The Active Measures Newsletter Podcast

Malinformation is a feature of modern life we all deal with, whether it’s a claim by an American politician, something we confront on social media, or a covert campaign waged by a foreign government.  Fortunately, there are tools we can all use and resources we can all access to check facts and help us all in our search for ground truth. Melissa Goldin is a news verification reporter for the Associate Press.  She jo...

The U.S. State Department has plans for an online portal designed to bypass European social media content bans. With a tagline “Freedom is Coming,” the plan plainly pits the U.S. government in opposition to European laws.  Simon Lewis and Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters broke this story in February and in this episode of the podcast trace the as-yet-to-be-launched website to a three part-ambition: promoting free speech; b...

Truth is the first casualty of war, and the sheer volume of digital disinformation coming out of the war with Iran only proves the point.  News Guard’s Sofia Rubinson and Isis Blachez review the phony images and videos claiming Iranian battlefield successes not borne out by the evidence.  In addition, hosts Jim Ludes and Mark Jacobson discuss other reporting on emerging themes in Spanish language disinformation ahea...

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, we examine Benjamin Franklin’s 1782 disinformation operation during the peace negotiations with Britain. As American diplomats sought formal recognition of independence following Yorktown, Franklin produced a fabricated supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle, printed in France but designed to appear authentic, alleging British officials had encouraged at...

“Flood the zone.”  That’s the strategy advice of domestic political operatives and hostile foreign intelligence services.  Veteran national security journalist J.J. Green stands in the midst of the ensuing storm with a new handbook, The Noise War, to help reporters, citizens, educators, and students spot disinformation, manage their information diet, and remain engaged in the life of the republic.  ...

As anti-government protests in Iran ratcheted-up in the waning days of 2025, the Iranian government cracked-down harshly, using physical violence against their own people and shutting down the internet in the country. Steven Feldstein and Shreya Joshi of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put Iran’s actions in a broader global context of digital-repression where regimes fight the population by controlling the flow...

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...