Not long ago, AI-generated falsehoods felt like a curiosity—a weird picture of the Pope in a puffer jacket, a synthetic voice saying something outrageous, a video that was clearly too strange to be real. That moment has passed. In the United Kingdom, AI content has moved from the margins to the mainstream of misinformation, and it now occupies a growing share of everything fact-checkers have to investigate. A new study, carried out by Full Fact and the University of Westminster and funded through the AISI Challenge Fund, set out to understand this shift. Researchers analysed 112 pieces of online misinformation…

It begins not with a dramatic raid but with the sudden, chilling silence that follows a disappearance. The six journalists of Matsda2sh, an independent fact-checking platform in Egypt, were doing what journalists do: trying to establish facts in a public sphere crowded with official narratives and fake news. For that, they were pulled out of their ordinary lives in the space of 24 hours, between September 28 and 29, and swallowed by the country’s security apparatus. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, or EIPR, whose lawyers are representing the six, announced on Monday morning that the journalists had been held…