Two Los Angeles residents linked to a powerful Iranian figure found themselves in hot water after federal officials discovered a major mismatch between their online posts and their visa claims. Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter Sarinasadat Hosseiny were taken into custody last week by immigr
Iran’s new president just took a bold step by writing directly to everyday Americans. His message? Stop believing everything you hear about Iran. In a post on a popular social media site, he argued that powerful governments often create enemies to push their own agendas. Instead of seeing Iran as a
For years, people have followed food rules they didn’t question—like avoiding certain foods because “experts” said so. But what if those warnings were wrong? Many foods once called unhealthy are actually packed with nutrients that most diets lack. The problem started when food companies pushed low-f
Palmer Luckey, a tech mogul, recently shared his thoughts on China's unique approach to governance. He believes that China's real power lies not in its advanced weapons, but in its ability to shape public opinion through media and propaganda. This is a big deal because it shows how control over info
DC has been in the spotlight lately, and not just for the usual reasons. A recent report from the House Oversight Committee has stirred up quite a bit of controversy. It claims that former DC Police Chief Pamela Smith was involved in a scheme to fiddle with crime data. This isn't just about numbers
Kanye West has stirred up a storm with his latest single, "Cousins. " The artwork for this track is a painting called "Leda and the Swan" by Paul Mathias Padua. This piece shows a woman and a swan in a rather intimate moment. It was first shown in Munich back in 1939. The painting later ended up in
Imagine scrolling through your social media feed and seeing a bunch of posts about politics. You might not know it, but some of those posts could be part of something called computational propaganda. Computational propaganda is when political actors use fancy tricks to influence what you see a
Social media has become a hotbed for spreading facts, false claims, and propaganda, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are great at processing language, but detecting propaganda is tricky because of the complexity of text interactions and the need to understand cont
Imagine this: the year is 1915, and the world is shaken by the news that the British ship Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine. Far away in the city of Pietermaritzburg, which was predominantly British, something unusual started to happen. A new group called the Pietermaritzburg Citizens Vi
Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a unique survey experiment was conducted. This experiment aimed to see if the propaganda spread by the Putin regime could sway public opinion to support military action. The results, collected a year before the actual invasion, showed that even mild fo
