SPotlight: 2025 Canadian Elections
the pravda network
Latest Research
May 2025
The evolving role of AI-generated media in shaping disinformation campaigns
A methodological examination of how malicious actors exploit visual generative models
April 2025
How social media shaped the 2025 Canadian election
Platform enforcement gaps, AI-generated spam, and foreign interference concerns converged during high-stakes political contest.
April 2025
Bot-like activity targets Canadian political parties and their leaders ahead of election
Canadian federal election subject to spam messaging from automated X accounts.
April 2025
Narrative and provocation: What Telegram had to say about the February attack on Chornobyl nuclear plant
Russian media and Telegram channels shifted blame onto Ukraine for the recent attack on the Chornobyl nuclear power plant and amplified narratives of potential nuclear escalation.
April 2025
Russia’s Pravda network in numbers: Introducing the Pravda Dashboard
The Pravda Dashboard reveals how Russia’s global network circumvents sanctions on prohibited content
April 2025
Russia expands its strategic footprint in occupied Abkhazia
The reopening of the decades-closed Sukhumi Babushara Airport and a test flight from Moscow demonstrate Russia’s push for control over occupied Abkhazia
March 2025
How Azerbaijani media and politicians endorse Georgia’s shift away from the West
Politicians and pro-government media in Azerbaijan packages Georgia’s anti-Western rhetoric and political shift for a domestic audience, reinforcing the narrative of Western decline.
March 2025
Cross-platform campaign sows anti-Europe division in Moldova
Campaign utilized a primary Telegram channel and thousands of Facebook accounts to post comments critical of Moldova’s pro-European stance
March 2025
Japan’s technology paradox: the challenge of Chinese disinformation
Japan serves as an important case study to illustrate an unappreciated aspect of fostering information resilience against malign influence
In-Depth Reports
September 2024
Mythical Beasts and Where to Find Them: Mapping the Global Spyware Market and its Threats to National Security and Human Rights
The Mythical Beasts project pulls back the curtain on the connections between 435 entities across forty-two countries in the global spyware market.
September 2024
Mythical Beasts and Where to Find Them
Mythical Beasts and Where to Find Them: Mapping the Global Spyware Market and its Threats to National Security and Human Rights is concerned with the commercial market for spyware and provides data on market participants.
June 2024
User in the Middle: An Interoperability and Security Guide for Policymakers
When technologies work together, it benefits users and the digital ecosystem. Policymakers can advance interoperability and security in tandem by understanding how each impacts the other.
June 2024
“Reasonable” Cybersecurity in Forty-Seven Cases: The Federal Trade Commission’s Enforcement Actions Against Unfair and Deceptive Cyber Practices
The FTC has brought 47 cases against companies for unfair or deceptive cybersecurity practices. What can we learn from them?
June 2024
Another battlefield: Telegram as a digital front in Russia’s war against Ukraine
In this new report, the DFRLab investigates the role of Telegram in Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine
April 2024
Markets Matter: A Glance into the Spyware Industry
The Intellexa Consortium is a complex web of holding companies and vendors for spyware and related services. The Consortium represents a compelling example of spyware vendors in the context of the market in which they operate—one which helps facilitate the commercial sale of software driving both human rights and national security risk.
February 2024
Hacking with AI
Can generative AI help hackers?
By deconstructing the question into attack phases and actor profiles, this report analyzes the risks, the realities, and their implications for policy.
February 2024
TikTok: Hate the Game, Not the Player
How Strategic and Regulatory Confusion Around TikTok Prevent an Effective National Security Response
January 2024
Design Questions in the Software Liability Debate
Software liability—resurgent in the policy debate since its mention in the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy—describes varied potential structures to create legal accountability for vendors of insecure software. This report identifies key design questions for such regimes and tracks their discussion through the decades-long history of the debate.
Projects
Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker
The DFRLab’s Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker (FIAT) is an interactive, open-source database that captures allegations of foreign interference relevant to the 2024 election. This tool assesses the credibility, bias, evidence, transparency, and impact of each claim.
Russian War Report
As Russia’s aggression in Europe heats up, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) is keeping a close eye on Moscow’s movements across the military, cyber, and information domains.
Election Official Handbook: Preparing for Election Day Misinformation
As part of the Election Integrity Partnership, the DFRLab has analyzed roughly four hundred cases of election-related dis- and misinformation on social media. This memo gathers the findings and issues recommendations for US election officials: they must prepare for viral falsehoods online that persist for weeks.
Dichotomies of Disinformation
Via the DFRLab’s Github: This project isolates “political disinformation campaigns.” Dichotomies of Disinformation proposes and tests a classification system built on 150 variable options. Our intent is to establish a replicable, extensible system by which widely disparate disinformation campaigns can be categorized and compared.
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