In Rowan County, Kentucky, a familiar tension is settling in as the November 3 election approaches. It is not just the usual pre-election jitters; it is a deeper, quieter sense of uncertainty that has become all too common in recent years. Somewhere between a mailbox and a living room, a story has been traveling across the internet. It arrives in a casual way, often through a friend of a friend, forwarded to a family group chat, passed along in a moment of concern. The story claims that a person who recently finished election training learned something alarming: if anything is…

It was a moment of quiet alarm in the middle of a busy diplomatic briefing. Speaking at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, UNHCR’s Senior Advisor on Information Integrity, Gisella Lomax, laid out a reality that is not yet fully understood by much of the world: the digital information landscape is no longer just an abstract space of opinions and debates, but a battlefield where the lives and safety of refugees and humanitarians are increasingly at stake. The UN Refugee Agency is growing deeply concerned about the spread of misinformation, hate speech and sophisticated deepfakes, and how these are not…