A Brazilian court has announced that it will be opening an investigation into X owner Elon Musk for obstruction of justice, after Musk reactivated far-right accounts that the Brazilian government had flagged for removal. The announcement came after Musk called for Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who heads …
Read More »Inside the Election Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November
As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one …
Read More »The Mayor of London Fought for Clean Air. Now He’s Battling Conspiracies and Deepfakes
It’s a slate-gray Tuesday morning in January, and Sadiq Khan is marching through Camden Market trailed by a caravan of officials, press officers, and the hulking presence of his Metropolitan Police protection unit. The mayor of London bustles with a sleeves-rolled-up, CEOish energy. The 53-year-old is short—famously so—but bantamweight trim, …
Read More »Chinese Hackers Charged in Decade-Long Global Spying Rampage
For years, China’s state-backed hackers have stolen huge troves of company secrets, political intelligence, and the personal information of millions of people. On Monday, officials in the United States and United Kingdom expanded the long list of hacking allegations, claiming China is responsible for breaching the UK’s elections watchdog and …
Read More »Why—and How—WIRED Is Covering Politics
Since taking the helm as WIRED’s global editorial director last August, I’ve heard from plenty of avid audience members—some with enthusiastic feedback about WIRED stories or coverage areas, and others with a consistent message that goes something like this: “I come to WIRED to read about tech, not [insert topic]. …
Read More »Meet the Arizona Election Official Combating Misinformation One Tweet at a Time
The Arizona primary is today, and there have already been allegations of voter fraud. Last month, a woman from Arizona who works with the right-wing group Turning Point USA posted a picture to X (formerly Twitter) of two mail-in ballots along with two early voting packets for the primary. “Maricopa …
Read More »Hate Speech Proliferates on YouTube in India, Research Finds
India is less than a month away from a national election in the world’s largest democracy. But a new report from the nonprofit Global Witness and the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) finds that YouTube and Koo, a homegrown Twitter-style alternative that specializes in Indian languages, continue to allow hateful content …
Read More »AI-Generated Fake News Is Coming to an Election Near You
Many years before ChatGPT was released, my research group, the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory, wondered whether it was possible to have neural networks generate misinformation. To achieve this, we trained ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-2, on examples of popular conspiracy theories and then asked it to generate fake news for …
Read More »A Group of Trolling Gen-Z Voters Is Buying Up GOP Domains
Ahead of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, a liberal Gen-Z-led group has purchased a handful of domain names related to the top Republican primary candidates in an effort to extinguish support from young voters. “Republicans are not investing in outreach to young people, and we know why,” Jessica Siles, …
Read More »Even After a Landslide Victory, Trump Supporters Claim Iowa Caucus Was Rigged
Despite the overwhelming scale of former president Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have already claimed that the vote was rigged because he lost one single county. “After it was reported that President Trump won every county in Iowa tonight, …
Read More »