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What if Russia didn’t have to convince you of anything new? What if it could simply exploit what you already believe? That’s the idea behind a Russian-linked disinformation network that hijacks real social media conversations to spread propaganda and influence U.S. elections. We follow the trail from celebrity rumors to Congress, and ask whether AI can spot the manipulation before it spreads.

In Social Security’s database, a few keystrokes can turn a living person into a dead one. As part of a deportation scheme, DOGE pushed to do just that to 2.7 million people — without checking whether they were actually dead. Social Security whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield decided to stop them.

Deepfakes are getting harder to spot. But digital forensics expert Hany Farid says the bigger problem isn’t just that AI can fool us. It’s that even when something is real, people may refuse to believe it. What happens when seeing is no longer believing—and the truth has a hard time catching up?

In 30 years of representing whistleblowers, national security attorney Mark Zaid has never had so many government lawyers come to him for advice. They’ve seen things inside the Trump administration that trouble them. And they want to blow the whistle. But as lawyers, they know the law. Which, as it turns out, may be part of the problem.

Frances Haugen walked out of Facebook with more than 20,000 pages of internal documents. And somehow, nobody caught her. Now her story is getting the Hollywood treatment in Aaron Sorkin’s new movie, The Social Reckoning. But how did she actually pull it off? Haugen takes us behind the scenes of her surprisingly low-tech operation—and explains why the next Facebook whistleblower might not be so lucky.

There’s a new space race underway. And this time, it’s not just about astronauts and moon landings. Companies are launching satellites by the thousands. Militaries are eyeing space as the next battlefield. And now people want to put AI data centers up there, too. So why is everyone suddenly so interested in space? Former astronaut Ed Lu says it has a lot to do with a 60-year-old prediction about computer chips. And there’s just one problem: the rules haven’t kept up.

Across Russia, the internet keeps going dark. The Kremlin says the blackouts are necessary to stop Ukrainian drones. But critics say it is really helping Vladimir Putin accomplish something he’s been working toward for years: an internet the Kremlin can control — and, when it wants to, cut off from the rest of the world.

Once someone believes a conspiracy theory, can anything change their mind? Researchers tried something unexpected: an AI chatbot. After just eight minutes of conversation, some conspiracy theorists were significantly less convinced. What did the bot know about changing minds that we don’t?

Eliot Higgins built Bellingcat on a simple idea: give enough people the right tools, and they can figure out what really happened. It’s called open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But AI can now generate convincing fakes in seconds. Higgins tells us what happens when finding the truth becomes a race against the internet itself.

States are passing age-verification laws designed to keep kids safer on social media. But figuring out who’s a kid means finding a way to check everyone’s age. Three decades after the first fights over kids’ rights online, we look at a new question: Could protecting minors end up changing the internet for all of us?