Paragraph 1 On a brisk October morning in Sofia, a room full of people who spend their working lives worrying about the truth gathered at the GATE Institute, and for a few hours, they did something almost radical: they shared what they had learned. This was the first annual expert workshop, modestly titled “From Analysis to Action,” and it was organized by BROD, one of fifteen hubs in the European Digital Media Observatory network. The mood was not one of panic, but of quiet, determined urgency. Bulgaria, after all, is a country where the information environment is under constant, grinding…

1. The Call That Changed Everything It began as one of those autumn afternoons in Ocean County when the trees along Hawkin Road and Success Road in Plumsted Township should have been just beginning to turn, their leaves a quiet explosion of gold and rust against the gray October sky. But on the fifteenth day of that month, the quiet wilderness near those roads became the setting for something far more urgent and unsettling. A 9-1-1 dispatcher received a frantic call about a woman in distress, and when first responders arrived, they found a 33-year-old woman in deep physical agony,…