The Night the Alarms Went Haywire: When Phones Lied About Armageddon In the dead of night, the piercing wail of a smartphone emergency alert is a sound designed to jolt the deepest instincts of survival. For millions of civilians across Ukraine and Russia, the early hours of Monday brought not a random text, but a stark, terrifying ultimatum delivered straight to their bedside tables. Within a span of roughly twenty-four hours, the official emergency alert applications on both sides of the front lines were compromised by sophisticated cyberattacks, transforming the very tools meant to shepherd people to safety into conduits…

On the eve of an election, the social media platform X quietly suspended about two dozen accounts linked to a Russian propaganda syndicate known as Storm-1516. On the surface, that sounds like good news—a last-minute crackdown, a win for the defenders of democracy. But the closer you look, the more complicated it becomes. The suspensions did not happen in a vacuum. They came as a wave of fabricated stories was washing through the feeds of voters in three states, targeting Democratic candidates in competitive Senate races. James Talarico in Texas and Sherrod Brown in Ohio were both hit with false…