When Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Beijing Winter Olympics last month, the two men gestured at something bigger than a photo opportunity. They issued a joint statement that spoke of reshaping the international order, and buried within that diplomatic language was a specific promise: a shared project to rewire the global information landscape. It was a quiet, almost technical ambition, but the full weight of it became clear just days later, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. For years, Beijing and Moscow had been building a parallel universe of news,…

MORGANTOWN — The phone is always there, glowing in a hand, on a desk, or propped against a coffee cup at breakfast. For millions of Americans, it is the first place they turn to in the morning and the last thing they look at before falling asleep. It is where they check on friends, laugh at memes, and, increasingly, where they try to make sense of the world. National polling shows that more than half of US adults now get at least some of their news from social media, and that number has been growing steadily for years. That means…