Russia’s election trick: hijacking what you already believe

Voting machines have long been at the center of conspiracy theories about U.S. elections. Now, Ben Adida and his nonprofit VotingWorks have built an open-source voting machine anyone can inspect, right down to its computer code. The idea is simple: make vote counting transparent. But making elections more transparent and making voters trust the results may be two very different things. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You used to need a government-backed operation to spread election disinformation. Now a chatbot might do. Larry Norden of the Brennan Center put the major AI chatbots to the test: Could they create election fakes? Debunk them? Even recognize their own handiwork? The answers were not all reassuring. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What if Russia didn’t have to convince you of anything new? What if it could simply exploit what you already believe? That’s the idea behind a Russian-linked disinformation network that hijacks real social media conversations to spread propaganda and influence U.S. elections. We follow the trail from celebrity rumors to Congress, and ask whether AI can spot the manipulation before it spreads. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In Social Security’s database, a few keystrokes can turn a living person into a dead one. As part of a deportation scheme, DOGE pushed to do just that to 2.7 million people — without checking whether they were actually dead. Social Security whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield decided to stop them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Deepfakes are getting harder to spot. But digital forensics expert Hany Farid says the bigger problem isn’t just that AI can fool us. It’s that even when something is real, people may refuse to believe it. What happens when seeing is no longer believing—and the truth has a hard time catching up? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 30 years of representing whistleblowers, national security attorney Mark Zaid has never had so many government lawyers come to him for advice. They’ve seen things inside the Trump administration that trouble them. And they want to blow the whistle. But as lawyers, they know the law. Which, as it turns out, may be part of the problem. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Frances Haugen walked out of Facebook with more than 20,000 pages of internal documents. And somehow, nobody caught her. Now her story is getting the Hollywood treatment in Aaron Sorkin’s new movie, The Social Reckoning. But how did she actually pull it off? Haugen takes us behind the scenes of her surprisingly low-tech operation—and explains why the next Facebook whistleblower might not be so lucky. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There’s a new space race underway. And this time, it’s not just about astronauts and moon landings. Companies are launching satellites by the thousands. Militaries are eyeing space as the next battlefield. And now people want to put AI data centers up there, too. So why is everyone suddenly so interested in space? Former astronaut Ed Lu says it has a lot to do with a 60-year-old prediction about computer chips. And there’s just one problem: the rules haven’t kept up. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Across Russia, the internet keeps going dark. The Kremlin says the blackouts are necessary to stop Ukrainian drones. But critics say it is really helping Vladimir Putin accomplish something he’s been working toward for years: an internet the Kremlin can control — and, when it wants to, cut off from the rest of the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Once someone believes a conspiracy theory, can anything change their mind? Researchers tried something unexpected: an AI chatbot. After just eight minutes of conversation, some conspiracy theorists were significantly less convinced. What did the bot know about changing minds that we don’t? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices