1. The quiet danger of a fabricated poll is that it looks exactly like a real one. It arrives with clean numbers, a confident headline, and the reassuring authority of a survey conducted by a professional-sounding firm. Campaigns, donors, and journalists rarely have time to interrogate every dataset that crosses their desks, especially in the heat of a competitive election cycle. That is why the recent scandal involving Wedgewood Polls has sent a small tremor through the political world. On Tuesday, Wedgewood Polls admitted to falsifying survey data after the election analysis website FiftyPlusOne uncovered serious irregularities in its research.…

Sometimes international diplomacy reads less like a clean exchange of legal notes and more like a noisy, crowded room where everyone is talking over everyone else. That was certainly the case in the Eastern Mediterranean this week, when Türkiye’s disinformation watchdog stepped into a heated maritime dispute with a blunt message: do not believe what you are seeing online. The Center for Combating Disinformation, or DMM, which sits under Türkiye’s Communications Directorate, responded publicly to social media posts claiming that Ankara is working to destabilize the region. The DMM called those claims “open disinformation” and warned that they were designed…