Imagine yourself scrolling through social media and seeing a video of a damaged historic building. The caption says the building was destroyed by a foreign government, and before long you find yourself typing into a search bar: “Why did they bomb it?” That is exactly the kind of moment where disinformation wins or loses. If your search results repeat the premise without question, you have just absorbed a lie. If they tell you the premise is false, you have dodged a bullet. To understand how today’s artificial intelligence tools handle these moments, NPR and NewsGuard—a company that monitors false information…

For months now, a quieter, more insidious battle has been waged alongside the physical one, and its weapons are not missiles but screenshots, not troops but trolls. In this corner of the information war, Russian propaganda has once again cycled through a familiar playbook, resurrecting the ghost of a falsehood with a fresh, digital coat of paint. The most recent target is the Ukrainian woman, cast in a fabricated narrative of forced conscription. The specific claim is as absurd as it is calculated: a viral screenshot purporting to show an official tender from Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, allegedly ordered through…