On a gray October morning in Warsaw, a senior Polish minister looked directly into the cameras and said the quiet part out loud: the world’s biggest social media companies are not neutral conduits for Russian lies. Krzysztof Gawkowski, Poland’s minister of digital affairs, announced on October 21 that the state would begin imposing financial penalties on platforms that fail to remove Kremlin-linked disinformation. His words carried the weight of a country that has become one of the primary targets of Russia’s information warfare. “On this disinformation front, there is a silent ally to the Russian bots and the Kremlin’s GRU:…

It began like so many digital rumors do: a short, alarming post on social media, quickly followed by a flurry of shares, a dramatic video, and a headline that seemed tailor-made for outrage. In early August, users on X were confronted with a story claiming that a Ukrainian drone had been shot down over Estonian airspace, and that crashing debris had badly damaged two Portuguese Air Force F-16 fighter jets stationed at Ämari Air Base. The alleged repair bill, according to the story, was an eye-watering €120 million. The problem, of course, was that none of it had happened. There…