In the information war, the most effective message is rarely the one a government delivers directly.

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An ancient but ever-effective technique

In the information war, the most effective message is rarely the one a government delivers directly. A ministerial statement is taken at face value – as the position of a vested party – and the reader weighs it accordingly. When the same argument comes from the mouth of a professor, a retired general, or a researcher at an institute with a reassuring name, its nature changes. It ceases to appear as someone’s position and begins to seem like a description of reality. It is this transformation – rather than the spread of fake news – that is the true subject of these pages: the use of experts as multipliers of credibility, and the selection of experts as a tool of power over public opinion.

It is worth clarifying right away what is not being argued. It is not being argued that experts are manipulators, nor that expertise is an invention of the elites: those who reason this way end up handing the debate over to whoever shouts the loudest, which is a worse outcome. The argument is more limited in scope and, I believe, more difficult to refute. The expert’s authority is a resource, and like any resource, it can be produced, acquired, concentrated, or denied to the opponent. Those involved in strategic communication have known this for a century. The public, for the most part, is unaware of it.

Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew who effectively invented the profession of public relations in the 1920s, theorized it candidly. In Propaganda, published in 1928, he explained that in a mass society, opinions are not formed through direct persuasion but through the groups and leaders whom people trust. This led to a method he would call the “third-party technique”: do not tell the public what you want, but have someone the public considers impartial say it. In his memoirs, he recounted a classic example. Hired by a bacon manufacturer, he did not buy advertising space; instead, he had a doctor opine on whether a hearty breakfast was healthier than a light one, gathered the endorsement of thousands of colleagues, and had it reported in the newspapers as news. The product was barely mentioned. The doctors were.

The tobacco industry brought this method to its full maturity. On January 4, 1954, as early research was linking smoking to lung cancer, the major American tobacco companies published a “frank statement to smokers” in hundreds of daily newspapers, announcing the creation of an independent research committee. For decades, that committee funded studies, conferences, and scientists whose primary function was not to prove that smoking was harmless, but to keep the controversy alive. Doubt was the product. And doubt, to be credible, needed white coats.

The Cold War transferred this technique to the geopolitical arena, and it did so on both sides. Beginning in 1950, the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom funded magazines, festivals, and conferences that offered European intellectuals a prestigious platform and an anti-communist orientation; in 1967, it was discovered that much of the money came from the CIA, via front organizations. Many of those intellectuals were unaware of the source of the funds, and this is the point: their sincerity was essential to the operation’s success. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the KGB put forward the theory in 1983 that the AIDS virus had been created in an American military laboratory. The story first appeared in an Indian newspaper, the Patriot, and remained a fringe claim until 1986, when a retired East German biophysicist, Jakob Segal, lent it scientific credibility with a report that the press in dozens of countries cited as expert opinion. The lie had been circulating for three years. It was a scientist’s signature that propelled it forward.

The Pentagon’s “democratic” model

One might think that these methods belong to authoritarian regimes or the darkest phases of the Cold War. The best-documented case of the past few decades, however, concerns the world’s most powerful democracy – and was brought to light by a newspaper from that very democracy.

On April 20, 2008, the New York Times published an investigative report by David Barstow, based on approximately 8,000 pages of internal documents obtained through a lawsuit. It detailed a program launched by the Pentagon in 2002, on the eve of the Iraq War: dozens of retired officers, who regularly appeared on television networks as military commentators, were summoned to confidential meetings, given talking points to promote, and taken on organized visits to Guantánamo and Iraq. In public, they appeared as independent analysts. According to the investigation, many of them had ties to defense contractors seeking contracts from the Pentagon itself – a connection that the television networks were largely unaware of and, in any case, did not disclose to viewers. A subsequent investigation, focusing on General Barry McCaffrey, revealed how a single commentator could simultaneously serve as a television pundit, a consultant to defense contractors, and a privileged interlocutor with the military leadership. Barstow’s work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

That case deserves attention for three reasons. The first is that none of the analysts needed to lie: all they had to do was repeat, with their own faces and their former uniforms, the narrative provided by the Department of Defense. The second is that the system relied on an information asymmetry, because the public knew those men were generals but did not know who they worked for the day after the broadcast. The third is the most important. Those who ran the program did not consider it a covert operation but rather a normal communications activity, and when the scandal broke, the television networks largely responded with silence. The expert as a tool of influence was not an anomaly in the system; it was part of it.

The market for opinions

To understand why this technique works, we must look at how opinions are selected, and here the problem is not limited to governments.

Take the monumental work of Philip Tetlock, who collected predictions from some 300 political and economic experts over nearly twenty years – tens of thousands of forecasts verified over time. The results, published in 2005, showed that, on the whole, experts performed only slightly better than simple statistical rules, and that those most frequently featured in the media tended to be more wrong than the others. Tetlock offered a convincing explanation: television rewards certainty, brevity, and soundbites – precisely the qualities that make an analyst less capable of correcting himself. The format selects a type of expert even before it selects a type of opinion. And it is a format that anyone wishing to influence the debate can study and exploit.

Alongside the format is money. In September 2014, another investigation by the New York Times revealed that dozens of foreign governments were funding Washington’s leading think tanks, often without the public’s knowledge when researchers from those institutions participated in the debate or testified before Congress; Qatar, to cite the most talked-about case, had contributed nearly fifteen million dollars to the Brookings Institution over four years. In June 2023, a study by the Quincy Institute – itself an institution with a specific foreign policy agenda – argued that in American media coverage of the war in Ukraine, think tanks funded by the defense industry were cited significantly more frequently than those without such ties. This finding should be interpreted with the caution due to any analysis produced by one side of the debate. But the phenomenon it describes is recognizable to anyone who follows the international press: those who speak out on the need for new arms supplies often work for an institute that receives funding from the very companies that produce those weapons, and this fact is rarely mentioned in the byline.

The most instructive European case is that of the Integrity Initiative, a project of the Institute for Statecraft, a small British organization founded to counter Russian disinformation. In November 2018, a group of hackers leaked internal documents describing a network of national “clusters” of journalists, academics, and officials in various European countries. The British government confirmed that it had funded the project with nearly two million pounds from the Foreign Office. The controversy centered on a few specific incidents: messages posted from the project’s account targeting Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and, according to the documents, a campaign by the Spanish group against the appointment of Colonel Pedro Baños as head of the Department of National Security – an appointment that ultimately did not go through. It is not necessary to accept the most conspiratorial interpretation that was offered, nor to forget that the source of the documents was itself opaque and, in all likelihood, hostile. The confirmed fact remains that a democratic government was funding a network of ostensibly independent experts with the aim of influencing public debate in other allied countries.

Four roles of the expert

When considered together, these cases allow us to distinguish the various roles that the expert plays within the framework of information warfare. Distinguishing them is useful because each requires a different defense on the part of the reader.

The first is validation. The expert takes a thesis originating from an interested party and lends it his or her apparent neutrality: this is the case with Segal regarding the KGB and with military analysts regarding the Pentagon. Russian military theory has a name for the ultimate effect of this type of operation: “reflexive control” – that is, the art of conveying to the adversary the premises from which the adversary will, believing himself to be acting freely, derive the desired decision. A credible expert is the ideal vehicle for those premises, because the recipient accepts them as knowledge rather than as a message.

The second function is the creation of doubt, pioneered by the tobacco industry. Here, the expert does not need to convince anyone; they need only make it seem plausible that a controversy exists, and that controversy alone is enough to paralyze decision-making.

The third function is the most subtle and, in democracies, the most widespread: the delineation of boundaries. The expert is not used to assert a thesis but to determine which theses are admissible. On October 19, 2020, two weeks before the U.S. presidential election, fifty-one former intelligence officials signed an open letter in which they argued that the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, revealed by the New York Post, exhibited “all the classic signs” of a Russian information operation. The letter clarified that the signatories had no evidence of Russian involvement. Nevertheless, it was enough to justify the caution – or silence – of many news outlets and platforms. In 2022, the New York Times and the Washington Post verified the authenticity of at least part of that material. In 2023, testifying before Congress, one of the letter’s initiators, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, stated that the initiative had been prompted by a contact from Joe Biden’s campaign – a circumstance that those involved interpreted in different ways. Whatever the correct account may be, the mechanism is clear: collective authority – which, by its own admission, lacked evidence – was used to place a news story outside the bounds of what could be discussed.

The same function can be exercised in reverse, by stripping authority from those who possess it. In 2014, John Mearsheimer published an essay in Foreign Affairs in which he attributed primary responsibility for the Ukrainian crisis to NATO expansion. This thesis is legitimately contested by many scholars, who offer serious arguments. In July 2022, however, the Center for Countering Disinformation of the Ukrainian National Security Council included Mearsheimer on a list of individuals accused of promoting Russian narratives, alongside American politicians and journalists such as Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, and Glenn Greenwald. An academic argument was thus transformed into evidence of belonging to the enemy camp. In Italy, a similar dynamic unfolded in June 2022, when the Corriere della Sera reported on the contents of a document regarding Russian disinformation attributed to the intelligence community, which cited, among others, regular talk show commentators; the government and intelligence agencies clarified that this was not a blacklist, but the public perception was that analytical dissent was being conflated with hostile influence operations. A few months earlier, RAI had terminated its contract with sociologist Alessandro Orsini due to his appearances on an in-depth analysis program.

This must be stated clearly, because symmetry is part of the analysis: the same Italian television ecosystem, during the same period, aired an interview in May 2022 with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov – which was criticized for the absence of effective cross-examination – and gave airtime to commentators whose expertise was far from well-documented. In Russia, meanwhile, prime-time talk shows regularly feature so-called “Western experts.” The difference in severity between these cases is enormous and should not be downplayed: in Russia, a non-aligned expert risks imprisonment; in Italy, he risks losing his contract. This logic – the selection of voices based on political stance rather than expertise – is, however, akin to the method of infowarfare that is typical of this historical phase of warfare.

Finally, the fourth function is the most recent: the fabricated expert.

The Chinese, for example, have long been familiar with an expression, jiè kǒu shuō huà, “borrowing a mouth to speak.” A surprisingly useful and low-cost tactic. In short, all it takes is to identify a subject who can be used as an actor – or, if necessary, to create one digitally.

No actor has a monopoly on this technique. In July 2020, a Reuters investigation revealed that “Oliver Taylor” – presented as a student at the University of Birmingham and the author of articles published by Israeli media outlets – did not exist: the face in his photo was generated by an algorithm, and his primary target was a Palestinian academic living in London. That same month, the Daily Beast revealed that a network of fake Middle Eastern analysts – with fabricated biographies and stolen or fabricated photos – had published commentary in dozens of conservative outlets, expressing views consistent with the United Arab Emirates’ stance and hostile toward Qatar and Turkey. The following month, Facebook and the analytics firm Graphika attributed a fake news outlet, Peace Data, to Russia’s Internet Research Agency; the outlet recruited real, mostly unsuspecting freelance journalists to write about topics related to the American left. The operation reversed the formula: real authors, fictitious publisher. In all cases, the goal was not to produce news but to create a byline.

These cases were uncovered because they were crude: a name with no real-world record, a computer-generated face, a biography with no traceable background. It is reasonable to assume that generative models will make fabrication much cheaper and harder to detect, and that verifying an expert’s existence will become a real problem for newsrooms that already lack the time to check their affiliations. This hypothesis concerns the future and should be treated as such. But if it were to come to pass, the most likely consequence would not be an influx of credible fake experts. It would be widespread distrust even toward the real ones – which, for those waging an information war, is an equally useful outcome.

An expert, yes, but an expert in what? And on whose behalf?

Lippmann, whom we’ve already mentioned – who had worked on American propaganda during World War I and knew its inner workings – placed his hope in 1922 precisely in experts: only bodies of independent specialists, he wrote, could provide citizens and governments with a reliable picture of a world too vast to be known firsthand. A century later, that hope has not proved unfounded, but it has revealed its hidden condition. The expert is useful to democracy only if his or her independence is verifiable. When it is not, the expert becomes the most effective channel through which a particular interest can present itself as neutral knowledge.

This does not imply a call for indiscriminate mistrust. Those who reject all experts end up relying on their own, chosen by even worse criteria, and recent history is full of people who have shifted from blind trust in official sources to blind trust in alternative sources without changing their approach. Rather, it suggests an exercise that every reader can undertake and that every serious newsroom should facilitate.

The first question concerns expertise: an expert in what? A general knows the logistics of a military campaign, but not necessarily the domestic politics of the enemy country; a virologist knows a great deal about viruses but little about the economic consequences of a lockdown. An expert’s authority is local, and its extension to related fields is one of the points where influence most easily creeps in. The second question concerns interests: who funds the institution for which they work, what other roles do they hold outside the television studio, who invited them, and why specifically them. An interest does not invalidate an argument, but it must be disclosed, and the fact that it is kept silent is already a piece of information. The third concerns absence: which competent voices were not invited, and for what reason. This is the most difficult question, because it requires noticing what is missing. Finally, the fourth question concerns the treatment of dissent. A well-founded consensus responds to objections with data and arguments; a manufactured consensus responds with labels. This criterion applies in all directions, and it holds true even if the dominant opinion turns out, in the end, to be the correct one.

In the information war, the target is not only what the public believes, but its ability to understand why it believes it. The expert used as a weapon strikes precisely there, because he replaces the question “Is it true?” with the question “Who says so?”, and then controls the answer to the second.

Restoring to citizens the ability to distinguish between a fact, an expert’s interpretation of it, the interests that interpretation may serve, and the voices that have been left out of the room is not a task that can be delegated to a verification authority – which would itself be an expert in need of verification. It is a habit. It develops slowly, and no one has any interest in teaching it.

While much of the media industry focused on the churn of headlines, we became increasingly interested in the undercurrents beneath them: the hidden systems, infrastructures and ideologies shaping events across borders and over time.

Again and again, our reporting led us back to the same realization: for a long time, the struggle over information was understood primarily as a question of censorship or access. Who controls information? Who gets to publish? Who gets silenced?

Those questions still matter. But they no longer fully describe the world we live in.

Today, the struggle over information is about who builds the systems through which reality is organized, distributed and trusted. From state propaganda to algorithmic feeds, from platform monopolies to AI-generated noise, the battle is not over facts. It is over the infrastructures that determine which narratives spread, which voices are amplified and which communities remain connected.

Over the past year, these questions led to a collaboration between Coda and The Continent, the pan-African newspaper founded in Johannesburg by Simon Allison and Sipho Kings. Although our reporting emerges from very different histories and geographies, we found ourselves arriving at remarkably similar conclusions about power, fragmentation and the future of journalism in an age of informational instability.

This two-chapter essay is the beginning of that collaboration, and marks the start of a new project called The Atlas. Pilot edition is available here — please feel free to share with friends, family and colleagues, preferably in its entirety.

In Chapter One, I return to the world of my Soviet childhood: propaganda, samizdat and the search for trustworthy signals through noise.

In Chapter Two, The Continent co-founder Simon Allison presents the Parable of Sinn Sisamouth: the story of how some of the greatest songs ever written were nearly lost, and then found, and then lost again. 

Taken together, these essays ask what journalism becomes in a world where information is no longer organized primarily to inform, but to capture attention, manufacture reaction and shape perception at planetary scale.

The Atlas grows out of that question.

Chapter One: Through the Static

Whenever I am asked why I decided to become a journalist, an image from my childhood pops into my head. It’s dusk. I am 10, sitting in the kitchen with my mom. She is glued to a shortwave radio. Outside, the Soviet Union is on the cusp of collapse. Georgia, where we are, is on the brink of civil war. We didn’t use the term back then, but fake news was all we got through official channels. Real news — coming from the West — felt like a lifeline. I was in awe of the crackling radio that held my mother’s full attention. I wanted to become that voice.

Years later, I got my dream job at the BBC and spent much of my adult life moving between wars, uprisings and authoritarian states. Again and again, I found myself in places where truth was contested terrain: Baghdad, Damascus, Donetsk, Sana’a. But over time I realized something fundamental had changed. Modern authoritarianism no longer relied primarily on suppressing information. It had discovered something more effective.

Information could simply be drowned out by static.

That realization became stark for me in eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014. I arrived in a field of bright yellow sunflowers where the bodies from Flight MH17 still lay scattered across the ground. A Russian missile had blown the passenger plane out of the sky, killing all 298 people on board. Yet almost immediately, the Kremlin flooded the information space with competing explanations. It was a Ukrainian fighter jet. A failed assassination attempt on Putin. The plane had been filled with corpses before takeoff. Each theory contradicted the next, but that hardly mattered. The point was not to persuade, it was to exhaust. It was to create so much noise that truth itself began to feel unstable.

Over the following years, I watched versions of the same logic spread far beyond Russia. Social platforms transformed public conversation into a permanent stream of outrage, performance and distraction, collapsing vastly different kinds of information into the same endless feed. War footage, propaganda, conspiracy theories, journalism and gossip all began competing inside systems designed not to inform people but to capture and hold attention.

Noise became the new censorship.

And increasingly, I found myself thinking about the world of my childhood again. Not because history was repeating itself neatly, but because the emotional landscape felt strangely familiar: confusion, exhaustion, distrust, the constant sense that reality itself was becoming slippery. Back then, people searched desperately for clear signals through the static of Soviet propaganda. Today, we are drowning in a different kind of static, but the instinct, the search for clarity feels remarkably similar.

In the Soviet Union, people developed ways of navigating that confusion. Among my strongest memories from that time is the sound of my parents’ typewriter late at night. Friends would pass around copies of banned Soviet literature and my parents would sit at the kitchen table all night, retyping them page by page so they could be shared again. It was my first encounter with samizdat, although I didn’t know the word then.

Looking back now, what strikes me is that samizdat was never simply about forbidden texts. It was about building trusted alternative systems of circulation when official systems had lost credibility.

At Coda, we have spent years building journalism against the logic of noise. We slowed stories down. We followed themes instead of headlines. We built a reporting system designed to connect events across borders and over time, helping readers see patterns instead of fragments. But as our globally distributed newsroom adapted to an increasingly fractured information landscape, it became clear that journalism alone was not enough. Distribution shapes understanding as much as reporting does.

Around the same time, in Johannesburg, Simon Allison, Sipho Kings and their team were building something that challenged many of the assumptions dominating digital media. The Continent, their pan-African newspaper, spreads largely through direct sharing networks: passed from reader to reader rather than pushed by algorithms.

Different histories had brought us to remarkably similar questions. What does journalism look like when trust is collapsing, attention is fragmented and the systems that carry information have themselves become instruments of power?

Out of that convergence came The Atlas: a new publication that brings together Coda’s methodology of following systems across borders and over time with The Continent’s radically distributed model for reaching readers beyond algorithmic feeds.

The Atlas is built on a shared conviction: as fragmentation, distrust and informational overload spread across the world, some of the clearest ways through will come from places that have already spent decades navigating propaganda, instability and contested reality. Places once treated as peripheral are becoming essential to understanding the defining question of this age: how can meaning survive systems designed to overwhelm it.

Chapter Two: The second silencing of Sinn Sisamouth

Imagine if your favourite song disappeared, forever. 

Almost every album I have ever loved was recommended to me by my friend An-Rui. A few months ago, he sent me a track by the undisputed King of Khmer Music, the Golden Voice, the Cambodian Elvis himself – Sinn Sisamouth.

I had never heard of him.

I didn’t respond at first, so he nudged me. That night, after the kids were asleep, I put on my headphones, sat in the garden and immediately lost myself in Cambodia’s psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. I don’t know enough about music to explain exactly what I fell in love with, but within weeks I was, according to Spotify, among the top one percent of Sinn Sisamouth listeners worldwide.

An-Rui had added a note to his recommendation. “the songs are happy but since i know what his fate was and i don’t understand the words, it sounds incredibly sad to me”.

The story goes something like this: A small-town boy with an extraordinary voice moves to the big city, and conquers all before him. He writes hundreds of songs, bridging Khmer musical traditions with new western influences: jazz, rock & roll, bossa nova, blues, the Beatles, and, of course, Elvis Presley. He toured the country. He toured the world. He made music with an actual King, Norodom Sihanouk, and became Cambodia’s most beloved rockstar.

Then, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power. In the course of committing a genocide, the communist regime disappeared Sinn Sisamouth, and banned his music. He has never been seen, or heard from, again.

But his music never died. It lived on brittle records, hidden for generations under floorboards. It lived on scratchy cassettes, passed hand to hand among the diaspora.

It was only decades later that his music was digitised and remastered, and made available on streaming platforms to the likes of me.

When I listen to Sinn Sisamouth, I can’t help but think about how easily we could have lost his masterpieces entirely. And I wonder what else might have been lost that we have not been able to recover.

And then it happened again.

There’s a particular track that I like to play in my car, where I can turn the bass up as high as it goes. I was driving one afternoon and looked for it on Spotify. It was gone, even though the rest of the album was there. 

I looked again on my laptop at home. Nothing. Gone from Spotify. Gone from Apple Music. Gone from YouTube. Like it had never been there in the first place. I started to wonder if I had gone crazy, and maybe imagined the song entirely. And then I started to panic: What if I never heard it again?

Eventually, I found a bootleg YouTube version, using a different transliteration of the Khmer title – Kanlang Pnheu Pran, instead of Konlong Phner Bran. Before I tracked that down, I had to wade through dozens of AI-generated Sinn Sisamouth ‘cover versions’, all uploaded to YouTube within the last few months. If I had never heard it before, I would never have been able to tell which was the original.

It’s not unusual for songs to disappear from the Internet, especially when the music is from non-English-speaking countries. I’ve had similar experiences with the music of Sharhabil Ahmed, the Sudanese jazz legend, and Ethiopia’s Tilahun “The Voice” Gessesse.

In fact, it’s not unusual for other kinds of information to disappear from the internet; to be edited after the fact; or to be simply lost among all the digital noise. Digital information is incredibly precarious, and becoming more so by the day. AI slop is taking over social media platforms. Algorithms determine what information we can and can’t see, shaping our cultural and political preferences. And powerful interests are becoming increasingly bold when it comes to brazenly manipulating information in their favour – or, of even greater concern, restricting the flow of information across borders.

Amazon changes the contents of books on people’s Kindles without telling anyone. News websites quietly alter critical stories, post-publication, to remove evidence of wrongdoing (my favourite example: the Financial Express published a story critical of India’s richest family; only to replace it with a glorified press release a few days later. They neglected to amend the URL, however, which contains the original headline). Governments shut down internet access on a whim, or legislate which apps and websites are available to specific populations.

For journalism, this is an existential threat. Our job is not just to hold power to account – it is also to write the first draft of history. But if we can’t preserve that first draft, or distribute it effectively, then what, exactly, is the point?

The Continent and Coda Story are working together to try something different. We want to publish news about the world, produced and verified by humans, that cannot be edited after the fact; and to distribute it in a way that dramatically decreases our reliance on unaccountable algorithms or search engine optimisation. The Atlas — pilot edition available here — is our answer to the precarity of information online. It’s a work in progress.

Stay tuned: if we’re going to succeed, we’ll need your help. And if we do succeed, the secret of our success will be those very same transnational networks that kept the music of Sinn Sisamouth alive. Communities of like-minded people, of friends and families will always find a way to stay connected, no matter how vast the distances between them, or how great the obstacles. So what does a global newspaper look like if we design it with exactly these communities in mind?

As soon as I found that bootleg on YouTube, I ripped an MP3 copy and sent it to An-Rui on Signal. “KEEP THIS SAFE,” I told him. I don’t know what happened to the song on Spotify, or if it is ever coming back. But I can’t take the risk of never hearing that bassline again. And here it is, in case you want to hear it too.

The post The new samizdat appeared first on Coda Story.

In 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large. 

On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.” 

10 years later with the aid of an “AI tribunal,” a team of intelligence and law enforcement veterans, and a political climate vastly more hostile to press freedom, he is trying to do exactly that, bypassing the courts, short-circuiting the first amendment, and making it much, much cheaper to indulge in the quasi legal harassment of journalists.

Objection.ai is a new startup funded by Thiel, and cofounded by Aron D’Souza, who worked closely with him on the Gawker case. It promises “a fast affordable way to challenge statements in the media.” Anyone can file an objection, which will trigger an investigation by a team hired, the company says, from the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence agencies. Targeted outlets and reporters will have an opportunity to respond, and the results will be fed to an AI model, which will render a verdict. The complainant, and the target, are asked to agree to binding arbitration, with an unspecified range of potential consequences. Financial details are vague, but the company has said the process will cost around $2,000 — far less than the retainer of a crisis communications expert.

An initial slate of cases includes objections against the New York Times, for reporting on how Thiel’s fellow traveller David Sacks, former PayPal chief operating officer and Donald Trump’s former “AI and Crypto Czar,” uses his White House position to benefit Silicon Valley connections; The Wall Street Journal for its revelations about the doodle contributed by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book (a case recently dismissed by a federal judge); and British reporter Hannah Broughton for an aggregated story in the UK tabloid the Mirror about allegations that Amazon workers were told to continue working while a colleague lay dead on the warehouse floor. A smattering of social media provocateurs (Candace Owens) and politicians (Bernie Sanders) round out the roster, but the aggregate effect is indisputable: Thiel’s animus was about journalism all along. Indeed, the Objection.ai team couldn't be clearer about that.

“Gawker was not unique,” writes D’Souza on the company’s website. “It was simply the first large media company to be tested against reality in the age of clicks, outrage, and algorithmic amplification. Since then, the same structural failure has spread everywhere.”

“Peter Thiel and I … did not just fight Gawker,” he goes on. “ — We demonstrated that facts still mattered if someone was willing to enforce them.”

This is worse than revisionism. D’Souza is banking on everyone having forgotten that the Hulk Hogan case had nothing to do with “reality.” It was undisputed that the sex tape published by Gawker was real. The original suit, which failed, was for copyright infringement and the ultimate $140 million award that bankrupted the company was for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional harm. 

This foundational lie is important, because it is a warning against the temptation to engage Objection.ai on the merits. It would be easy enough to conduct a good faith debate to take at face value D’Souza’s argument that tech platforms and algorithms amplify false claims to millions, that courts are expensive and slow, media ombuds toothless, and fact-checkers partisan. And it would not be hard to demonstrate that he is harnessing widely shared concerns about a disordered information environment to mobilize support for an AI powered justice system controlled by a hyperpartisan private company with a track record of attacking the very institutions that are holding the line on consensus reality.

It would also be a mistake. There is nothing good faith about this effort. Rather, it is classic Thiel: an attempt to hack the principles of accountability, and turn them against journalism. Leave it to his less sophisticated Silicon Valley peers to rail against the media, create in house news outlets or buy them. The PayPal co-founder is going for the heart of the system, and financing infrastructure that will enable anyone who can afford a used Honda Civic to launch a harassment campaign, cloaked in the language of legitimate investigation. James O’Keefe, but with the judicial rather than journalistic process as its governing metaphor.

It will be tempting, too, to question the likely financial sustainability of Objection. That will be the least of its founders' concerns. The for-profit structure supports a story about the company’s purpose. It may work, or not, but its goals are nonfinancial. We reached out to Thiel for comment on Objection.ai before publication and will update this article as soon as he responds.

Providing funding, alongside Thiel, is Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and author of “The Network State,” a book about social networks with “a sense of national consciousness” replacing the nation state. He once outlined an early version of the Objection.ai model in an email to the far right theorist Curtis Yarvin about dealing with critical coverage. "If things get hot,” he suggested “it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts."

These men understand the limits of the Gawker verdict’s impact. It bankrupted the company, a personal victory for Thiel, but perhaps the least important outcome of the case. At a more systemic level, it struck fear into the hearts of media insurers and newsroom counsel, focusing attention on third party litigation finance as potential threat. 

If people with limitless resources could sponsor litigation against news organizations they disliked, constitutional protections would be no match for the sheer cost and complexity of defense.

Now, they’ve found an AI-assisted way to supercharge those effects. 

The Gawker case routed around the First Amendment by relying on a privacy claim. Objection.ai does so by building a hallucination of the legal process. Any journalist foolish enough to agree to binding arbitration by the company probably deserves what they get, but that will be a vanishingly small minority. For those who don’t, a phone call, or a knock on the door from a former FBI agent, or defense intelligence operative, will be chilling, and an ex-parte verdict rendered by Thiel’s custom-tuned AI will act as a cudgel on social media and via traditional PR. Journalists will be assigned a “trust score” to act as an additional goad.

In an environment of less peril for press freedom, it might be easy to laugh off Objection.ai as the confection of a thin-skinned millenarian. Right now, with the crony capture of broadcast news far advanced, swathes of the tech community openly hostile to journalism, and the White House onside, it would be wise to take it seriously. That starts with seeing it for what it is, and refusing to engage with a process which, unlike the real courts, Peter Thiel has no legal power to compel. 

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Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, faces an election dogfight. Behind in the polls, he has been effectively endorsed by both the Kremlin and the White House, and a host of conservative world leaders. As wars in Iran and Ukraine exacerbate the fissures that have weakened NATO, as well as the U.S.’s relationship with the European Union, this is an election that is being followed with bated breath in Washington, Moscow, Kyiv and Brussels. 

Before the elections on April 12, a scandal engulfed the Hungarian government. On leaked recordings, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó can be heard deferentially acquiescing to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and passing on information from EU meetings. Szijjártó appeared willing to help the Kremlin’s cause in Brussels, to remove oligarchs and their relatives from the EU blacklist, and to block efforts to aid Ukraine. Hungary’s advocacy for the Kremlin’s agenda culminated in its recent veto of fresh sanctions on Russia and over $100 billion in loans to Ukraine. On X, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wrote that while “Hungary is and will be in the European Union, Victor Orbán and his foreign minister left Europe long ago.” And the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin described Szijjárto’s calls with Lavrov as both “sinister” and “alarming.”

Szijjárto alleged that “foreign intelligence services, with the active involvement of Hungarian journalists, have been intercepting my phone calls.” It is a plot, the Hungarian government claims, to influence the upcoming polls. Orbán directly blames Ukraine for seeking to unseat his government. The opposition, led by Peter Magyar, has a healthy lead in the polls and describes the Hungarian government’s closeness to the Kremlin as “treason.” According to European intelligence reports, Moscow sent a three-person team to Hungary, overseen by Putin confidant Sergei Kiriyenko who ran an operation to interfere in the Moldovan election back in September. His tactics encompassed “vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.” A Kremlin-linked media consultancy, facing EU sanctions, was hired to dismiss Magyar as a Brussels stooge and portray Orbán as the only candidate strong enough to to be treated as an equal by world leaders, as evidenced by the strength of his relationship with Trump. 

Despite a war with Iran that doesn’t appear to be going entirely to plan, the U.S. president took time out to back Orbán with enthusiasm and at considerable length on Truth Social. Trump said Orbán was “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER.” JD Vance, the vice president, is scheduled to visit Hungary on April 7, just five days before the election. And secretary of state Marco Rubio went to Hungary in February. It is now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy to work towards “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” To that end, notes the U.S. government, “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Orbán speaks MAGA’s language on immigration, traditional values and the Christian essence of Western societies. He is, like Putin and Trump, in MAGA’s view, an implacable opponent of secular, progressive, globalist politics as symbolised by Brussels.

Orbán, the longest serving current head of government in the EU, has become a figurehead for populist, nationalist movements across the world. The recent CPAC Hungary summit was attended by several of these leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders,who called Orbán “a lion on a continent led by sheep.” Latin American leaders close to Trump , including Javier Milei of Argentina and Jose Antonio Kast of Chile, also attended. Milei, who gave the longest speech at the summit, said Orbán was “a beacon for all… who refuse to accept that the West's destiny is one of managed decline.” This international network, with the United States and Russia included, has a vested ideological interest in seeing Orban continue to remain a thorn in the EU's side. 

But what can Brussels do? The answer, it appears, is not much. The EU is consensus driven; it needs all its parts to act in concert, giving holdouts like Orbán considerable power to hold the whole bloc hostage. But given Orbán’s prominence as an ideologue, when Hungary blocks sanctions or delays support for Ukraine, it is more than a single nation going rogue. Alice Weidler, co-chair of the far-right AfD, the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag, was among those who spoke at the CPAC Hungary conference last month. Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, is an Orbán ally. On April 19, Bulgaria will have its eighth general election in just five years. Former president Rumen Radev’s new Progressive Party leads the polls and shares Orbán’s pro-Kremlin, anti-EU inclinations.

So polarized is the Hungarian election, that right wing groups are deploying their own observers from Argentina, Austria, the Czech Republic, Kenya, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Serbia, Tanzania and the United States to monitor proceedings. EU observers have said the Hungarian government controls the national media and a recent documentary alleges that a desperate government is resorting to vote-buying, gerrymandering and intimidation tactics. It’s hard to see how either Orbán or Magyar will accept the election result without protest, unless the margin is crushing. But, given Trump’s disdain for NATO allies and the EU, an Orbán election defeat would be a much-needed victory for European unity. 

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A funny thing happened on the day OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora, its video generation app: Iran went all in on synthetic propaganda and very quickly started winning the global meme war. The timing is a coincidence, no doubt, but it is the kind of coincidence that illuminates. 

Watching the explosive virality of the clips offers a powerful lesson in asymmetric media operations. They deploy cultural sophistication, an understanding of online communities and the enormously powerful creation tools made available by American tech companies, tools that give everyone on the internet access to a personal reality distortion field — drones, but for your feed.

On Wednesday, as Donald Trump was trying desperately to talk down the oil markets with hints of a deal, a stream of videos, carefully calibrated for U.S., regional and third country audiences rolled out on X via embassy accounts, Russia Today, and disaffected Maga influencers. The clips, by broad social media consensus, are good. Some lean heavily on the extremely online grammar of the U.S. right. Some remix Hollywood characters and likenesses in exactly the way that OpenAI’s now nixed billion-dollar deal with Disney was supposed to sanction. Others lean more heavily into Islamic iconography, featuring Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as worshippers of Baal, the foreign demon god who figures in both the Quran and the Hebrew Bible. The Lego movie is an especially rich resource, but so are TikTok formats, and the kind of idealized AI figures beloved of Trump administration meme makers. You can watch a few of them here.

Notably, faked war footage is far from the dominant format. All of these clips foreground and celebrate their own artificiality: some are sentimental, some triumphal, many are full of the gleeful adolescent wit of gamers on discord forums. 

https://twitter.com/politblogme/status/2036909041566306565?s=20

Researchers have long been warning that generative tools will undercut the authority of visual evidence, compounding and accelerating the damage created by slower, cruder forms of fakery: photoshop, selective editing, even gaming clips passed off as combat footage. Of course, we are already there, and have been for a while. Russia has been the paramount master of this game, in Ukraine and in its ongoing influence operations around the world. But others have learned quickly. Last year, when India and Pakistan were engaged in a brief aerial battle, social media bullshit overwhelmed and compromised traditional coverage. More recently, Israel’s obliteration of Gaza was accompanied by a sustained and comprehensive blizzard of visually compelling misinformation, propaganda, and official lies. 

That continues. On March 28, Israel killed three journalists in a targeted strike in Southern Lebanon, claiming without evidence that one of them, Ali Shoaib, was a member of Hezbollah’s Radwan forces. They later distributed a photograph of him in military fatigues to reinforce the point, but explained to Fox news that in fact, they’d had to photoshop the uniform in because no such picture existed.

Meanwhile, in the Trump administration’s domestic war on immigrants and political opponents, we’ve seen a complete resetting of norms around the tone of official communication and any expectation that it is rooted in fact. Nowhere was that more evident than in the altered footage posted by the White House of the arrest of the prominent Minneapolis activist Nekima Levy Armstrong in January. In the video, shared by the official White House handle, a handcuffed Levy Armstrong is sobbing, her skin visibly darkened. In fact, she had faced arrest calmly. 

Questioned by reporters about this blatant falsification, deputy White House communications director Kaelan Dorr responded: "Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” Collapsing the distinction between a meme and the factual record with the aid of AI is the final step in this administration's insistence that its preferred narrative simply is reality.

The problem for the White House and its allies is that their choices in tech policy, official communication, and press freedom level the playing field for information war in ways that Tehran’s media strategists understand and they, for all their immersion in online worlds, do not.

Iranian propagandists know that the currency of visual information online has already been completely debased. They’ve dealt with it plenty, and no doubt practiced it themselves in regional battles for narrative dominance. Their insight is that as cheap and easy as it is to create and distribute fakes, returns on the effort of mobilizing what disinformation researchers call “coordinated inauthentic action” are diminishing. They still do it, but it isn’t where the action is.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have, in a very practical sense, wrought this moment in concert with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, JD Vance and Donald Trump. At their urging, the U.S. has surrendered unrivaled dominance in scarce, expensive information and cultural assets in exchange for a political economy of media that widely distributes cheap, abundant ones.

Tech leaders and conservative politicians have worked consistently for a decade to deprecate the trustworthiness of American journalism and constrain its liberties. They have smeared its practitioners as “enemies of the people”; they have captured the commanding heights of the broadcast and culture industries through crony deals, and they have launched an assault on both press freedom and standards, two assets that once made American news outlets the envy of the world. Needless to say, the economic collapse of traditional media companies fostered by Google’s  and Meta’s advertising duopoly only served to deepen the damage. Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post shuttered its Middle East bureaus just days before the war began.

Meanwhile, lying from agency podiums and the Oval Office, makes Karoline Leavitt barely distinguishable from Baghdad Bob, Iraq’s minister of information in 2003 whose surreal, truth-dodging press conferences during the U.S.-led invasion made him a global laughingstock. And the DOGEing of both the nominally independent Voice of America, as well as the state department’s Global Engagement Center leaves the administration with neither broadcast nor digital counter-propaganda assets. 

When no one can be trusted with the actual truth, we are left with the AI equivalent of 19th-century editorial cartoons, produced at industrial scale and distributed globally. America has little advantage in that war, particularly when it is at a moral, political and legal nadir.

If anything, Iran, which combines repression with an enormously rich literary culture, film scene and advertising market brings serious capabilities to the fight.

Of course, the ebbing of information power was already under way during the first Trump administration, and during Joe Biden’s term in ways that are indissociable from broader democratic decline. The “trust and safety” architecture adopted by big platform companies was designed — implicitly if not always visibly — to conserve information authority, and ensure that it functioned in broadly pro-democratic ways. 

After the disastrous failures of the Rohingya genocide — which rights groups and UN investigators blamed Facebook for facilitating — and the fears surrounding the manipulation of the U.S. electoral environment in 2016, there was a clear threat to the commercial and political health of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Tech companies, governments, researchers and human rights experts devised rules and norms for content moderation grounded in existing standards, tools for detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior, and a framework for crisis response.

The community of practitioners and institutions that sprung up to combat the flesh-eating virus attacking the body politic were working with bandaids in the battlefield hospital even before Covid, a coordinated attack from the right, and the second Trump victory hit them, but they succeeded in imposing some limits. That project now lies in ruins. 

The Stanford Information Laboratory has been shut down. Trust and Safety teams at Meta and X have been disbanded. The national security arm of the project, centered around the State Department is gone, and private funding for countering misinformation has largely dried up.

Where are the hyperscalers, the AI titans, whose tools are being so effectively deployed, in all of this?

The trust and safety people who do work at OpenAI are dutifully putting out reports every few months. They are detailing how they foiled efforts to use ChatGPT for a Chinese influence campaign aimed at Sanae Takaichi, the Japanese prime minister, and exposing a Russian content mill feeding African newspapers. “Pro-tip for governments,” wrote Head of National Security policy Sasha Baker on LinkedIn of the February report. “Please don’t use our products to spread lies online.”

Governments, in the world of Sam Altman’s “democratic AI” do not include that of the United States. OpenAI has not mentioned a single U.S. ally — let alone the administration itself — in these reports. 

OpenAI has hired multiple ex-Clinton, Obama and Biden officials, and in their work a weird, attenuated piece of the old national security approach to information integrity lives on, alongside the project of selling products to the Pentagon. The company’s leaders clearly treat these issues  as a complement to messaging around Western AI, or a picayune adjunct to the bigger questions of AI risk, which are handled way up in the organizational stratosphere, as they are at Anthropic.

Perhaps the larger lesson is that you can’t really shut down Sora, or put AI-generated video back in its box. If you choose to prosecute an illegal war of choice after surrendering the hard-won high ground of a robust, democratic information environment, high tech weaponry will not offset the deficit. On the contrary, you will have compounded the risk of both tactical failure and strategic geopolitical defeat. When that happens, and in some ways it already has, those who made this war, and their enablers in Silicon Valley, will have only themselves to blame.

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