You don’t need to hear an explosion or see a tank on your street to be under attack. That’s the strange and uncomfortable truth about the world we live in now. Russia doesn’t have to fire a single shot to cause real damage in the UK. All it needs is a few thousand automated social media accounts, a handful of fake websites, and — this is the part that stings — enough gullible, angry British people to do the rest of the work for free. We tend to picture war as something happening somewhere else, with soldiers and artillery and…

Imagine you are scrolling through Facebook and come across a post that makes your stomach drop: “HPV vaccines increase the risk of neurological problems.” You have a child in the recommended age range for the vaccine, and suddenly that alarming headline sticks in your mind. Then you see a reply from an artificial intelligence account dedicated to fact-checking. It says the claim is false. Do you change your mind? According to new research led by Washington State University, your answer may depend less on whether the correction is accurate and more on how the AI speaks to you—and what you…