When I had the idea to create a new organization dedicated to increasing the cost of lies that undermine American democracy, one of the first goals I set was to demonstrate the intellectual dishonesty of those who attack disinformation researchers and claim we’re engaged in “censorship.”

Those claims have consumed the disinformation research community, creating real fear of the harassment they can incite, and having a tremendous chilling effect on the essential work of researching one of the most serious national security threats our nation has ever faced.

When we launched The American Sunlight Project, we sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan demanding that he immediately release the sworn testimony of the researchers he dragged before his subcommittee on the so-called “weaponization of government.”

Never in our wildest dreams did we think that three weeks after our launch, Jim Jordan would buckle.

Click here to see the House Judiciary Committee hearing chaos over the transcripts.

Last month, after a year of keeping my testimony under lock and key, Jordan caved and released it to the public, decimating two years of lies he, his colleagues, and the conservative media ecosystem had told about me.

These lies had profound effects on me and my family’s safety. MSNBC covered the release, writing that I was “unfairly tarred.” Even conservative outlets recognized that Jordan’s behavior in withholding the transcript was untransparent and anti-democratic.

While I’m profoundly gratified by our victory on my transcripts, the important thing is to use it to continue to build momentum and get all of the transcripts released so that we can begin to roll back the impacts of this long-running fear campaign.

Mapping and understanding the disinformation threat is essential to defeating it, and researchers are at the front lines of those efforts.

Our mission calls on us to empower researchers, and this victory is an important step in doing that. If nothing else, it lets them know that Jim Jordan isn’t someone they should be afraid of.

— Nina

Last month, a video began circulating purporting to tell the story of an internet troll farm in Kyiv targeting the American election. Speaking in English with a Slavic accent, “Olesya” offers a first-person account of how she and her colleagues initially worked in support of President Zelenskiy. The video is fake, part of an effort to cloud the political debate ahead of the U.S. elections.

The stories are doom-laden, laced with vitriolic sneers about Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ursula von der Leyen. Ukrainians are “ready to depose” their leader, Macron is breaking French “rules” with aid to Ukraine, an “uncontrolled influx” from the east is “seriously harming the Germans”. These are just a few examples of a vast pro-Russian propaganda campaign washing over Facebook accounts of French and German citizens, before the European parliament elections next month.

Fake accounts posting about the U.S. presidential election are proliferating on the social media platform X, according to a social media analysis company's report shared with Reuters exclusively ahead of its release on Friday.

Recently unearthed documents reveal that leaders of an online news site aimed at Americans have received money from both Russian and Iranian government media outlets, showing how widening geopolitical alliances are making it harder to identify and trace foreign influence operations.