In September, an academic with a quiet reputation for exposing digital authoritarianism published a report that should worry anyone who cares about the Horn of Africa. Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, has spent years documenting how governments and covert networks twist social media to manipulate public life across the Middle East and Africa. This time, he turned his attention to an online operation that calls itself the Red Sea Axis. On the surface, it looks like a news organization covering a turbulent region. But the more Jones pulled at the threads,…

On a Friday evening in Springfield, inside the Hoogland Center for the Arts, a group of voters gathered for a conversation that has become increasingly difficult to find: a calm, fact-based discussion about how elections actually work. The Citizen Club forum brought together Don Gray, the Sangamon County clerk and a Republican, and Matt Dietrich, spokesperson for the Illinois State Board of Elections, with retired University of Illinois Springfield political science professor Kent Redfield moderating. Their mission was not to score political points but to untangle a knot of myths and disinformation that have grown around American elections in recent…