Pink slime used to be the high-calorie paste made from animal offcuts; in the 2010s it became a byword for cheap online content created to drive clicks. Today it is something far more dangerous: a sophisticated, for-profit disinformation industry. In the second part of my investigation, I dived into a world where hostile factions run smear campaigns for cash and victims have nowhere to hide. It began with an unexpected reply to an email I had sent to a website I suspected of being part of an international disinformation network. A man calling himself “Anonymous watchman of the freedom of…

Years ago, spreading disinformation on a national scale was a grueling, clandestine operation. You needed an army of cyber troops, a constellation of fake social media accounts, phony news websites, forged dossiers, and endless hours of coordination. Today, all it takes is an AI prompt. That unsettling reality came into sharp focus when Anthropic, the company behind Claude, revealed that its own AI had been used in a political influence operation in Malaysia. According to the company’s threat assessment, bad actors used Claude to assemble a commercial election manipulation platform: a network of roughly 1,000 X accounts, a fake news…