Dear Disinfo Update readers,

#Disinfo2024 was a resounding success! We’re incredibly grateful to our insightful speakers who made the sessions engaging and informative.

Our opening session, featuring Liz Wahl and Hamza Al-Kateab, offered a powerful discussion on how humanitarian workers are being targeted with disinformation. Another highlight was the panel on foreign interference in elections, where Uldis Elksnitis, Paula Gori, Benjamin Shultz, and Ben Graham Jones underscored the significant impact of FIMI and the critical need for debunking.

The panel focusing on the targeting of the counter-disinformation community—featuring Gunta Sloga, Ilya Ber, Lola Tagaeva, and Imran Ahmed—shed light on the resilience of individuals who stand firm in their commitment to truth, even under direct attack.

In addition to the sessions, #Disinfo2024 featured several exciting side events, including a nighttime guided tour of Riga and a screening of the riveting documentary For Sama. 

If you missed the conference, don’t worry! We’ve already added a selection of photos to the event page, and our full recap of the conference will be available soon. Whether you couldn’t join us this year or were with us and want to return, we’d love to see you at #Disinfo2025. Mark your calendars—#Disinfo2025 will be held on 15-16 October 2025 in Ljubljana, Slovenia!

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Disinfo news & updates

  • Health Disinformation: A US-funded anti-malaria program has become the target of disinformation. The program has been accused of infecting local people with malaria. This narrative was shared by a French-Tongolese activist who often posts pro-Russian content. These claims have not been supported by scientific evidence; researchers have refuted the claims.
  • Hurricane response misinformation: In North Carolina, US, the hurricane response has been interfered with by rumours surrounding federal agencies involved in recovery efforts. In addition, an armed man was arrested after making threats against FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) employees. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper stated, “We know that significant misinformation online contributes to threats against response workers on the ground.”
  • Hurricane rumours debunking: FEMA has created a hurricane rumour response page to fact-check claims about Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. It also provides links for readers to find official information about the hurricanes. 
  • Deceptive AI disruption: OpenAI has published its second report on its efforts to disrupt deceptive uses of AI by covert influence operations. The report analyses the actions of these actors and identifies trends in these activities. 
  • Open source software targeted: The Internet Archive was targeted with a cyber attack on October 9th, it is back online as a read-only service. The targeting of this open-source repository could interfere with the efforts of disinformation researchers.
  • Germany targeted: Germany has continued to be a target for Russian disinformation campaigns, the goals of these campaigns include undermining support for Ukraine, worsening NATO’s image, and amplifying pro-Russian voices. The AfD (Alternative for Germany) and Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (both of which represent pro-Russian positions) have gained significant media attention.
  • FIMI and Moldova’s election: Moldova has experienced significant foreign interference from Russia ahead of the 20 October EU referendum. The foreign policy advisor to Maia Sandu, Olga Rosca, describes the influence operation by stating that “it’s a calculated, large-scale effort aimed at destabilising our future and derailing Moldova’s EU path”. Check out the recommended read for more on Moldova.
  • Russia and AI: A Ukrainian official described the use of generative AI in Russia’s disinformation campaign against Ukraine. “Now that generative AI came in, that allows disinformation narratives to be multiplied and distributed on a new more complex level,” the official said to Reuters.

Brussels corner

  • FIMI fails: Following a significant amount of electoral disinformation before the EU elections, there are reports that this interference was unsuccessful in influencing the elections. According to Věra Jourová (European Commission Vice President), the disinformation went without “major incident … capable of disrupting the elections”.

Reading & resources

  • Israel-Gaza misinformation: Logically Facts has published a report on misinformation surrounding the Israel-Gaza conflict. The report analyses the state of information being shared about the conflict since October 7th 2023. The report explores narratives about human devastation, civil unrest, and US-Israel relations. The disinformation strategies include misattributed footage, fabricated news/authority statements, AI-generated video/images, video game footage, edited/digitally altered videos and pictures, and non-visual claims made through text and speech.
  • AI and election disinformation: This report from the University of Texas at Austin explores the impact of Generative AI on democratic processes in the EU, Mexico, the US, India, and South Africa. It discusses trends developing around these elections, including the erosion of public trust in institutions, the leveraging of trusted messengers and messages, the creation of AI personas, and many more. This report provides insight into the trends surrounding elections specific to each of the regions and countries mentioned above.
  • Harms to researchers: The podcast Stage Talks with Bellingcat has an episode about the experience of researching online extremism and terrorism with researcher Elizabeth Pearson. The podcast discusses a report that explores the harms experienced by researchers, including harassment, trolling, and PTSD. In addition, it explores potential coping methods for researchers.
  • Media literacy guidelines: EDMO (the European Digital Media Observatory) has published standards and best practices for media literacy initiatives. The guidelines can be beneficial for initiatives providing education on mis/disinformation, news literacy, digital literacy, and algorithm education.
  • Debunking tool: The Sentinel project has created a useful tool known as WikiRumours, that allows individuals to report a rumour in their community that could contribute to the likelihood of conflict. The status of the rumour can then be updated by the moderator or administrator. This allows for fact-checking of potential inflammatory content in places where there might not already be a significant fact-checking infrastructure.
  • Russian disinfo in the US: This article explores Russian propaganda in the United States, it discusses how disinformation is published, spread, and becomes mainstream. The article traces a video of a man claiming that Ukraine offered him $4,000 to assassinate Tucker Carlson while the celebrity was in Moscow. It also explores the tactics used by storm-1516 (a Kremlin-aligned troll farm) and narratives spread by this threat actor.
  • FIMI and elections: Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference –Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or FIMI ISAC, has published a report compiling the different FIMI attacks during the first half of 2024. The case studies included campaigns using/abusing artificial intelligence tools to produce content, mimicking legitimate news sources, and disinformation campaigns targeting immigrants, gender, or public health.

This week’s recommended read

This week, our Project Officer Inès Gentil recommends reading Victoria Olari’s investigation from DFRLab; “Mysterious cross-border influence campaign sparks election controversy in Moldova”. The report is particularly timely following Moldova’s presidential elections and referendum on EU membership (to enshrine EU accession as a constitutional goal), which passed by a narrow margin of 50.46% to 49.54%. 

The investigation by DFRLab uncovers an influence operation that sought to undermine Moldova’s pro-European government by falsely portraying it as imposing censorship. More precisely, the cancelled concert by Ukrainian artist Anastasya Prikhodko played a key role in this operation, it was used to spark public discontent ahead of the referendum. The campaign was strategically framed as being led by Ukrainians, aiming to depict the government as suppressing dissenting “anti-EU” voices.

Events & announcements

  • 23 October: Solaris will be hosting a webinar on Generative AI and Geopolitical Disruption.
  • 29 October: The European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) will be hosting a conference in Brussels about the challenges and successes of fact-checkers. 
  • 29 October: The Coordinated Sharing Behavior Detection Conference will bring together experts to showcase, discuss, and advance the state of the art in multimodal and cross-platform coordinated behaviour detection. The conference is organized by the University of Sheffield and will be held on their campus.
  • 30 October: Solaris will be hosting a webinar on Generative AI and Democratic Resilience in Europe.
  • 12 November: Les Surligneurs will be hosting a debate on internet regulations, the event will take place in Paris.
  • 14 November: EEAS will be hosting an event on identity-based disinformation. The event, Identity-Based Disinformation in FIMI: Countering the Weaponization of Who We Are, will take place both online and in person (in Brussels). Our researchers Maria Giovanna Sessa and Raquel Miguel Serrano will give a workshop on how to carry out an OSINT investigation to document cases of Identity-Based Disinformation/FIMI. If you can’t attend the event, we will host a webinar on December 12 on the same topic.
  • 14 November: ARCOM, the French Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority, will be hosting Arcom Research Day. The event will be held in Paris and streamed online.
  • 22 November: CYBERWARCON will take place in Arlington, Virginia, US, bringing together attendees from diverse backgrounds to identify and explore cyber threats.
  • 2-3 December: The European Media and Information Fund (EMIF) will be hosting its two-day winter event in Florence, Italy, to discuss disinformation trends and provide networking opportunities.
  • 21 November: Zevedi will be hosting a workshop about the DSA and what it means for fighting disinformation in Germany 
  • 6-10 January 2025: The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Winter School on ‘Chatbots for Internet Research?‘.
  • 24-27 February 2025: RightsCon 2025, hosted by Access Now, will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, and will bring together leaders and activists to discuss key digital rights issues.
  • 23-25 April 2025: A call for papers has been announced for The Cambridge Disinformation Summit, the deadline for application is 25 October.
  • 22-25 May 2025: Dataharvest. The European Investigative Journalism Conference will take place in Mechelen, Belgium.
  • 15-16 October 2025: After this year’s brilliant outcome, the EU DisinfoLab annual conference #Disinfo2025 will be bringing the community together again, this time in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Mark your calendars!

Jobs

  • Are you passionate about countering disinformation? We are looking for interns to join the EU DisinfoLab team! Please apply!
  • Atlantic Council has several job openings including project assistant, Scowcroft strategy initiative, associate director, web content strategy, and senior fellow at the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center
  • Logically has several job openings including assistant editor, fact checker, media literacy trainer, and software engineering manager
  • Internews is hiring for several positions including a grants manager, a project manager, and an open-source software developer
  • The Center for Information Resilience has job openings for an engagement manager and an events coordinator
  • Debunk.org has job openings for a researcher and analyst for disinformation analysis, a media literacy expert on disinformation, a researcher and analyst for disinformation analysis in Mongolia, an administrator/project coordinator for countering disinformation, voice actors, and translators for the digital literacy program
  • Access Now is hiring a platform engagement coordinator