Picture this: It’s the weeks before a presidential election. You’re scrolling through social media when you see a post claiming that voting machines in your county are flipping votes. It’s alarming, it gets a lot of likes, and before long it’s everywhere. A fact-checker might take days to write a careful rebuttal—but by then, the falsehood has already settled into people’s minds. For democracies around the world, this is one of the most frustrating realities of the digital age. Misinformation has become a persistent challenge, from Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election to elections in India, making it harder for…

It began with a bold and risky military move: Ukrainian drones striking deep inside Russia, targeting the data centers of Yandex, the country’s largest tech company. The attacks were retaliation for a Russian campaign against Ukrainian digital infrastructure, which Moscow itself had cynically described as “a forced digital detox.” For days, ordinary Russians lost access to email, cloud storage, maps, and streaming; internet connectivity on Yandex networks plunged to a fraction of normal levels. But shortly after the smoke cleared, something else happened: a very different story exploded online. The claim was irresistible—that Ukraine had not only disrupted Russian internet…