP defense allocation and German brigade deployment providing a capability baseline that structural gaps in cyber resilience, counter-drone coverage, and total societal mobilization currently undermine. Source: Jamestown Foundation. Lessons Learned From Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Case of Lithuania. [online] Published 18 August 2026. Available at: https://jamestown.org/lessons-learned-from-russias-war-against-ukraine-the-case-of-lithuania/ Top Of Page Kremlin Pivots from Climate Denial to Exploiting EU Policy Narratives An analysis published by EUvsDisinfo states that Kremlin-aligned information operations have shifted from denying climate change to weaponising it as a vehicle for established anti-EU disinformation tropes, recasting EU climate and energy efficiency regulations as surveillance mechanisms and attacks on private property, amplifying apocalyptic predictions of European water wars and food price collapse to position Russia as a future climate haven, and repeatedly claiming that Europe faces winter without heating due to its rejection of Russian gas, while Russia's own fuel crisis driven by Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries and a diesel export ban imposed to stabilise domestic supply contradicts its narratives about European energy dependency. The Kremlin's climate narrative pivot reflects a structural adaptation: as the observable effects of climate change became impossible to suppress domestically, with permafrost thaw threatening Russian oil and gas pipeline infrastructure, damaging buildings and railways, and the 2020 Norilsk fuel tank spill serving as an early indicator of accelerating technological risk, outright denial lost credibility with domestic audiences, so the adaptation shifted to attacking proposed solutions rather than denying the problem, a more durable posture that simultaneously exploits legitimate climate anxieties in target countries, reinforces anti-EU narratives without requiring false empirical claims, and allows Russia to reframe its fossil fuel dependency as a strategic advantage rather than an environmental liability. Source: EUvsDisinfo. From Denial to Exploitation: How the Kremlin Has Adapted Its Climate Disinformation. [online] Available at: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/from-denial-to-exploitation-how-the-kremlin-has-adapted-its-climate-disinformation/ Top Of Page China PRC Targets Kaohsiung Election with Fake Polling While AI Cyberattack Hits Taiwan Systems An analysis published by AEI/ISW states that Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te publicly accused the PRC of targeting the Kaohsiung 2026 mayoral election with fabricated polling data and fake news, while a separate AI-enabled autonomous cyberattack in July 2026 compromised 21 government systems and exfiltrated approximately 2,500 records across 85 accounts, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. stated publicly that the Philippines would not allow its territory to be used as a US launch platform in a Taiwan contingency, a position the analysis links to ongoing PRC political influence on Manila. The PRC's parallel deployment of disinformation and cyberattack operations against Taiwan reflects an integrated cognitive warfare doctrine in which election-targeted influence operations and infrastructure penetration serve complementary strategic functions; the fake polling and disinformation targeting Kaohsiung's 2026 vote serves as a rehearsal for 2028 presidential interference, while the AI-enabled cyberattack against government systems generates intelligence on official communications that can be used to calibrate or authenticate future disinformation content. Source: American Enterprise Institute. China & Taiwan Update, August 18, 2026. [online] Published 18 August 2026. Available at: https://www.aei.org/commentary/china-taiwan-update-august-18-2026/ Top Of Page AI Enables PRC Comprehensive Election Interference Supply Chain Against Taiwan An article published by Taipei Times states that Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party China Affairs Department warned that artificial intelligence has significantly lowered the cost of producing disinformation, enabling the PRC to field a comprehensive election interference industry supply chain that collects voter data and online behavioral profiles, generates false audio recordings, videos, endorsements and scandals within hours before elections, distributes content through local collaborators and inauthentic accounts, and refines strategies based on real-time engagement metrics, operating at a speed calibrated to outpace Taiwan's fact-checking capacity. An article published by Taipei Times states that the DPP's characterization of PRC election interference as an industry supply chain reflects a structural assessment that Beijing's interference is not episodic campaign activity but a continuous operational infrastructure evolved through documented iterations, the 2016 Chou Tzu-yu controversy, 2018 local election disinformation, 2020 presidential information warfare, and post-2022 influence operations, with each cycle providing feedback data that refines targeting precision, making the cumulative capability qualitatively different from a series of isolated incidents. Source: Taipei Times. AI Could Intensify Chinese Election Interference: DPP. [online] Published 17 August 2026. Available at: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2026/08/17/2003862627 Top Of Page [AI Related Articles] AI-Generated News Sites Now Indistinguishable from Authentic Outlets, NewsGuard Finds A report published by NewsGuard Reality Check states that a growing infrastructure of AI-generated news websites, designed to pass as authentic local and national news outlets, publishing under credible-sounding names with content indistinguishable from genuine reporting to most readers, has proliferated to the point where professional media monitors cannot rapidly identify them without forensic analysis, illustrating that the barrier to creating authentic-appearing synthetic news infrastructure has fallen below the threshold that current detection systems and public media literacy effectively address. The proliferation of AI-generated fake news sites represents a structural shift in the disinformation threat landscape; unlike fabricated stories distributed through identifiable partisan channels, AI-generated outlet networks establish apparent institutional credibility that makes individual false claims harder to debunk, since audiences attribute the authority of a news organization to content appearing under its masthead, and since AI generation enables the simultaneous operation of hundreds of such sites at negligible cost, the scale at which synthetic local news infrastructure can operate exceeds the monitoring capacity of national fact-checking organizations. Source: NewsGuard's Reality Check. Is This Website Real or AI Slop? [online] Published 17 August 2026. Available at: https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/is-this-website-real-or-ai-slop Top Of Page SOCOM Commander Warns AI Deception Has Made Officials Unable to Distinguish Real from Fabricated Content An article published by Defense One states that Admiral Frank Bradley, Commander of US Special Operations Command, warned that increasingly capable AI-generated deception is eroding confidence in digital information, complicating military operations and potentially weakening the “unity of effort” required to deter or respond to adversarial attacks. Bradley emphasized the growing importance of rapidly exposing hostile behavior and maintaining trusted intelligence, arguing that “information advantage leads to decision advantage.” In addition, a former State Department official argued that politically driven decisions within the U.S. government, combined with leadership-led changes at major social media platforms, have weakened the structures, tools, and transparency needed to detect and assess foreign influence operations, leaving analysts increasingly “flying blind.” Source: Defense One. AI-enabled Deception Threatens Future Operations, Raises Chances of Large Conflict, Says Special Operations Leader. [online] Published 21 August 2026. Available at: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2026/08/ai-enabled-deception-threatens-future-operations-raises-chances-large-conflict-says-special-operations-leader/415582/ Top Of Page LLM Political Persuasion Matches Human Content as Monitoring Frameworks Lag A study published by Carnegie Endowment states that large language models have achieved political persuasiveness comparable to human-written content, with research across 19 models and over 700 political issues finding that factual claims drove persuasiveness equally between AI and human outputs, while a 2025 NewsGuard analysis found LLMs asserted false claims as true 35% of the time on misinformation queries, and the authors document that content moderation of politically sensitive topics has varied during live events, with GPT-4.1 refusal rates on Israel-related content increasing substantially during the August 2025 Gaza conflict without public disclosure of the change. The authors identify the DEEP properties of LLMs, Dynamic (changing constantly without disclosure), Ephemeral (outputs disappear after use), Embedded (operating within layered software guardrails that vary by deployment), and Personalized (responses calibrated to individual user history), as the structural reason one-off audits are insufficient: a point-in-time audit captures a version of the system that may be materially different from what any user encounters at a given political moment, meaning LLMs can shift their political outputs between elections, between news cycles, and between individual users without any of those changes being detectable through current research or regulatory frameworks. Source: Brennan Center for Justice. Does AI Fight or Fuel Election Disinformation? [online] Available at: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/does-ai-fight-or-fuel-election-disinformation Top Of Page [General Reports] Forthcoming Book Maps Authoritarian Disinformation Architecture and Proposes Multi-Layer Counter-Framework A preprint book published by PhilPapers states that authoritarian regimes systematically deploy disinformation through layered propaganda architectures that exploit cognitive biases, social media recommendation algorithms, and AI-generation tools to sustain political control and undermine democratic institutions, with a typology spanning authoritarianism, polarization, propaganda mechanics, cognitive vulnerability exploitation, disinformation operations, and social media amplification, arguing that AI-generated deepfakes and coordinated inauthentic behavior represent a new operational tier that lowers fabrication costs while outpacing existing detection and regulatory frameworks, and that effective counter-IO requires simultaneous supply-side platform regulation and demand-side cognitive inoculation rather than relying on post-exposure fact-checking alone. Friedenberg's interdisciplinary framework, integrating social psychology research on belief persistence and cognitive bias with structural analysis of social media platform architecture and authoritarian regime behavior, provides a practitioner-relevant taxonomy for classifying and anticipating disinformation operations, with its core insight being that the effectiveness of disinformation does not depend on the audience being irrational but on the operation being architecturally calibrated to exploit predictable cognitive processing patterns, including confirmation bias, illusory truth effects from repetition, and motivated reasoning, that are universal human features rather than individual vulnerabilities, meaning that counter-IO frameworks relying on media literacy alone address a symptom rather than the structural mechanism through which authoritarian actors convert information environments into instruments of political control. Source: Fricker, Miranda. Disagreement and the State of Knowledge. [online] Available at: https://philpapers.org/rec/FRIDAD-6 Top Of Page SE Asia Insiders Confirm Shift from Bots to Data-Driven Gray Campaigns A study published by Information, Communication & Society states that a peer-reviewed study based on 78 in-depth interviews with influence operation insiders in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand identifies five simultaneous transformations in contemporary IO, a shift from state-dominated commissioning to a broader range of political and business clients; increased outsourcing to private PR firms and freelancers; a move from high-volume bot-like accounts to fewer carefully crafted pseudonymous influencer accounts with large genuine followings; a content shift from repetitive state-mirroring messaging to data-analytics-driven 'gray' campaigns that reframe real news rather than fabricate disinformation; and dissemination strategies moving from mass flooding to responsive, real-time, data-informed communication. The IO 2.0 framework carries two analytically significant implications for counter-IO efforts: first, the shift from fabrication to gray campaigns, where real information is selectively reframed and amplified rather than invented, directly limits the effectiveness of fact-checking and content-removal moderation, since gray content does not trigger false-claim detection; second, the shift from automated bots to carefully nurtured pseudonymous accounts with genuine followings means contemporary IO is designed to be indistinguishable from ordinary user behavior at the account level, complicating coordinated inauthentic behavior detection frameworks that social media platforms rely on, a structural gap the authors conclude requires financial transparency of political campaigns and independent investigative journalism rather than technical content moderation alone. Source: Ruijgrok, Kris, Berenschot, Ward, Sastramidjaja, Yatun, Gaw, Fatima, Sombatpoonsiri, Janjira, Wiyayanto, and Agonos, Mariam Jayne. Influence Operations 2.0: The Evolution of Social Media Manipulation in Southeast Asia. [online] Published 2026. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2713663 Top Of Page Major Ad-Tech DSPs Place Own Brand Ads Next to Misinformation An investigation published by NewsGuard Reality Check states that the four largest demand-side advertising platforms, Google's Display & Video 360, Amazon DSP, Yahoo DSP, and Adobe Advertising DSP, placed programmatic advertisements for their own brands and client brands next to misinformation articles advancing provably false claims, with NewsGuard analysts in 2026 identifying advertisements for 45 major technology brands appearing next to 162 false-claim articles, including Adobe Acrobat Pro ads appearing on JoeHoft.com next to false 2020 election theft articles and Google product advertisements appearing on a health hoax site next to articles claiming hydrogen peroxide cures cancer, exposing a fundamental gap between the brand safety guarantees these platforms sell to advertisers and the content adjacency their automated systems actually produce. The inability of major ad-tech demand-side platforms to prevent their own advertising spend from appearing next to misinformation reveals the structural mechanism by which the disinformation ecosystem is commercially sustained: programmatic advertising operates through automated buying systems with limited publisher-level content visibility, meaning that misinformation sites monetize through the same commercial revenue channels as credible publishers, while the brand safety tools sold by these DSPs operate as opt-in domain blocklists rather than real-time content assessment, a design structurally incapable of addressing the velocity at which new misinformation sites and AI-generated content farms emerge, which means brand safety revenue subsidizes the commercial viability of maintaining a large, continuously replenishing ecosystem of misinformation sites. Source: NewsGuard's Reality Check. These Ad-Tech Giants Claim to Protect. [online] Available at: https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/these-ad-tech-giants-claim-to-protect Top Of Page Fake Polling Company Admits Fabricated US State Surveys Were a Social Experiment An article published by Washington Times states that a polling company named Median Strategies admitted that fabricated surveys it published across at least three US states were conducted as a social experiment, with the company having no verifiable address, staff, or methodology disclosures, and the fabricated data having circulated in political media without verification before the admission, illustrating how synthetic polling data can enter the political information ecosystem through normal political reporting channels in the absence of industry-standard source verification. The Median Strategies case reveals a documented vulnerability in how political polling data is consumed and reported: survey data published under a professional-sounding organization name routinely receives less source verification than individual factual claims, because polling is understood as systematic measurement rather than an assertion subject to standard journalistic source assessment, creating a structural entry point for fabricated quantitative data into the political information environment that does not require the audience to accept a specific false claim, only a numerical framing as reflecting public opinion. Source: The Washington Times. Fake Polling From Mysterious Company Highlights Danger of Unvetted Election Surveys. [online] Published 18 August 2026. Available at: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/18/fake-polling-mysterious-company-highlights-danger-unvetted-election/ Top Of Page US Lawmakers Demand Meta Detail AI Deepfake Election Safeguards Ahead of Midterms An article published by India West states that 19 US lawmakers led by Representative Kevin Mullin sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding specific details of the company's election safeguards against AI-generated deepfakes ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, citing documented rollbacks of Meta's previous election integrity commitments and the absence of publicly disclosed standards for detecting or removing AI-generated political impersonation content from Facebook and Instagram. The bipartisan letter to Zuckerberg reflects a shift in Congressional strategy from legislative proposals, which have failed to advance in multiple sessions, to oversight pressure using platform commitments already made as the accountability standard, rather than demanding new regulatory obligations, the letter specifically asks Meta to account for the safeguards it has already committed to and explain where those commitments have been reduced, placing the burden of justification on the platform rather than requiring legislation to establish new obligations. Source: India-West. 19 US Lawmakers Slam Meta Over AI Deepfakes Ahead of Midterms. [online] Published 18 August 2026. Available at: https://indiawest.com/19-us-lawmakers-slam-meta-over-ai-deepfakes-ahead-of-midterms/ Top Of Page AI Chatbots Fill Voter Information Gap as CISA Guidance Links Break Before Midterms An analysis published by TechPolicy.Press states that AI chatbots are becoming a primary source of electoral information for an increasing share of voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, that political campaigns are using synthetic voter focus groups, AI-simulated representations of voter segments, to craft and test messaging, and that official CISA guidance links to election information resources have broken following structural changes to the agency's public communications, leaving voters who seek authoritative federal information directed to dead links. The convergence of AI-delivered voter information and broken CISA guidance links creates a structural vacuum: voters seeking authoritative election information from federal sources encounter broken links while AI chatbots, which the Brennan Center documented as making factual errors in 50% of election-related responses despite rebuffing conspiracy theories, fill that informational space, meaning the practical effect of degraded government communications infrastructure is to transfer voter guidance from verified official sources to AI systems whose accuracy at the task has been documented as unreliable. Source: Tech Policy Press. AI Meets the US Midterm Elections. [online] Published 16 August 2026. Available at: https://www.techpolicy.press/newsletter-august-16-2026/ Top Of Page [Appendix - Frameworks to Counter Disinformation] FTC Expands Operation AI Comply to B2B with Personal Liability An analysis published by Holland & Knight states that the Federal Trade Commission's Operation AI Comply enforcement campaign, launched in September 2024, has expanded from initial B2C consumer protection cases to target business-to-business AI capability misrepresentation, using the means and instrumentalities doctrine to hold corporate decision-makers personally liable alongside their companies, while the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a parallel AI washing enforcement campaign targeting publicly traded companies that misrepresent their AI capabilities to investors. The expansion represents a structural progression from consumer protection framing, where the primary harm is individual consumer deception, to systemic market integrity framing, in which false AI capability claims distort investment decisions, competitive positioning, and procurement outcomes across entire industry sectors, with personal liability exposure for corporate officers providing a deterrent that company-level fines alone may not achieve. Source: Holland & Knight. “Operation AI Comply” 2 Years Later: Continued Enforcement Against Misleading Claims. [online] Published 18 August 2026. Available at: https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/08/operation-ai-comply-2-years-later-continued-enforcement Top Of Page [CRC Glossary] The nature and sophistication of the modern Information Environment is projected to continue to escalate in complexity. However, across academic publications, legal frameworks, policy debates, and public communications, the same concepts are often described in different ways, making collaboration, cooperation, and effective action more difficult. To ensure clarity and establish a consistent frame of reference, the CRC is maintaining a standard glossary to reduce ambiguity and promote terminological interoperability. Its scope encompasses foundational concepts, as well as emerging terms relating to Hostile Influence and Cyfluence. As a collaborative project maintained with input from the community of experts, the CRC Glossary is intended to reflect professional consensus. We encourage you to engage with this initiative and welcome contributions via the CRC website. Top Of Page

Tonga's information ecosystem is unusually concentrated and physically fragile, making it an attractive target for great-power competition in the Pacific. The Kingdom relies on a single submarine fiber-optic cable for global connectivity — a vulnerability starkly exposed when the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption severed it for five weeks, forcing the diaspora to become the country's de facto information relay. Today, roughly 58.5% of Tonga's 104,000 residents are online, and of those, social media usage is almost entirely Facebook-driven (66.5% of the population), while X/Twitter has collapsed to under 1,900 users. This Facebook-first, X-absent media sphere means platform monitoring for influence operations must focus overwhelmingly on Meta properties. Compounding this concentration is a diaspora nearly twice the size of Tonga's resident population, spread across New Zealand, the US, and Australia, and connected to home primarily through Facebook groups, Messenger, and diaspora-based outlets like Kaniva Tonga News. Remittances make up ~39% of GDP, and the diaspora has demonstrated real political leverage — from a 2025 voting-rights campaign to a 2024 backlash over a leaked pro-China document that forced domestic political consequences. On the diplomatic-infrastructure front, the report traces how Tonga "hedges between China and the West": significant Belt and Road-linked debt to China's Export-Import Bank continues to constrain reconstruction, while the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany/EU, and Japan have all stepped up counter-engagement — from deep-sea mineral partnerships to post-ransomware cyber assistance. While no large-scale coordinated influence campaign has been documented, prior incidents (deepfake audio, fake political letters, COVID conspiracy content) show Tonga's susceptibility to information manipulation, underscoring the case for proactive social-media monitoring and media-literacy resilience before a campaign — rather than after. Author: Esau Tupou (Head of the Tonga Computer Emergency Response Team) [Download PDF Here]

This article highlights a significant blind spot in existing counterintelligence frameworks: unresolved integration trauma as a distinct psychological vulnerability exploited by foreign intelligence services. Critically engaging with the Swedish Defence Research Agency's 2026 "Spies Among Us" report, the author argues that while the study acknowledges "divided loyalties" among recruited agents, it treats these as static demographic markers rather than active psychological mechanisms. The dominant MICE model (Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego) has no category for the emotional experience of failed integration, the chronic sense of non-belonging that leaves individuals open to manipulation. Drawing on social psychology research on belonging and acculturation stress, the author argues that when integration fails, the resulting psychological state is a structural vulnerability. An offer of belonging from an intelligence-linked recruiter operates at a more fundamental level than ideological persuasion, making such recruits harder to identify through conventional screening, and less likely to recognize themselves as being recruited at all. The article further argues that influence operations systematically priming diaspora communities with narratives of grievance and Western betrayal are not separate from HUMINT recruitment, but part of a deliberate, coordinated strategy. The policy implication cuts across both intelligence and social policy: genuine integration may be the most effective long-term countermeasure, and integration quality should be understood as directly intersecting with national cognitive security. Author: Tamara Klevova (The author’s name has been changed at their request to protect their privacy. The author’s identity has been verified by the CRC’s editorial board) [Download PDF Here]

This article by Dr. Gregory Asmolov introduces "disconnective propaganda" as an emerging, under-recognized cognitive threat vector affecting societal resilience and mobilization efforts. As European countries face structural constraints in military recruitment, societal resilience and civilian mobilization capacity have become essential components of national security. Civilian COVID-19 aid networks and Ukraine's whole-of-society wartime response both demonstrate that horizontal, digitally-enabled self-organization has become a decisive strategic asset. The article argues that hostile actors, particularly Russia, have adapted their information operations accordingly: rather than seeking to persuade audiences, adversarial disconnective propaganda deliberately targets the social infrastructure of collective action -- trust, volunteer networks, and coordination mechanisms -- to degrade a society's capacity to mobilize when needed. For that purpose, disconnective propaganda employs mechanisms such as polarization and fragmentation, delegitimization of civic organizers, participatory propaganda and digital vigilantism, disruption of crisis communication, and influence over digital governance debates. Finally, the report presents five policy recommendations for European stakeholders: Reframe counter-propaganda around protecting resilience, rather than fact-checking. Integrate "resilience disruption" metrics into FIMI monitoring frameworks. Consider influence defense a component of civil defense and reserve policy. Strengthen and protect local information ecologies. Assess digital regulation for its potential impact on horizontal connectivity. Together, these measures complement the European Democracy Shield and Preparedness Union Strategy by addressing a fairly underdeveloped dimension of European resilience: safeguarding society’s crucial capacity to communicate, organize, and mobilize in response to various crises scenarios, including external threats. Author: Gregory Asmolov, PhD (King’s College London) [Download PDF Here]

While influence operations research has traditionally focused on high-arousal emotions like anger and outrage, this report by Alina Bârgăoanu and Maya Sobchuk examines a quieter, more insidious vector: nostalgia. Unlike overt propaganda, weaponized nostalgia operates as an "ambient" emotion, it doesn't announce itself as political, but instead shapes how audiences judge the present through idealized, emotionally warm portrayals of the past, gradually normalizing distrust in current institutions and eroding critical evaluation. Drawing on two original investigations, the report documents this dynamic in action. In Romania, a Russian-linked network of roughly 75 Facebook pages and affiliated clickbait sites active since 2020 and reaching a combined audience in the millions has spent years embedding nostalgia for the communist era across 12,790 analyzed posts. Rather than explicit political messaging, the content leans on themes of family, faith, childhood, tradition, and "true" values, implicitly contrasting a morally coherent past with a fragmented present. Notably, these pages were built years in advance of any electoral target and have survived repeated exposure, including through the contested 2024 election cycle. In Okinawa, Japan, the report documents PRC-aligned campaigns exploiting Ryukyuan historical identity across X/Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. These efforts range from official Chinese state media (including a dedicated Global Times hashtag, #RyukyuChronicles) to coordinated networks of inauthentic accounts some AI-generated, some sloppily assembled with mismatched VPNs and bios promoting narratives of Ryukyu's "undetermined status," historical grievance against Japan, and opposition to U.S. military presence. Over 44–56% of accounts engaging in these narratives displayed bot-like characteristics. The comparative analysis reveals a shared playbook: nostalgic content is dressed up as cultural celebration, historical education, or community memory, making it resistant to being dismissed as propaganda. The report also identifies a complementary strategy, pairing nostalgic narratives with "techno-utopian" messaging (as seen in Chinese diplomatic content in Malaysia) that frames a China-aligned future as the answer to a present rendered inadequate from both temporal directions. The authors argue that because nostalgia is ambient rather than viral, it evades most automated detection systems, making manual, qualitative analysis essential. The report closes with recommendations for influence defense practitioners: engage the emotional register of these narratives rather than relying on factual rebuttal alone, build cognitive resilience before narratives normalize, and treat slow narrative permeation as seriously as sudden disinformation bursts. Authors: Alina Bârgăoanu & Maya Sobchuk [Download PDF Here]

Indonesia's June 2026 protest wave, driven by university students, women's groups, and civic actors reacting to economic pressure, fuel and food costs, and criticism of the Free Nutritious Meals Programme was locally rooted, but its meaning was quickly contested online. This report documents how a cluster of pro-PRC influencer accounts moved to reframe the demonstrations as a U.S.-, NED-, and Soros-backed "color revolution" aimed at destabilizing Indonesia and countering China's regional influence. Using narrative intelligence tools, CRC researchers identified 187 relevant posts generating over 1.2 million views, concentrated in two coordinated surges (June 6–7 and June 14–15) that tracked closely with key moments in the protest cycle. Four accounts @angeloinchina, @NuryVittachi, @BrianJBerletic, and @PeterCronau drove the bulk of this activity, mutually amplifying one another and receiving support from a network of 37 accounts, 45% of which displayed bot-like behavior. Notably, this was not an isolated incident: the same accounts pushed similar claims during Indonesia's 2025 protest cycle and timed a parallel revival of "Tiananmen was Western-backed" narratives to coincide with the June 4th memorial period, pointing to a recurring, deliberate playbook rather than spontaneous commentary. While open-source evidence does not support claims that the protests were foreign-made or externally funded, the report argues that Indonesia as Southeast Asia's largest economy and a longtime adherent of a non-aligned foreign policy, remains a key target for narratives seeking to shape public and policymaker perceptions amid intensifying U.S.-China strategic competition. [Download PDF Here]

Commissioned by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation For Freedom Malaysia in late 2025, as part of a Study on Perceptions of Geopolitics and Regional Issues, this dedicated CRC report examines how Chinese and Russian influence affects Malaysia’s digital information environment and public opinion. The report integrates the results of two recent national surveys, narrative intelligence findings, and a media environment analysis. It argues, that Malaysia is not necessarily undergoing authoritarian conversion. Instead, it is consistently exposed to foreign-driven anti-Western and authoritarian-aligned narratives which are embedded across state media, diplomatic channels, local outlets, social media platforms, and amplifier assets. In that context, the People's Republic of China (PRC) is the most prominent foreign actor, using a multi-layered influence architecture in an attempt to frame Beijing as Malaysia’s foremost economic and strategic partner. At the same time, Russian influence activity is also observed, albeit on a more limited scale. It relies mostly on diplomatic messaging, cultural institutions, individual influencers, and media partnerships promoting narratives around multipolarity, sovereignty, anti-Western sentiment, and closer Malaysia-Russia alignment. Survey data from the CRC and Merdeka Center provides important insights. It shows that although many Malaysians view the PRC as highly active and economically beneficial, a majority still holds China responsible for South China Sea tensions. For Malaysian and European influence defense stakeholders, the report highlights uneven cognitive resilience capacity across demographic groups, reinforcing the need for improved strategic communication deployment, as well as adoption of counter-FIMI detection, remediation and response capabilities in order to protect the crucial assets of democracy. This report was compiled in March 2026. [Download PDF Here]

Since the outbreak of the Iran War (Operation Epic Fury) on 28 February 2026, the conflict has emerged as a landmark case study in modern hybrid warfare, one defined not just by airstrikes and military force, but by the seamless integration of cyber operations and information warfare into a unified offensive strategy. Cyfluence Research Center (CRC) examines what analysts are calling "cyfluence" operations: the coordinated fusion of cyber capabilities with influence campaigns designed to shape perceptions, sow confusion, and degrade morale. Key incidents documented include the compromise of Iran's BadeSaba prayer app, which was hijacked on the first day of strikes to push surrender messages to millions of Iranian users, and the simultaneous kinetic strike and broadcast hijack of state television network IRIB, through which messages from Israeli PM Netanyahu and President Trump were beamed directly to Iranian audiences. Beyond these high-profile operations, the report details Iranian-linked disinformation efforts, including networks of sockpuppet accounts impersonating Chinese, Russian, and North Korean state media, alongside the prolific hack-and-leak activities of the Iran-aligned hacktivist group Handala, whose claimed targets ranged from Israeli universities to FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email. The report concludes that cyfluence is no longer a peripheral tactic, it has become the operational logic of modern warfare, where controlling how events are perceived may matter as much as controlling territory. Key Takeaways The current war in Iran and the wider Middle East (also known as Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion) has demonstrated a remarkably close integration between varied forms of kinetic and hybrid warfare, including combined cyber-enabled influence (cyfluence) operations, employed in tandem to maximize strategic effects. As such, Hostile Influence Campaigns (HICs) and Coordinated Information Disorder (CID) increasingly function as Primary Offensive Efforts (POEs) alongside the use of military force. Russia and China – Iran’s most powerful allies – have played an important role during the conflict, providing continuous diplomatic backing, supplying tactical intelligence, and executing supportive offensive information operations, while exploiting newly-created cognitive attack surfaces. AI-assisted DISARM mapping is employed throughout this report to render cyfluence attack chains analytically tractable, building on methodologies for agentic AI operationalization of influence operation analysis frameworks. Author: The CRC Team [Download PDF Here]

[Introduction] Cyber-based hostile influence campaigns are aimed at influencing target audiences by promoting information and/or disinformation over the internet, sometimes combined with cyber-attacks which enhance their effect (hence force Cyfluence, as opposed to cyber-attacks that aim to steal information, extort money, etc.) Such hostile influence campaigns and operations can be considered an epistemological branch of Information Operations (IO) or Information Warfare (IW). Typically, and as customary during the last decade, the information is spread throughout various internet platforms, which are the different elements of the hostile influence campaign, and as such, connectivity and repetitiveness of content between several elements are the main core characteristics of influence campaigns. Hostile influence campaigns, much like Cyber-attacks, have also become a tool for rival nations and corporations to damage reputation or achieve various business, political or ideological goals. Much like in the cyber security arena, PR professionals and government agencies are responding to negative publicity and disinformation shared over the news and social media. We use the term cyber based hostile influence campaigns, as we include in this definition also cyber-attacks aimed at influencing (such as hack and leak during election time), while we exclude of this term other types of more traditional kinds of influence such as diplomatic, economic, military etc. During the 10th to 16th August 2026, we observed, collected and analyzed endpoints of information related to cyber based hostile influence campaigns (including Cyfluence attacks). The following report is a summary of what we regard as the main events. Some of the mentioned campaigns have to do with social media and news outlets solemnly, while others leverage cyber-attack capabilities. [Contents] [Introduction] [Report Highlights] [Report Summary] [State Actors] Russia Operation Matryoshka Deploys Fake Websites to Target Germany's 2026 Election Russian Fabricated Nova Poshta Strikes, Matryoshka France Deepfakes, and Invented British Mercenary Russia's GRU Training Camps Targeted Moldova Matryoshka Pushes Fake Reports to Exploit Germany's East-West Divide Russian Fabrication Claims Ukrainian Drone Damaged Portuguese F-16s Russian Manipulation False-Flag Allegation at Leipzig Airport China Chinese AI Chatbots Fail to Debunk Pro-China False Claims China's PLA Deploys GoLaxy Smart Propaganda System Against Taiwan [AI Related Articles] Grok Produced 87% of Synthetic Audio Files South Korea's KNPA Arrests people for Non-Consensual Deepfake Sexual Content AI Detection Tools Correctly Identified Fewer AI-Generated Election Images Facebook AI-Generated Silver Fox Personas Accumulate Up to One Million Views [General Reports] Online Anti-Migrant Narratives on X, Telegram, and TikTok Preceded Violence in Southampton and Belfast Michigan Local Election Officials Anticipate Significant Disinformation Problems Ahead of November 2026 Midterms Brazil Orders Discord to Suspend Livestreaming Voter Registration and Biometric Verification Systems Pose Greater Structural Risk Than Deepfakes [Appendix - Frameworks to Counter Disinformation] Nationwide Partnership Network to Fact-Check Critical 2026 Midterm Elections FTC Proposes Regulating Undisclosed AI Ideological Bias [CRC Glossary] [ Report Highlights] EUObserver reported that Operation Matryoshka, a Russia-linked influence network, is deploying websites impersonating BBC News and German public broadcaster ARD to spread disinformation targeting Germany's September 2026 federal election, applying the same impersonation infrastructure previously used against French audiences during the May 2026 regional elections. An NYT investigation based on intelligence officials from three countries, Moldovan prosecutors, and leaked documents reveals that Russia's Kremlin ran GRU-linked paramilitary training camps in Serbia, Bosnia, and Moscow, paid hundreds of Orthodox priests to push Kremlin narratives, making Moldova the most extensively documented Russian election interference operation outside Ukraine. NewsGuard documented Operation Matryoshka's campaign to exploit Germany's historical East-West divide ahead of state elections, using the hashtag #TimeToDivideGermany, and designed primarily to seed false claims into AI tools and fact-checking ecosystems rather than generate direct website traffic. FPRI analyzed China's cognitive warfare playbook against Taiwan, documenting the GoLaxy Smart Propaganda System, a PLA AI platform automating content generation, multi-platform distribution, and audience targeting, as part of a broader PLA cognitive domain operations doctrine that treats information warfare as an integrated component of military operations. Resemble AI's H1 2026 Deepfake Threat Report identified 15,736 confirmed victims of deepfake audio and video attacks globally in the first six months of 2026, with Grok accounting for 87% of detected synthetic audio files, with financial fraud, non-consensual intimate imagery, and political impersonation the three dominant use categories. ISD Global traced the amplification pathway from false and misleading anti-migrant posts on X, Telegram, and TikTok to real-world violence at asylum seeker accommodation in Southampton and Belfast, indicating that platform enforcement actions taken after 2024 have not disrupted the underlying far-right network infrastructure. A RestOfWorld analysis by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and the African Union's Advisory Group on AI argued that disproportionate focus on deepfakes understates the structural risk of AI embedded in voter registration, biometric verification, and results management systems. PolitiFact announced a nationwide partnership network combining state and local news organizations, university journalism programs, and digital publishers to extend coordinated fact-checking coverage to smaller markets and competitive congressional districts historically underserved by national fact-checkers ahead of the November 2026 US midterm elections. [ Report Summary] StopFake debunked a Russian propaganda claim that a Ukrainian drone damaged Portuguese F-16 aircraft stationed at Estonia's Amari Air Base, a fabrication circulating across pro-Russian Telegram channels. StopFake documented how Russian propaganda channels stripped caveats from Die Zeit reporting on an incident at Leipzig/Halle Airport to falsely present the German newspaper as concluding Ukraine staged a false-flag operation, when Die Zeit's actual reporting raised questions without making any such allegation. EUObserver reported that Operation Matryoshka, a Russia-linked influence network, is deploying websites impersonating BBC News and German public broadcaster ARD to spread disinformation targeting Germany's September 2026 federal election, applying the same impersonation infrastructure previously used against French audiences during the May 2026 regional elections. Detector Media's weekly review of Russian disinformation for 5-11 August 2026 documented fabricated claims of Russian strikes on the Nova Poshta postal service, Matryoshka network deepfake content targeting French audiences, and an entirely invented story about a captured British mercenary in Ukraine, each serving distinct narrative goals across different geographic target audiences. An NYT investigation based on intelligence officials from three countries, Moldovan prosecutors, and leaked documents reveals that Russia's Kremlin ran GRU-linked paramilitary training camps in Serbia, Bosnia, and Moscow, paid hundreds of Orthodox priests to push Kremlin narratives, making Moldova the most extensively documented Russian election interference operation outside Ukraine. NewsGuard documented Operation Matryoshka's campaign to exploit Germany's historical East-West divide ahead of state elections, using the hashtag #TimeToDivideGermany, and designed primarily to seed false claims into AI tools and fact-checking ecosystems rather than generate direct website traffic. NewsGuard tested Chinese-made AI chatbots including DeepSeek, Kimi, and Doubao against non-Chinese models on the same pro-China false claims, finding Chinese chatbots failed to debunk those claims 53% of the time versus 24% for non-Chinese models. FPRI analyzed China's cognitive warfare playbook against Taiwan, documenting the GoLaxy Smart Propaganda System, a PLA AI platform automating content generation, multi-platform distribution, and audience targeting, as part of a broader PLA cognitive domain operations doctrine that treats information warfare as an integrated component of military operations. Resemble AI's H1 2026 Deepfake Threat Report identified 15,736 confirmed victims of deepfake audio and video attacks globally in the first six months of 2026, with Grok accounting for 87% of detected synthetic audio files, with financial fraud, non-consensual intimate imagery, and political impersonation the three dominant use categories. South Korea's National Police Agency arrested 419 people in 2026 for producing or distributing non-consensual AI-generated deepfake sexual content, primarily male students targeting female classmates, while deploying a physics-based AI detection system that identifies synthetic images through lighting inconsistencies and facial geometry anomalies that current AI generators cannot fully simulate. The Brennan Center for Justice found that AI detection tools tested on AI-generated election-related images correctly identified fewer synthetic images on average, demonstrating that both technological and human-review safeguards for AI-generated election content are operating below reliable identification thresholds ahead of the November 2026 US midterms. Futurism documented networks of AI-generated fake male personas on Facebook monetized through Facebook's own Content Monetization program, with Google's AI Overview initially presenting the fabricated identities as real people when queried by users. ISD Global traced the amplification pathway from false and misleading anti-migrant posts on X, Telegram, and TikTok to real-world violence at asylum seeker accommodation in Southampton and Belfast, indicating that platform enforcement actions taken after 2024 have not disrupted the underlying far-right network infrastructure. A survey of Michigan local election officials found 80% confident in voting integrity ahead of the November 2026 midterms, while 20% anticipated significant disinformation problems, with the officials concerned disproportionately representing smaller rural jurisdictions. Brazil's Supreme Court ordered Discord to suspend its livestreaming functionality after the platform repeatedly failed to comply with government orders to remove neo-Nazi content, extremist channels, and material promoting violence against minority groups, representing an escalation from individual content takedowns to targeted functional suspensions as a compliance pressure mechanism. A RestOfWorld analysis by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and the African Union's Advisory Group on AI argued that disproportionate focus on deepfakes understates the structural risk of AI embedded in voter registration, biometric verification, and results management systems. PolitiFact announced a nationwide partnership network combining state and local news organizations, university journalism programs, and digital publishers to extend coordinated fact-checking coverage to smaller markets and competitive congressional districts historically underserved by national fact-checkers ahead of the November 2026 US midterm elections. The Federal Trade Commission proposed applying Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices, to AI systems that embed or amplify ideological bias in their outputs without disclosing that bias to users, advancing a theory of liability in which undisclosed systematic political skew in AI responses constitutes a deceptive trade practice subject to FTC enforcement. [State Actors] Russia Operation Matryoshka Deploys Fake Websites to Target Germany's 2026 Election An investigation published by EUObserver states that Operation Matryoshka, a Russia-linked influence network, is deploying websites impersonating BBC News and German public broadcaster ARD to spread disinformation targeting Germany's September 2026 federal election, with fabricated content designed to undermine confidence in German democratic institutions and amplify divisive narratives by routing them through the reputational authority of trusted international and domestic broadcasters. The investigation states that Operation Matryoshka's targeting of Germany's federal election represents systematic adaptation of proven infrastructure across sequential European electoral cycles; the same BBC and broadcaster-impersonation methods previously deployed against French audiences during May 2026 regional elections are now being applied to Germany's federal vote, indicating an operational doctrine of reusing tested influence infrastructure rather than developing bespoke campaigns for each national target. Source: EUobserver. Operation Matryoshka: Russia using ‘BBC news’ fakes to pervert key German vote. [online] Published 11 August 2026. Available at: https://euobserver.com/231951/operation-matryoshka-russia-using-bbc-news-fakes-to-pervert-key-german-vote/ Top Of Page Russian Fabricated Nova Poshta Strikes, Matryoshka France Deepfakes, and Invented British Mercenary A report published by Detector Media states that Russian disinformation during 5th to 11th August 2026 included fabricated claims of Russian strikes on Nova Poshta, Ukraine's largest private postal and logistics company, designed to demoralize the Ukrainian civilian population by manufacturing evidence of logistical collapse, alongside Matryoshka network deepfake content targeting French audiences and an entirely invented story about a captured British mercenary fighting in Ukraine. The report states that the week's three simultaneous fabrication tracks illustrate the Kremlin's multi-audience targeting doctrine: the Nova Poshta narrative targets Ukrainian civilian morale, the Matryoshka deepfakes target French electoral opinion ahead of Germany's September vote, and the British mercenary fabrication sustains the false NATO-involvement framing used in Russian domestic propaganda and Global South channels to justify escalation, three geographically distinct audiences served by three operationally distinct but simultaneously active fabrication tracks. Source: Detector Media. Strikes on Nova Poshta and a fabricated “British mercenary.” Review of Russian fakes from August 5–11, 2026. [online] Published 13 August 2026. Available at: https://en.detector.media/post/strikes-on-nova-poshta-and-a-fabricated-british-mercenary-review-of-russian-fakes-from-august-5-11-2026 Top Of Page Russia's GRU Training Camps Targeted Moldova An investigation published by The New York Times states that Russia conducted one of the most extensive foreign election interference operations documented outside Ukraine against Moldova, deploying GRU-linked training camps in Serbia, Bosnia, and Moscow to build paramilitary shock troops; paying hundreds of Orthodox priests approximately USD 1,000 each to campaign against EU membership from the pulpit; and funding exiled oligarch Ilan Shor's Skolkovo-based vote-buying scheme, which enlisted over 150,000 Moldovans through 240 Telegram chatbots and paid approximately USD 20 million to 38,000 activists ahead of Moldova's 2024 EU membership referendum, according to leaked documents, three Western intelligence services, and Moldovan prosecutors. According to the investigation, Putin privately told military commanders in December 2025 that Russia's strategic goal for 2026 is 'the collapse of NATO and the E.U. from within, with Moldova ranked second only to Ukraine in Kremlin priorities, both because it sits between NATO members and Ukraine and because Russia still seeks to create a land bridge through southern Ukraine to Transnistria, the Russian-controlled breakaway region inside Moldova, making the documented scale of covert investment in Moldovan electoral politics a strategic imperative rather than a peripheral influence campaign, and one whose methods (GRU paramilitary training, priest networks, chatbot-coordinated vote-buying, CEC hacking) represent a composite template for Russian electoral subversion that Western intelligence expects to be adapted for future targets. Source: The New York Times. Putin’s Russia Seeks to Destabilize Moldova. [online] Published 14 August 2026. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/14/world/europe/russia-moldova-putin.html Top Of Page Matryoshka Pushes Fake Reports to Exploit Germany's East-West Divide An investigation published by NewsGuard states that Operation Matryoshka has produced at least 20 fabricated videos and news reports depicting German news outlets, celebrities, and business leaders as advocates for the redivision of Germany into its communist-era East and West, circulated under the hashtag #TimeToDivideGermany ahead of Germany's state elections, with the broader Matryoshka campaign comprising 723 fake news reports mimicking 134 real news brands, including Der Spiegel and Deutsche Welle among the most imitated, and designed primarily not to generate traffic to fake websites but to seed false claims that propagate through organic repetition, harm credible media reputations, overwhelm fact-checkers, and manipulate AI language models that synthesize across sources. The investigation states that Operation Matryoshka's German redivision campaign represents a documented strategic inversion in Russian messaging about Germany, shifting from the prior Kremlin position of crediting Russia for Germany's peaceful reunification to actively attempting to reverse it, a shift attributable to Germany's sustained military and financial support for Ukraine, and one that exploits residual East-West socioeconomic tensions as a social fault line to fracture the domestic political consensus underpinning Germany's Ukraine policy, with the redivision framing calibrated to audiences in the former East Germany where support for continued Ukraine assistance has historically been lower. Source: NewsGuard. Russia’s Push to Re-Divide Germany. [online] Available at: https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/russias-push-to-re-divide-germany Top Of Page Russian Fabrication Claims Ukrainian Drone Damaged Portuguese F-16s An analysis published by StopFake states that Russian propaganda spread a false claim that a Ukrainian drone struck and damaged Portuguese F-16 aircraft stationed at Estonia's Amari Air Base, a fabrication circulating across pro-Russian Telegram channels and websites without any corroborating evidence and contradicted by both Estonian and Portuguese defence officials who confirmed no such incident occurred. The analysis states that the fabricated claim follows an established Kremlin pattern of inventing drone incidents at NATO facilities to portray alliance member states as direct participants in the Ukraine conflict, with the specific targeting of Portuguese aircraft at an Estonian base designed to simultaneously strain Portugal-Estonia relations and amplify narratives of NATO complicity in Ukrainian strikes against Russia. Source: StopFake. Fake: Ukrainian Drone Damaged Portuguese F-16s at Estonian Air Base. [online] Published 15 August 2026. Available at: https://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-ukrainian-drone-damaged-portuguese-f-16s-at-estonian-air-base/ Top Of Page Russian Manipulation False-Flag Allegation at Leipzig Airport An analysis published by StopFake states that Russian propaganda channels misrepresented reporting by the German newspaper Die Zeit to falsely claim the outlet concluded Ukraine staged a false-flag operation at Leipzig/Halle Airport, when Die Zeit's actual reporting raised questions about an incident without making any such allegation, with Russian sources stripping all qualifiers and caveats to convert acknowledged journalistic uncertainty into a definitive claim of Ukrainian culpability. The analysis states that the manipulation follows a documented Kremlin technique of selectively quoting or misrepresenting credible Western media to lend false authority to disinformation narratives, exploiting the reputational capital of established outlets like Die Zeit to reach audiences that would reject the same claim when it originates from Russian state media. This technique makes the false narrative self-insulating against debunking, since the cited outlet genuinely exists and did publish the source article. Source: StopFake. Manipulation: Die Zeit Says Ukraine May Have Staged a False-Flag Operation at Leipzig Airport. [online] Published 14 August 2026. Available at: https://www.stopfake.org/en/manipulation-die-zeit-says-ukraine-may-have-staged-a-false-flag-operation-at-leipzig-airport/ Top Of Page China Chinese AI Chatbots Fail to Debunk Pro-China False Claims A report published by NewsGuard states that Chinese-made AI chatbots, including DeepSeek, Kimi, and Doubao, failed to debunk pro-China false claims 53% of the time, more than double the 24% failure rate of non-Chinese models tested against the same claims, with Chinese chatbots frequently responding to politically sensitive topics including Tiananmen Square, Taiwan, and Uyghur detention with evasive non-answers that leave false claims unchallenged rather than factually correcting them. As states in the report, the systematic divergence between Chinese and non-Chinese AI models on pro-China false claims indicates political alignment embedded in Chinese AI training and guardrail design, with the deflection pattern, declining to answer rather than denying, representing a technically less detectable form of bias than active repetition of false claims, since models that refuse to address sensitive topics leave users without corrections while avoiding the more easily documented behavior of directly reproducing propaganda narratives. Source: NewsGuard. As Chinese AI Models Gain Popularity in the West, Their Chatbots Fail to Debunk Pro-China False Claims More Than Half the Time. [online] Published 13 August 2026. Available at: https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/chinese-ai-chatbots-fail-to-debunk-pro-china-false-claims-more-than-half-the-time Top Of Page China's PLA Deploys GoLaxy Smart Propaganda System Against Taiwan An analysis published by FPRI states that China's People's Liberation Army is deploying the GoLaxy Smart Propaganda System, an AI-powered platform that automates content generation, multi-platform distribution, and audience targeting for cognitive warfare operations against Taiwan, enabling the PLA to produce and distribute tailored influence content at a scale and speed that previously required substantially larger human operational infrastructure, as part of a broader PLA cognitive domain operations doctrine integrating information warfare with conventional military planning. According to the analysis, GoLaxy represents a structural shift in Chinese cognitive warfare capabilities against Taiwan from manual content production to AI-automated pipeline operations, enabling continuous rather than episodic influence campaigns that simultaneously target multiple audience segments, Taiwan's civilian population to undermine confidence in democratic governance and military preparedness, international Chinese-language communities to shape diaspora opinion, and English-language media to influence foreign policymaker perceptions, with automation reducing per-campaign operational cost and enabling the sustained tempo that episodic human-operated campaigns cannot maintain. Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute. Inside China’s Cognitive Warfare Playbook Against Taiwan. [online] Published 13 August 2026. Available at: https://www.fpri.org/article/2026/08/inside-chinas-cognitive-warfare-playbook-against-taiwan/ Top Of Page [AI Related Articles] Grok Produced 87% of Synthetic Audio Files A report published by Resemble AI states that its H1 2026 Deepfake Threat Report identified 15,736 confirmed victims of deepfake audio and video attacks globally in the first six months of 2026, with Grok accounting for 87% of detected synthetic audio files, a concentration attributable to xAI's comparatively permissive voice synthesis content policies relative to competing models, and with financial fraud, non-consensual intimate imagery, and political impersonation comprising the three dominant use categories. The report states that the concentration of synthetic audio production in a single platform at 87% represents a systemic vulnerability in the deepfake threat landscape, where policy decisions by one AI provider can materially alter the global distribution of harmful synthetic content, and that the 15,736 victim figure represents only confirmed cases from reports reaching Resemble AI's detection infrastructure, with researchers assessing actual victim numbers as substantially higher given the fragmented reporting environment and the volume of content that evades automated detection Source: Resemble AI. The H1 2026 Deepfake Threat Report. [online] Published 12 August 2026. Available at: https://www.resemble.ai/resources/h1-2026-deepfake-threat-report Top Of Page South Korea's KNPA Arrests people for Non-Consensual Deepfake Sexual Content An article published by SBS News states that South Korea's National Police Agency arrested 419 people in 2026 for producing or distributing non-consensual AI-generated deepfake sexual content, with those arrested primarily male students targeting female classmates using commercial AI image manipulation tools, and with the KNPA deploying a physics-based AI detection system that identifies synthetic images through lighting inconsistencies, shadow geometry errors, and physiologically impossible facial proportions invisible to human reviewers. According to the article, the KNPA's physics-based detection approach represents a technically distinct counterstrategy to existing deep-fake identification methods. Rather than training classifiers on known synthetic content patterns that degrade as generation models evolve, physics-based analysis identifies violations of physical laws that current AI generators cannot fully simulate, providing detection capability that is less vulnerable to adversarial model updates and remains effective as generation quality improves. Source: SBS News. Police Apprehend 419 Suspects Using AI to Track Deepfake Production and Creation Processes. [online] Published 13 August 2026. Available at: https://news.sbs.co.kr/english/article.do?news_id=N1008703923 Top Of Page AI Detection Tools Correctly Identified Fewer AI-Generated Election Images A report published by the Brennan Center for Justice states that AI detection tools tested on AI-generated election-related images correctly identified fewer than 4 of 14 synthetic images on average, with human reviewers performing no better than the automated tools, demonstrating that both technological and human-review safeguards for AI-generated election content are operating below reliable identification thresholds ahead of the November 2026 US midterm elections. The report states that while AI is increasingly deployed to fight election disinformation through automated monitoring and content labelling, the same AI capabilities are simultaneously enabling adversaries to produce higher volumes of more convincing disinformation at lower cost, with the detection gap documented in the report indicating that the offensive application of AI to election influence operations is currently outpacing the defensive application, creating a structural asymmetry that platform moderation systems and human reviewers are not yet equipped to close. Source: Brennan Center for Justice. Does AI Fight or Fuel Election Disinformation? [online] Available at: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/does-ai-fight-or-fuel-election-disinformation Top Of Page Facebook AI-Generated Silver Fox Personas Accumulate Up to One Million Views An article published by Futurism states that Facebook is hosting networks of AI-generated fake male personas, presented as 'silver fox' relationship advisors with names including 'Uncle George,' 'Leo Davidson,' and 'The Male Insight', accumulating between 126,000 and over one million views per video, monetized through Facebook's own Content Monetization program as well as e-book sales and page resale, with Google's AI Overview initially presenting the fabricated personas as genuine people when queried, extending inauthentic identities into mainstream search results as a secondary amplification vector. According to article, the AI-generated silver fox persona networks represent a documented case of commercial-scale coordinated inauthentic behavior operating within platform monetization structures rather than against them -- with Facebook's Content Monetization program directly rewarding the engagement generated by fabricated personas, creating a financial incentive structure in which the platform's own revenue model subsidizes AI-generated inauthentic content at scale, and with Google's AI Overview propagating fabricated identities into search as a secondary credibility amplifier, illustrating how AI-generated personas can exploit both social media and search AI systems simultaneously to build false legitimacy. Source: Futurism. Facebook Is Filling With Viral AI-Generated Silver Foxes Wooing Women by Ranting About How Terrible Men Are. [online] Published 13 August 2026. Available at: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-generated-silver-foxes-facebook Top Of Page [General Reports] Online Anti-Migrant Narratives on X, Telegram, and TikTok Preceded Violence in Southampton and Belfast An analysis published by ISD Global states that online anti-migrant narratives circulating on X, Telegram, and TikTok directly preceded and contributed to real-world violence at asylum seeker accommodation in Southampton and Belfast in August 2026, with ISD researchers tracing the amplification pathway from initial false or misleading posts about alleged crimes by migrants to coordinated resharing by established far-right network accounts and subsequent physical violence. The analysis states that the Southampton and Belfast incidents replicate the causal amplification pathway documented during the August 2024 UK riots, in which online disinformation about a single crime allegation cascaded through coordinated far-right networks into national disorder, indicating that the enforcement actions platforms took in response to the 2024 riots have not dismantled the underlying network infrastructure, which remained fully operational and responsive to new triggering narratives in August 2026. Source: Institute for Strategic Dialogue. From Posts to Protests: Southampton and Belfast. [online] Published 20 June 2026. Available at: https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/posts-to-protests-southampton-and-belfast/ Top Of Page Michigan Local Election Officials Anticipate Significant Disinformation Problems Ahead of November 2026 Midterms An article published by The Conversation states that a survey of Michigan local election officials found 80% confident in voting integrity ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections, while 20% anticipated significant disinformation problems, with officials citing social media-spread false claims about voter registration procedures, mail ballot rules, and polling locations as the primary threat vectors, and with smaller rural jurisdictions reporting substantially less capacity to monitor and respond to disinformation than larger county offices. As the article states, the 20% of officials anticipating significant disinformation problems disproportionately represented smaller rural jurisdictions with fewer staff resources for public communication and counter-messaging, indicating that the distribution of disinformation vulnerability among election administrators is not uniform -- with smaller offices systematically less equipped to respond to the volume and velocity of social media disinformation than major urban offices, creating pockets of elevated electoral risk in jurisdictions that national counter-disinformation resources are least likely to prioritize. Source: The Conversation. Michigan’s Local Election Officials Are Confident in Voting Integrity Ahead of November’s Midterm Election. [online] Available at: https://theconversation.com/michigans-local-election-officials-are-confident-in-voting-integrity-ahead-of-novembers-midterm-election-289133 Top Of Page Brazil Orders Discord to Suspend Livestreaming An article published by The Record states that Brazil's Supreme Court ordered Discord to suspend its livestreaming functionality after the platform failed to comply with multiple government orders to remove neo-Nazi content, channels promoting violence against minority groups, and extremist material, with the court finding Discord's content moderation response insufficient and threatening broader platform restrictions if compliance is not achieved. The article states that the Brazilian government's action against Discord represents an escalation in its regulatory approach to platform non-compliance, moving from individual content takedowns toward targeted functional suspensions that apply operational pressure while stopping short of a full platform ban, following a pattern established in Brazil's 2024 extended suspension of X for similar compliance failures, indicating that Brazilian courts are prepared to apply the same functional-suspension model to other platforms that repeatedly fail court-ordered content removal. Source: The Record. Brazil orders Discord to suspend livestreaming after teen suicide. [online] Published 13 August 2026. Available at: https://therecord.media/discord-brazil-orders-suspension-livestreaming Top Of Page Voter Registration and Biometric Verification Systems Pose Greater Structural Risk Than Deepfakes An analysis published by Rest of World states that disproportionate public focus on AI-generated deepfakes in election contexts understates the structural risk of AI systems embedded in electoral administration itself, with India's machine learning-based voter verification system linked to the Aadhaar biometric database algorithmically deleting approximately 5.5 million voters from rolls without notice across two states, a 93% algorithm error rate that required Supreme Court intervention before the program was halted and subsequently revived nationally in 2021, and with AI chatbots including ChatGPT and Gemini providing voting information to users without dedicated electoral accuracy guardrails. The analysis states that the governance gap in AI-administered elections is structurally distinct from the deepfake threat: while deepfakes operate through audience perception of fabricated content, AI embedded in voter registration, biometric verification, and results management can determine who is permitted to participate before any ballot is cast, with algorithmic exclusion operating within administrative processes whose opacity makes it systematically harder to detect, challenge, and reverse than fabricated media, and with election technologies hosted by private vendors beyond national oversight introducing accountability gaps in which no domestic legal framework governs data transfers, audits, or error correction, particularly in African electoral contexts where the AU Advisory Group has identified concentrated vendor dependency as a systemic risk. Source: Rest of World. AI Elections, Deepfakes, and Voter Chatbots. [online] Available at: https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-elections-deepfake-voter-chatbot/ Top Of Page [Appendix - Frameworks to Counter Disinformation] Nationwide Partnership Network to Fact-Check Critical 2026 Midterm Elections An article published by Poynter states that PolitiFact announced a nationwide partnership network combining state and local news organizations, university journalism programs, and digital publishers to provide coordinated fact-checking coverage of the 2026 US midterm elections, designed to extend capacity beyond PolitiFact's own reporters to smaller markets and competitive congressional districts not covered by major national fact-checkers. According to the article, the distributed partnership model directly addresses the documented geographic gap in fact-checking coverage identified in prior election cycles, in which disinformation spreading in smaller media markets and competitive House districts received substantially less verification attention than claims circulating in high-profile Senate and gubernatorial races, with local partners' constituency-specific knowledge enabling faster response to localized disinformation narratives that national fact-checkers lack the contextual expertise to evaluate quickly. Source: Poynter. PolitiFact Announces Nationwide Partnership Network to Fact-Check Critical 2026 Midterm Elections. [online] Published 13 August 2026. Available at: https://www.poynter.org/news-release/2026/politifact-announces-nationwide-partnership-network-to-fact-check-critical-2026-midterm-elections/ Top Of Page FTC Proposes Regulating Undisclosed AI Ideological Bias An article published by CyberScoop states that the Federal Trade Commission proposed applying Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, to AI systems that embed or amplify ideological bias in their outputs without disclosing that bias to users, advancing a disclosure-focused theory of liability in which AI models that systematically skew responses in politically partisan directions while presenting themselves as neutral constitute a deceptive trade practice. The article states that the FTC's ideological bias proposal sits at the intersection of consumer protection and AI governance, with critics arguing that defining ideological bias as deceptive requires normative judgments about political balance outside the Commission's mandate, while proponents argue that undisclosed AI bias is analogous to undisclosed material product limitations, and that a disclosure obligation does not require the FTC to define correct political views, only to ensure users are informed when a model's outputs systematically favour particular political perspectives. Source: CyberScoop. The FTC Wants to Regulate AI for Ideological Bias. [online] Published 10 August 2026. Available at: https://cyberscoop.com/ftc-regulating-ai-ideological-bias/ Top Of Page [CRC Glossary] The nature and sophistication of the modern Information Environment is projected to continue to escalate in complexity. However, across academic publications, legal frameworks, policy debates, and public communications, the same concepts are often described in different ways, making collaboration, cooperation, and effective action more difficult. To ensure clarity and establish a consistent frame of reference, the CRC is maintaining a standard glossary to reduce ambiguity and promote terminological interoperability. Its scope encompasses foundational concepts, as well as emerging terms relating to Hostile Influence and Cyfluence. As a collaborative project maintained with input from the community of experts, the CRC Glossary is intended to reflect professional consensus. We encourage you to engage with this initiative and welcome contributions via the CRC website. Top Of Page