After Ukrainian drones hit three Yandex data centres, officials and commentators said Russian disinformation had fallen in Ukraine, Europe, the US and the UK. The evidence published so far does not support that, and the traffic chart behind the claim measured something else.
American campaigns have adopted generative AI faster than almost any tool in modern politics. Laboratory experiments show it can persuade attentive voters, while decades of field research suggest that campaign contact rarely produces measurable changes in candidate choice. The midterms will be read as a verdict on AI, though they were not designed to deliver one.
The MAGA online ecosystem is usually described as a media empire. It is better understood as a merger of three trust networks — partisan media, charismatic Christianity, and armed fraternity — and its resilience comes from that redundancy. What happens when the legal deterrent aimed at one of those networks is switched off?
The world's first national ban on under-16s using social media has taken effect, and its real legacy may be the age-checking machinery it normalizes.