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Social Media Platforms Aren’t Doing Enough to Stop Harmful AI Bots, Research Finds
While artificial intelligence (AI) bots can serve a legitimate purpose on social media — such as marketing or customer service — some are designed to manipulate public discussion, incite hate speech, spread misinformation or enact fraud and scams.
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To Make Children Better Fact-Checkers, Expose Them to More Misinformation — with Oversight
“We need to give children experience flexing these skepticism muscles and using these critical thinking skills within this online context,” a psychology researcher said.
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Salt Typhoon Hack Shows There's No Security Backdoor That's Only for The "Good Guys"
If U.S. policymakers care about China and other foreign countries engaging in espionage on U.S. citizens, it’s time to speak up in favor of encryption by default. If these policymakers don’t want to see bad actors take advantage of their constituents, domestic companies, or security agencies, again—they should speak up for encryption by default.
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Extremists Co-Opt Hurricane Response to Blame Israel, Incite a Storm of Hateful Narratives
Right-wing extremists have been exploiting the devastation surrounding Hurricane Helene — a storm that has so far claimed the lives of at least 230 people in the southeast U.S.— and now Hurricane Milton, to advance antisemitic or anti-Israel conspiracy theories that federal disaster assistance has been slow or inadequate because they believe the U.S. is sending funds and personnel to Israel instead.
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Oversight Revealed in AI Image Recognition Tools
Artificial intelligence can help people process and comprehend large amounts of data with precision, but the image recognition platforms and computer vision models that are built into AI frequently overlook an important back-end feature called the alpha channel. Researchers developed a proprietary attack called AlphaDog to study how hackers can exploit this oversight.
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2025 Homeland Threat Assessment
DHS has issued its 2025 threat assessment, focusing on the most direct, pressing threats to the U.S. homeland during the next year. The assessment is organized around DHS missions that most closely align or apply to these threats—public safety, border and immigration, critical infrastructure, and economic security.
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Election Security: When to Worry, When to Not
Everyone wants an election that is secure and reliable and that will ensure that the voters’ actual choices are reflected in the results. At the same time, not every problem in voting technology or systems is worth pulling the fire alarm —we have to look at the bigger story and context. And we have to stand down when our worst fears turn out to be unfounded.
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U.S. Warns Voters of Disinformation Deluge
American voters are likely about to be swamped by a flood of misinformation and influence campaigns engineered by U.S. adversaries aiming, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials, to sway the results of the upcoming presidential election and cast doubt on the process itself.
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How Foreign Operations Are Manipulating Social Media to Influence Your Views
Foreign influence campaigns, or information operations, have been widespread in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Influence campaigns aim to shift public opinion, push false narratives or change behaviors among a target population. Russia, China, Iran, Israel and other nations have run these campaigns by exploiting social bots, influencers, media companies and generative AI.
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Subsea Communications Cables: Vital but Vulnerable
Ensuring the resilience of the submarine cable network against disruptions is crucial. Lying deep on the ocean floor, these fiber-optic cables can transmit massive amounts of data at high speeds with low latency, making them far more efficient than satellites, which handle only a fraction of global data transmission.
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Governments Respond to Multiple Claims on Helene
Bad actors coming in behind hurricanes in North Carolina to spread false claims is nothing new. This time, the White House felt the need to respond.
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Fact-Checking the Viral Conspiracies in the Wake of Hurricane Helene
Buoyed by firebrands like Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Helene stirred up a toxic stew of conspiracy theories and culture war politics.
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Some Online Conspiracy-Spreaders Don’t Even Believe the Lies They’re Spewing
There has been a lot of research on the types of people who believe conspiracy theories, and their reasons for doing so. But there’s a wrinkle: My colleagues and I have found that there are a number of people sharing conspiracies online who don’t believe their own content.
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Online Misinformation Most Likely to Be Believed by Ideological Extremists: Study
There has been a dramatic rise of online misinformation, but the influence of misinformation is not universal. Rather, users with extreme political views are more likely than are others to both encounter and believe false news.
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You’d Never Fall for an Online Scam, Right?
Wrong, says cybersecurity expert. Con artists use time-tested tricks that can work on anyone regardless of age, IQ — what’s changed is scale.
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The long view
Researchers Calculate Cyberattack Risk for All 50 States
Local governments are common victims of cyberattack, with economic damage often extending to the state and federal levels. Scholars aggregate threats to thousands of county governments to draw conclusions.