The Active Measures Newsletter Podcast

Somebody is growing a network of pages across social media targeting professional sports franchises in the United States and the star athletes they employ with rage bait, spam, and AI slop that undermines the multi-billion dollar sports industry. This week, hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson discuss the operation of these networks with Shawn Eib and Eric Nelson of Alethea, the private firm whose research identified their presence. A...

Before it became a Europe-wide phenomenon, Russia's use of migration as a weapon was a test-case stressing the borders between Russia and its two arctic neighbors: Norway and Finland. On this week's episode of the podcast, Karen-Anna Eggen (Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies) and Jyri Lavikainen (Finnish Institute for International Affairs) share their research detailing Russia's efforts to weaponize human migration.  Hos...

"Russia is our friend?"  It was a strange refrain for tiki-torch wielding protesters in 2017, but it exposed the reality that for some American white-nationalists, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a role model as the last defender of white Christendom.  In this special edition of the podcast, host Jim Ludes reviews the American separatism Russia encouraged in 2016, the Putin regime's ties to American extremists, and its p...

Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore discusses the threat of foreign malign influence to American elections, Trump administration cuts to federal programs to support local election officials, and the enduring value of civics education and critical thinking in an era of ubiquitous disinformation.  Hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson also highlight continued, bipartisan Congressional support for U.S. international broadcast...

On the first episode of the new year, Janis Sarts, Director of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence discusses the current information challenges facing the North Atlantic alliance, Russia's current use of these tools, and the transition from an ecosystem dominated by social media platforms to one dominated by artificial intelligence.  Hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson also highlight disinformation spilling ou...

In June of 1953, civil disturbances hit East Germany--and the Eisenhower administration faced a choice: make good on the rhetoric of 'liberation' or adopt a more restrained approach.  According to host Jim Ludes, President Eisenhower and his team adopted the latter approach, restraint, seeking to exploit the uprisings for advantage in the Cold War without encouraging anyone to take needless risks or discrediting the protests t...

In this special edition of the podcast, host Mark Jacobson revisits the classic work of Edward Bernays whose 1928 book, Propaganda, argued that democracy required managed perception and was effective precisely because it bypasses conscious reasoning. Bernays wrote at a time when newspapers were the dominant form of communication, when radio and film were still nascent, but the clear implications of his work for our current world of...

It's been a dynamic year of growth for the Active Measures Newsletter Podcast.  With great guests and a ton of news, each week we've had more to talk about than time to do it.  So as the year winds down, hosts Mark Jacobson and Jim Ludes name their "final four"--the biggest stories from the Active Measures Newsletter in 2025.  Artificial Intelligence, Sabotage in Europe, America’s Unilateral Disarmament, and mo...

“They’re burning all the witches,” sang Taylor Swift on the album “reputation,” a lyric with meaning about modern-day witch hunts, cancel culture, and, in fact, disinformation. In this week’s episode of The Active Measures Newsletter Podcast, hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson break down the recent attack on Taylor Swift’s actual reputation and the self-harm done to America’s reputatio...

The terminology we use to describe new phenomena matters.  On this week's podcast, defense intellectual Frank Hoffman reviews Chinese, Russian, European, and--to the extent there is any--American writings about 'cognitive warfare.' For the uninitiated--this runs the gamut from traditional tools of influence to novel technologies, including chemical and directed energy weapons that can "alter peoples’ brains and thought p...

American social media is filled with high-strung posters, outrage-addicts, and partisan players.  It's a perfect avenue for amplifying division and most platforms let anyone play anonymously.  So it came as a shock to some this week when X turned on a new geolocation service and the overseas posting of active accounts--some with hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers--proved to originate from Eastern Europe,...

This week, Naomi O’Leary, European Correspondent for The Irish Times describes Russia’s hybrid warfare across Europe—from severed pigs heads dumped at French mosques to cases of arson in Poland and the United Kingdom.  “Russia is recruiting what they call ‘Telegram agents’ over this messaging app to do small-scale sabotage,” she says, “and the aim is . . . ‘to disrupt the u...

Journalists at Sky News created an elegant experiment to assess whether content on X in the United Kingdom had political bias. From a database of 90,000 posts created by 21,690 accounts collected over two weeks in May of 2025, they were able to observe ". . . a clear imbalance of content promoted on the platform, with right-wing voices dominating and the algorithm pushing posts to new users that don't align with their interests." D...

This week, Politico's Marion Solletty (Editor-at-Large, France) and Laura Kayali (Defense Correspondent) join hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson to discuss the "Red Hands" trial in France, reports of ties to Russian intelligence, and the broader context in which France finds itself as a "hot-spot in Russia's hybrid war against Europe."  The hosts also examine Shakespeare for lessons about irregular warfare and reports that Russ...

This week on the Active Measures Newsletter Podcast, hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson speak with Poppy McPherson (Special Correspondent for Southeast Asia) and Karen Lema (Philippines Bureau Chief) of Reuters whose recent reporting showed Chinese government use of a local public relations firm in the Philippines to mount a pro-China/anti-U.S. influence campaign in the country. Mark and Jim also review some of the big stories from ...

In this special edition of the Active Measures Newsletter Podcast, host Mark Jacobson explores how the disinformation lessons of the past echo in the digital age. Drawing on Mark Twain’s reflections on Gutenberg’s printing press, Jacobson traces how revolutions in communication have spread both knowledge and deception, and asks whether artificial intelligence will bring us closer to enlightenment—or...

This week on the Active Measures Newsletter Podcast, hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson speak with Georgetown University's Renée DiResta about trends in technology, social media, and disinformation.  They also discuss some of the reporting in this week's newsletter, including the U.S. Army General using ChatGPT to make military decisions, Russia's continued use of information laundering, the tendency of some victims of m...

This week, hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson welcome Erol Yayboke of CSIS and FilterLabs.AI for a conversation about the potential of agentic artificial intelligence to contribute to effective and even ethical offensive information operations.  They also review some of the top stories in this week's newsletter, including reporting from Rolling Stone about the Macedonian national who runs popular pro-MAGA accounts from Macedoni...

This week, Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson welcome Stephen Clermont, Head of Polling at Change Research, for a discussion of the sustained appeal of conspiracy theories in the United States, today--all stemming from a collapse in public confidence for the major institutions in American public life.  First up, however, they discuss the optics and messaging of the gathering of uniformed U.S. military leaders at Quantico this week, t...