The telephone has always been a place where the human voice matters. You hear a tone, a hesitation, a familiar cadence, and your guard comes down. In the weeks before the November midterm elections, that vulnerability has become a political problem. Anna Gomez, a Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission, is asking her own agency to recognize the danger and reject the use of artificial intelligence to generate robocalls. On Wednesday, she pushed back against a petition filed by Club for Growth, a national conservative fiscal policy organization, which asked the FCC to let political groups place automated calls…

Imagine arriving at a conference about lies and manipulation, only to discover that some of your own backers have quietly slipped away, their names hidden under white stickers. That was the strange atmosphere in Vilnius this week, where #Disinfo2026—the annual gathering of Europe’s counter-disinformation community—brought together hundreds of researchers, journalists, technologists and policymakers in a hotel for two days of talks, workshops and debate. The conference is run by EU Disinfo Lab, an independent Brussels nonprofit, and for years it has been one of the most important meeting points for people working to understand how foreign governments use information as…