Writing
| FEATURE | Exploitable by Design: Social Media and the AdTech Threat JUN 2026 Argues unregulated ad-targeting, not the platforms, let Russia’s 2015-2017 Facebook campaign reach 126 million Americans for about $100,000, and that Congress banning TikTok while letting the Honest Ads Act die every session since 2017 is a double standard, not a security policy. | AMERICAN AFFAIRS (external) |
| REACTION | Experts react: Hungary just voted out Viktor Orbán. Here’s what to expect in Europe and beyond. APR 2026 Brooking’s section, “Europe has dodged a bullet,” argued Russian intelligence had interfered extensively for Orbán through astroturfing and social-media manipulation, and that only the scale of Tisza’s landslide victory averted the political chaos Moscow and Trump-aligned Americans were positioned to exploit. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| REACTION | Fast Thinking: Orbán’s out in Hungary. Now what? APR 2026 Under “The losers,” Brooking reported that Russian intelligence had interfered extensively for Orbán via astroturfing and social-media manipulation; under “The aftermath,” he warned that the sixteen-year regime’s networks would likely try again despite Magyar’s decisive win. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| INVESTIGATION | Pravda in the Pipeline: Early Evidence of State-Adjacent Propaganda in AI Training Data APR 2026 A Common Crawl audit finds Pravda propaganda archived 40,000 times by late 2025 (up from 37 a year earlier); Llama 3.1 405B reproduced a false RT bioweapons-lab claim from the archive nearly verbatim. | DFRLAB (external) |
| REACTION | Eight ways AI will shape geopolitics in 2026 JAN 2026 Opening the roundup under “AI poisoning goes mainstream,” Brooking argued that Russia’s Pravda network, which publishes millions of articles across more than eighty countries to target AI training data rather than human readers, has already gotten its content cited in Wikipedia, X Community Notes, and chatbot answers — a problem he predicted would break into the mainstream in 2026. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| REACTION | In Brief: Balancing Speed and Security in Defense Communications APR 2025 Three experts on how the defense enterprise should weigh speed against security in its communications, in War on the Rocks’ members-only In Brief exchange. | WAR ON THE ROCKS (external) |
| INVESTIGATION | Cross-Platform Campaign Sows Anti-Europe Division in Moldova MAR 2025 A Telegram hub called ‘Forbidden Channel’ coordinated 4,484 fake Facebook and Telegram accounts posting 15,000+ comments to brand President Maia Sandu corrupt and cast EU integration as a threat to sovereignty. | DFRLAB (external) |
| REACTION | Your Expert Guide to the Debate Over Banning TikTok JAN 2025 Ten Atlantic Council experts split on the TikTok Supreme Court case: some cite a CCP-enabled backdoor and surveillance risk, others say the security case was never substantiated and a ban would harm the open internet. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| REACTION | What to Know About Foreign Meddling in the US Election NOV 2024 DFRLab found 2024 foreign interference outpaced 2016 and 2020: Russia ran Doppelganger, China targeted down-ballot races on X and Facebook over TikTok, and domestic misinformation moved opinion more than either. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| INVESTIGATION | How Russian Propagandists Spun the Trump Assassination Attempt JUL 2024 Kremlin spokespeople and Telegram channels spun the Trump shooting within hours, forging a shooter-Ukraine link and reviving civil-war predictions — opportunistic exploitation, not a coordinated campaign, DFRLab found. | DFRLAB (external) |
| ANALYSIS | International Cyberspace & Digital Policy Strategy Markup MAY 2024 The Atlantic Council’s line-by-line markup of the State Department’s first cyberspace strategy, endorsing its digital-solidarity framing while noting it remains, for now, more statement of purpose than actualized impact. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Gaza and the Future of Information Warfare DEC 2023 How the Israel-Hamas war fused physical and digital fronts: Israel’s 9,500 platform takedown requests (94% granted) and an 80% collapse in Gaza’s internet traffic, prefiguring China’s “cognitive warfare” doctrine. | FOREIGN AFFAIRS (external) |
| REACTION | Live expertise: The latest insight as Israel prepares for a ground invasion of Gaza OCT 2023 In a curated X thread headed “Israel’s information blockade on Gaza will challenge how we think about war,” Brooking compared the blockade to Russia’s siege of Mariupol, arguing it would fragment public awareness and obscure primary-source material even as pro-Palestinian speech volume rose, not fell. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Welcome to Cyber Realism SEP 2023 The 2023 DoD Cyber Strategy, argue its own drafters, quietly drops decades of “cyber Pearl Harbor” alarmism for modest aims: the Pentagon can’t defend every network, and cyber works only alongside other tools of power. | WAR ON THE ROCKS (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Draft Trump Executive Order Shows How False Foreign Interference Claims May Be Used to Undermine U.S. Elections APR 2022 A December 2020 draft executive order would have had the Pentagon seize voting machines nationwide, using fabricated claims that Dominion Voting Systems was foreign-controlled as pretext to federalize the National Guard. | JUST SECURITY (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Meta Meets the Reality of War MAR 2022 Meta’s leaked guidance briefly allowed calls for violence against Russian soldiers (not POWs) in Ukraine, echoing earlier carve-outs for the Taliban and ISIS — a policy a garbled Reuters headline helped Russia use to ban Instagram. | TECH POLICY PRESS (external) |
| ANALYSIS | How to End Israel’s Digital Occupation DEC 2021 Israeli security services have arrested roughly 2,000 Palestinians for social media posts since 2017, while pressure campaigns pushed Facebook toward a definition of antisemitism that chills criticism of Israeli policy. | FOREIGN POLICY (external) |
| FEATURE | Before the Taliban Took Afghanistan, It Took the Internet AUG 2021 Traces two decades of Taliban propaganda, from 2005’s Al Emarah press releases through livestreamed 2015-2016 Kunduz battles, arguing the 2021 takeover was tactical modernization of one message, not a new ideology. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| ANALYSIS | What We Learned in the DNI's New Election Report MAR 2021 The declassified intelligence assessment of 2020 election interference shows the threat evolving: Russia dropped the WikiLeaks-style cutouts and pitched influence directly to Trump allies, Iran grew more aggressive, and China judged meddling not worth the risk. | DEFENSE ONE (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Americans Were Worried About the Wrong Threat JAN 2021 Written in the wake of January 6: Americans spent 2020 fearing foreign election interference — 75 percent told Pew so — while years of domestic disinformation built the “tinderbox of rage and delusion” that produced the Capitol attack. | THE ATLANTIC (external) |
| REACTION | FAST THINKING: How the Capitol riot was coordinated online JAN 2021 Under “Are online crackdowns coming?” Brooking noted that Facebook and Twitter locked Trump’s accounts only around 4pm on January 6, after the Capitol had already been breached, and predicted Twitter would remove him outright on his next violation, calling earlier disinformation-flagging efforts “of limited utility” in fast-moving events like the riot. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Op-Ed: For right-wing extremists, this was a victory JAN 2021 Written for the morning after January 6: the Capitol attack was a victory for the far right — a mythologized rallying point that will outlast Trump and pull the movement toward anti-state violence. | DFRLAB (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Foreign Influence Operations After 2020 OCT 2020 A synthesis of a Lawfare/Stanford debate on whether foreign influence operations are real or an overblown “disinformation complex” — both camps agree the core vulnerability is domestic polarization, not foreign meddling. | LAWFARE (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Coverage of Hunter Biden story illustrates extremes in media polarization OCT 2020 A DFRLab analysis of coverage of the unverified Hunter Biden laptop story in the closing weeks of the 2020 campaign, tracing how the same material split sharply along partisan media lines — a case study in the extremes of the U.S. information environment. | DFRLAB (external) |
| ANALYSIS | The Senate Created a Playbook to Counter Foreign Influence. Then It Did the Opposite. AUG 2020 The Senate Intelligence Committee urged restraint on foreign interference, while Sen. Ron Johnson ran his own Ukraine probe that became a vehicle for Kremlin-linked operatives to launder disinformation targeting Biden. | JUST SECURITY (external) |
| INVESTIGATION | Disinformation About ‘Antifa’ Provides Fodder for Foreign Propagandists JUL 2020 How domestic disinformation about antifa during the 2020 George Floyd protests was repurposed by foreign actors: an Iranian opposition group’s false Tehran-funding claim drove 77 percent of related tweets in three weeks, while Turkish state media tied antifa to Kurdish militants. | DFRLAB (external) |
| INVESTIGATION | The Disinformation Campaign to Define U.S. Protesters as ‘Terrorists’ JUN 2020 Written as the George Floyd protests peaked: 12,000 antifa-referencing articles and videos drew 27 million shares in two weeks, three-fourths from right-leaning outlets, as tweets tying antifa to “terrorism” jumped from 21,000 to 173,000 in a single day. | DFRLAB (external) |
| NOTE | On Architects JAN 2020 On the second floor of the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, among the stately brown suits that Martin Luther King Jr. once wore, there is a dog-eared book. The text is Mahatma Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments With Truth. You can see King's scrupulous notes in the margins. If you try hard enough, you can see King himself, deep in thought with a pencil in his hand, laying the intellectual foundation of the movement that he would lead. | FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | The Russians Are Meddling in the Democratic Primary. Is Anyone Paying Attention? OCT 2019 A Russian Instagram operation reaching 147,000 US users, boosting Sanders while tarnishing Biden, repeats 2016 — but inside the primary, the meddling accusation itself becomes a weapon Democrats turn on each other. | WASHINGTON POST (external) |
| INVESTIGATION | How a “Political Astroturfing” App Coordinates Pro-Israel Influence Operations AUG 2019 A DFRLab audit of Act.IL, an app assigning pro-Israel social-media “missions,” found its reach thin during the May 2019 Gaza escalation: five targeted tweets averaged 12 retweets against 17,500 registered users. | DFRLAB (external) |
| ANALYSIS | The Christchurch Call and the Failure of US Leadership MAY 2019 The Trump administration cited free-speech concerns to skip the 2019 Christchurch Call on online extremism, then hours later attacked platforms for removing white nationalist content, reversing 2017 anti-ISIS pledges. | ATLANTIC COUNCIL (external) |
| INVESTIGATION | Christchurch-Style Terrorism Reaches American Shores APR 2019 John Earnest posted his manifesto and an 8chan announcement two hours before the April 2019 Poway synagogue shooting, copying the Christchurch attacker’s playbook down to the meme-laden writing and attempted livestream. | DFRLAB (external) |
| ANALYSIS | White Nationalism Overshadowed at Congressional Hearing on White Nationalism APR 2019 Twitter mentions of Candace Owens outpaced mentions of white nationalism after she sparred with Rep. Ted Lieu at an April 2019 hearing on hate crimes, drowning out Google and Facebook testimony on content moderation. | DFRLAB (external) |
| NOTE | A Dispatch from the Trail NOV 2018 I am down in southeast Atlanta campaigning for Stacey Abrams. It feels good. | FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | The Very First Social Network OCT 2018 In 1979, a chain email asking ARPANET researchers their favorite science fiction authors became, in Vint Cerf’s words, proof ‘we had a social medium on our hands’ — the direct ancestor of the internet we know today. | SLATE (external) |
| ANALYSIS | What Clausewitz Can Teach Us About War on Social Media OCT 2018 Applies Clausewitz’s “center of gravity” — a people’s spirit and will — to explain why social media succeeds at wartime persuasion where WWII radio and Vietnam-era leaflets failed. Coins the term “LikeWar.” | FOREIGN AFFAIRS (external) |
| ANALYSIS | How October 7th, 2016 Shaped the Course of American History OCT 2018 October 7th, 2016 was the day that Hillary Clinton appeared to win the presidential election. She was ahead in the polls in every contested state, with twice the field offices as Donald Trump and twice the cash on hand. She had been blanketing the airwaves with ads and was on her way to being endorsed by 95 percent of all newspaper editorial boards. And then, at 4:05 P.M. EST, the Access Hollywood tape dropped. | ROLLING STONE (external) FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | Why Americans Aren’t Paying Attention to the Longest War in Their Nation’s History OCT 2018 By 2018, most Americans had tuned out the Afghanistan war — Trump tweeted about the NFL anthem six times more often than the conflict, and its most viral moment was mockery of the MOAB’s nickname. | TIME (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Social Media Is Revolutionizing Warfare OCT 2018 Michael Flynn, interviewed as a former DIA director, describes intelligence’s shift toward open-source data — a conversation held before his fall as Trump’s National Security Adviser. | THE ATLANTIC (external) |
| ANALYSIS | How the Kavanaugh Information War Mirrors Real Warzones OCT 2018 The Kavanaugh fight replayed information-war tactics: OSINT crowdsourcing into his finances, a doppelganger theory echoing Russia’s MH17 disinformation, and dueling Wikipedia edits over “Devil’s Triangle.” | WIRED (external) |
| ANALYSIS | Immigration Fight Shows Silicon Valley Must Stop Feigning Neutrality JUL 2018 During the family-separation protests, Twitter banned a crowdsourced ICE-agent database as “doxing” while suspending users who merely shared a journalist’s leaked phone number — proof its neutrality was always a fiction. | WIRED (external) |
| NOTE | Always Politicize Tragedy OCT 2017 The internet renders us an immediate, intimate observer to tragedies in all corners of the world. But the internet changes very little in what we can actually do. We are largely as powerless as the audiences of a century past; we just happen to learn things an order of magnitude more quickly. | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | The Purpose is Stasis DEC 2016 Well over a month since the 2016 election and more than two months since a public ODNI assessment of the matter (an organization which represents the combined views of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies), many people seem to be screwing up the Russia hacking story. For obvious reasons, Clinton proxies have hit the airwaves declaring that it was the linchpin upon which the election turned. For equally obvious reasons, the president-elect and his distressing parade of appointees have dismissed it as the work of conspiracy theorists. Adding to the chaos, disenchanted leftists and paid Russian shills have further stirred the pot of unreality, asking (in a baldly false equivalence) why Democrats should trust the same intelligence agencies that once led the United States to invade Iraq. As a consequence, the issue has become muddied. Only 55 percent of Americans are "bothered" by the hacking story, split almost wholly along party lines. | FULL TEXT |
| FEATURE | War Goes Viral NOV 2016 ISIS’s #AllEyesOnISIS propaganda, Russian troll farms and RT disinformation, and China’s two million internet censors are converging into a new kind of information warfare, echoing the nationalism that preceded 1914. | THE ATLANTIC (external) |
| NOTE | What the Web Used To Be SEP 2016 What is the internet? | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | A Brief History of Too Much Violence JAN 2016 It was the image of a 7-year-old trauma victim, still strapped in his airplane seat after a 30,000 foot fall, which made me quit my work for the night and go outside to gulp breaths of cold, crisp air. I hadn't gone looking for the picture---I was doing research on the MH17 crash site---but it was one of the top results, and I habitually zoomed in for a better look. You could still make out the look of terror before explosive decompression had robbed him of his consciousness, hopefully the whole way down. | FULL TEXT |
| FEATURE | Terror on Twitter DEC 2015 How ISIS built a social-media strategy of intimidation (viral execution videos), reassurance (Instagram’s Cats of Jihad), and recruitment (Dabiq magazine) — and the moderators, hackers, and spies working to counter it. | POPULAR SCIENCE (external) |
| NOTE | Op-Ed Arrogance DEC 2015 I have always wondered what it felt like in Washington, DC in early 2003, as the U.S. military gathered like a storm on the Iraq-Kuwaiti border and the pro-war drum beat reached a fever pitch. I have also wondered how so many smart people were sold on a campaign plan that literally lacked a conclusion. | FULL TEXT |
| FEATURE | Anonymous vs. the Islamic State NOV 2015 Profiles the Anonymous-descended hacktivists fighting the Islamic State online, including the bot-driven @CtrlSec Twitter operation and GhostSec, which fed leads to the FBI and claims to have downed 149 ISIS sites. | FOREIGN POLICY (external) |
| ANALYSIS | When Should the 9/11 War End? SEP 2015 A law written to cover nineteen 9/11 hijackers now underwrites counterterrorism operations across a quarter of the world’s nations; with bin Laden dead, it argues the AUMF needs rewriting, not indefinite renewal. | THE NATIONAL INTEREST (external) |
| NOTE | What Is It Like to Live in a Nation at War? MAY 2015 Finally having the opportunity to ascend the Washington Monument yesterday, although all the views were beautiful, my eye was drawn to a photograph of the National Mall as it stood in 1942. Many of the parks and memorials were absent — in their place sat rows and rows of squat, ugly office buildings, clearly constructed in a hurry. This was the capital of a nation at war. | FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | World War I’s ‘D-Day’ Disaster: The Gallipoli Tragedy APR 2015 Churchill’s faith in naval bombardment, a vague political mandate, and General Hamilton’s refusal to plan for failure turned the 1915 Gallipoli landings into an eight-month catastrophe costing 250,000 casualties for four miles of ground. | THE NATIONAL INTEREST (external) |
| ANALYSIS | The U.S. Government Should Pay Anonymous in Bitcoin to Fight ISIS MAR 2015 Proposes a Bitcoin-funded bounty system, run through an independent nonprofit, paying hacktivists like Anonymous to identify and disable Islamic State social media accounts, recruiting sites, and VPN channels. | FOREIGN POLICY (external) |
| NOTE | So Long, Jon FEB 2015 Who is the twenty-first century's Edward Murrow? Walter Cronkite? | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | A Different Sort of Carpentry FEB 2015 A fine wooden desk sits in my room. It's one of a number that my grandfather refinished. This was his hobby: hunting from one yard sale to the next; eyeing cast-off, beaten-up furniture and evaluating by a checklist only he could see; setting each new acquisition on his workshop operating table; and emerging months later with something reinforced, refinished, and utterly transformed. He was an artist. When I knew I was bound for DC, I drove the desk 400 miles north with me. | FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | A Century Ago Today, the Age of Industrial Warfare Began JAN 2015 On August 7, 1914, the French advanced into German-controlled Alscace, beating back the German divisions with a vicious display of massed firepower and artillery. This was the opening day of the Battle of the Frontiers, a month-long struggle of maneuver in which French, British, and German armies played tug-of-war across a 440-mile front. This was World War I before the trenches, where the visions of nineteenth-century military planners collided with the realities of twentieth-century industrial warfare. The battle saw 670,000 dead or wounded in a month---the highest density of losses in the entire war. This month would shatter a century of military doctrine. | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | Partying with Shakespeare DEC 2014 Wayne Bailey passed away December 17, 2014. | FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | More Than 6,000 Afghan Interpreters Are Stuck in Bureaucratic Limbo OCT 2014 The Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program is set to lapse Dec. 31 after granting just 32 visas to 5,700 applicants in four years, while two bills to extend it stall in Congress. | DEFENSE ONE (external) |
| NOTE | A Truly Exceptional Nation SEP 2014 I've been struck, watching the steady stream of ISIS air strike footage released via U.S. Central Command these past few days, by the precision and global reach of the power on display. I'm sure this is exactly the message the U.S. military is trying to convey – but that doesn't make it any less true. There really is no analogue to U.S. military capability in modern history. You have to wind the clock back – way back – to find an appropriate comparison. | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | Thirteen Years Later, We're Still Fighting the 9/11 War SEP 2014 I was twelve years old when those two planes flew into the Twin Towers and turned the country upside down. 2,996 people were dead. More attacks seemed imminent. Jon Stewart cried on television. The United States was ready to fight back – but how? And against whom? It was a strange, confusing, and frightening time to be an American. | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | People Are Talking About ALS Now. It's About Time. AUG 2014 My grandmother was a strong, stubborn woman, part Irish and part Pennsylvania Dutch, raised amid the worst of the Great Depression. She didn't take kindly to anything that slowed her down, and this included the early symptoms of ALS. | FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | The ISIS Propaganda Machine Is Horrifying and Effective. How Does It Work? AUG 2014 The Islamic State's "A Message to America," showing American journalist James Foley's final moments, is vile and horrifying. Significantly, unlike the early propaganda of Al Qaeda, this video is also professionally cut and edited. It is the sort of thing engineered to achieve rapid, viral spread on the open internet. It also represents the main weapon the Islamic State is increasingly employing to great effect against the West. | FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | In Iraq, What Exactly Was the Alternative? JUN 2014 "We Never Should Have Left Iraq." "Who Lost Iraq?" "Bush warned this would happen in Iraq." "Obama's Iraq disaster." "The Collapsing Obama Doctrine." "Sometimes withdrawal is the stupidest thing of all." | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | New York, or the Feeling That Something's Missing JUN 2014 It's very easy to make fun of New York and the artists who flock to it. | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | Time, and the Lack of It MAY 2014 Where does it all go? This is a question I suspect many people ask themselves as they get a little older. It's certainly something I've been asking myself. | FULL TEXT |
| FEATURE | The Heritage IS Hate! JAN 2014 This is a story about rednecks, the Confederate flag, and the time everyone thought my school was going to get shot up. It's all true and I wish it wasn't. | MEDIUM (external) FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | Dark & Doubtful: Movies of the Iraq II & Afghanistan Generation JAN 2014 I challenge you to find a chest-pounding, upbeat, pro-American movie about conflict released in the last five years. Cross out "pro-American" and I'll bet you still can't do it. | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | Currahee JAN 2014 This is a short tale about a mountain I tried to run up, twice. TL;DR, the mountain kicked my ass. | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | Interesting Times JAN 2014 "May you live in interesting times," goes the ancient, subtly backhanded, vaguely oriental curse. The phrase is, in fact, likely a fabrication of a 20th century British imperialist, but it's still a great saying so let's just roll with it. | FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | What Now for America’s Young, Jobless Soldiers? NOV 2013 As the Pentagon carries out its sharpest personnel drawdown in forty years, post-9/11 veterans face 10 percent unemployment, 20 percent among those 18-24, even as the GI Bill and federal hiring offer less of a safety net. | THE NATIONAL INTEREST (external) |
| NOTE | Andalusia SEP 2013 In a broadcast following the attacks of 9/11, bin Laden began his statement with the following: | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | Iraq MAR 2013 I was in the 8th grade, riding back from an oboe lesson, when President Bush crackled on the radio and declared the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I wasn't sure why we were going to war. I didn't know the first thing about Iraq and I certainly couldn't find it on a map. | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | McGovern OCT 2012 I was sad when I saw that George McGovern had entered hospice last week, and I was sad to hear that he passed earlier today. We're losing an important generation of American statesmen; McGovern ranked high on that list. | FULL TEXT |
| NOTE | Remembering the Great War MAR 2011 Last month, 110-year-old Frank Buckles — our final surviving veteran of World War I — died peacefully in his sleep. His passing marks the end of an era and the fading of a conflict that is increasingly footnoted and ignored in American studies of history. | FULL TEXT |
| ANALYSIS | Neverwinter Nevermore JAN 2010 Neverwinter Nights occupies a strange corner of PC gaming history. It was the last of the great Dungeons & Dragons RPG epics (following Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Baldur's Gate) and the first to be rendered in 3D. It was also the last "old-school" BioWare game, coming as the studio was already shifting gears toward Knights of the Old Republic. While Neverwinter Nights saw strong reviews and enough commercial success to spawn two expansion packs and an Obsidian-produced sequel, it was a flawed masterpiece. Its graphics were outdated almost immediately; its single-player campaign was unremarkable. | THE ESCAPIST (external) FULL TEXT |