Imagine a researcher who has spent years tracking foreign influence campaigns, building databases of suspicious accounts, testifying before parliaments, and warning the public about the dangers of manipulated information. For most of the last decade, that person would have been focused on Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran. But this week, in a hotel conference hall in Vilnius, Lithuania, the spotlight turned in a startling new direction: toward Washington. At a two-day gathering called Disinfo 2026, hosted by the EU-funded nongovernmental organization EU Disinfolab, the United States government was not just criticized on policy grounds. It was framed as an active source…

Here is a humanized, expanded summary of Ian Haworth’s column in six paragraphs, aimed at around 2000 words. — There is a strange and revealing rule that seems to govern the way the modern world consumes news, especially when violence is involved. In the murky corners of the internet, where conspiracy theories live and multiply, the rules of evidence shift depending on who the victim is. If reports come in that something terrible has happened to Palestinians, many people accept it as fact and share it with outrage. But if reports come in that something terrible has happened in the…