On Tuesday, 15 September, the European Parliament delivered a forceful message from its chamber in Strasbourg: the fight against foreign disinformation is no longer a fringe concern, but a core issue of European security and democratic survival. In a vote that saw 420 members in favour, 220 against, and 26 abstentions, MEPs formally adopted a report calling for harsher sanctions against foreign actors who spread disinformation and explicitly identifying Russia as the primary external threat to Europe’s security and democratic integrity. This is not merely a bureaucratic paragraph buried in a pile of EU documents. It is a political signal,…

For two months, Jennifer Pritchard did not simply dislike her former husband; she set out to destroy him. From a Facebook page she created called “Jen’s Justice,” the 47-year-old woman from Tredegar in Blaenau Gwent posted a stream of vicious falsehoods about Stephen Pritchard, a serving South Wales Police sergeant. She called him a rapist. She called him a baby killer. She repeated claims of domestic violence and other criminal acts, none of which were true. Her ex-husband was not an abuser; he was a victim—not of physical violence, but of a calculated, sustained campaign of online harassment designed to…