1. On a clear autumn morning in Warsaw, Volodymyr Zelenskyy stood before an audience of security officials and policymakers with a claim that felt almost too perfect to question. The Ukrainian president had spent months pleading for more military support, but on this day he offered something different: a story of victory in the invisible war. He described Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex, the Russian technology giant, and how those strikes had reached its data centers. The physical damage was real, but Zelenskyy suggested something even more profound had happened. “When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers,” he said, “it suddenly…

In a world where a single misleading post can circle the globe before an official statement has even been drafted, government communicators are fighting a battle that cannot be won with facts alone. A new study by Zanele Mngadi, conducted as part of her Bachelor of Public Administration Honours degree at MANCOSA, set out to understand how a national government department in South Africa manages social media in an era of rampant misinformation and disinformation. The research, based on interviews with nine communication practitioners who manage the department’s online platforms, reveals a deeply human challenge: people want information that is…