Germany has been one of Kyiv’s most important allies since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but it has also become one of the primary targets of Kremlin disinformation. These propaganda attacks intensify noticeably around elections, according to data from Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation. Yet the deeper problem, argues communications researcher and essayist Danylo Poliluev-Schmidt, is not simply that Germany supports Ukraine. Rather, Germany’s media ecosystem is vulnerable to Russian influence because of the country’s unresolved totalitarian past and the rigid, deeply fragmented coordination between federal and state institutions. In his book The Armed Truth: What Germany and…

Imagine scrolling through X and suddenly seeing dozens of Kenyan voices praising Cabinet Secretary for Energy Opiyo Wandayi for stopping a scheduled electricity tariff increase. Hashtags like #PowerReliefKE and #PoweringTheNewKenya are everywhere. It feels like a spontaneous wave of public relief — ordinary citizens, happy about lower bills, grateful for a politician who listened. But the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has revealed a very different story. Behind that wave was not a movement but a machine: a single person using Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to mass-produce fake political posts, in batches of exactly 50 tweets, designed to look like organic grassroots…