Imagine sitting at a cluttered newsroom desk, coffee in hand, when an email pings in from a name you vaguely recognize. The subject line reads: “Exclusive tip — you need to see this.” Inside is a link to a story that looks professionally produced, complete with a familiar news logo and a headline shocking enough to make you sit up. The only problem? It never happened. The person who sent it may not exist. The outlet whose logo appears never published a word of it. This is the everyday reality exposed by a new study from the cybersecurity firm TrendAI,…

In a cross-border collaboration that brought together newsrooms across Europe, including The Journal, journalists set out to look beneath the surface of Ukraine’s and Moldova’s long roads toward the European Union—and to expose the quiet, relentless information war being fought alongside the physical one. The old saying that truth is the first casualty of war feels almost too gentle for what is happening here. Long before Russian tanks rolled deeper into Ukraine, and certainly since, truth has been under systematic attack, not just on the battlefield but in the stories people are told, the fears they are encouraged to feel,…