AI-driven Chinese influence operations are targeting Taiwan with coordinated content, deepfakes, and social media campaigns, writes Pei-Chi Jao.

AI systems are consuming false, misleading, and manipulated content from across the internet - and increasingly presenting it as authoritative answers to millions of users.

TrustCon is the only global conference of its kind dedicated to trust and safety professionals who are responsible for the challenging work of keeping our platforms and communities safe. Attendees hav...

Sell Me Lies, Sell Me Sweet Meta Lies by Ctrl-Alt-Speech on Patreon. Join Ctrl-Alt-Speech's community for exclusive content and updates.

Made with Tally, the simplest way to create forms.

Help keep IFTAS online and independent. 500 supporters to donate the equivalent of just 1 a month to fund core infrastructure. Small change, big difference, be the one to join the 500.

Help keep IFTAS online and independent. 500 supporters to donate the equivalent of just 1 a month to fund core infrastructure. Small change, big difference, be the one to join the 500.

Help keep IFTAS online and independent. 500 supporters to donate the equivalent of just 1 a month to fund core infrastructure. Small change, big difference, be the one to join the 500.

If you value this work and want to see our safety resources stay online, independent, and active, please consider joining our Power of One campaign. We are looking for 500 supporters to contribute just 1 (£, €, $) a month. Small change, big difference. Support IFTAS here: https://givebutter.com/iftas-power-of-one

Givebutter will ask if you want to leave a tip for them, but they are covering all fees so feel free to reduce your tip to 0 - it's a bit fiddly with a few clicks but not necessary to add to your 1.

If you value this work and want to see our safety resources stay online, independent, and active, please consider joining our Power of One campaign. We are looking for 500 supporters to contribute just 1 (£, €, $) a month. Small change, big difference. Support IFTAS here: https://givebutter.com/iftas-power-of-one

⚠️ #SW_ISAC_ADVISORY The following domain(s) are entering the IFTAS Abandoned/Unmanaged Domain (AUD) review process: mstdn.at paxation.info sigmoid.social zirk.us These nodes are open registration, are being used by coordinated botnets, and are unresponsive to reports, DMs, and Email communications. If you have contacts at any of these services, please reach out and let them know we have been trying to contact them for three weeks. #Spam #FIMI #CIB https://about.iftas.org/library/iftas-abandoned-and-unmanaged-domain-list/

I probably won't do any more of these as we are literally educating the botnet operators on which bios fool us, but I hope you've gotten a sense of how difficult it can be for community teams to keep the bots of your respective servers. Hug your instance mods and admins today! #TowelDay #GeekPride #Glorious25th

Spot-the-not-a-bot answer reveal! I tried to make this a hard one, and it paid off! I can't link to the profile as the relevant community team have already suspended the account, but "Plumber by day, brewing German Wheat And Rye Beer after hours" is, was, an inauthentic bot account. The human? The gentleman who works in school IT and is a scout leader, admin of his own personal Mastodon server!

A quick scan of "Study of interoperability tools in the digital single market" (https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/7ed3fe8e-42a7-11f1-8095-01aa75ed71a1) seems to exhibit some misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Mastodon and the broader fediverse/open social web. "study examines whether horizontal interoperability obligations similar to those already in place for number-independent interpersonal communications services under the Digital Markets Act could be extended to online social networks and, if so, under what conditions" cont'd

3. (p36) "The only known attempt to realise such interoperability relies on the latter approach (i.e. bridge attempts between the Nostr decentralised OSN and the ActivityPub Fediverse)" The Bridgy Fed bridge that interoperates ActivityPub and AT Protocol operated by A New Social @anewsocial currently serves 150k users. cont'd

5. (p63) "A comment by B1 on A1’s post will be visible by all B users, and A users but not by C users." This references a 2023 web page, and was significantly ameliorated by version 4.4 of Mastodon as of July 2025. Even prior to that, the correct statement would have been "A comment by B1 on A1’s post will be visible by all B users, and A users but IN SOME CASES (emphasis mine) not by C users." cont'd

Meta in fact already interoperates with ActivityPub via its Threads product, and as such has classified content from thousands of interoperating ActivityPub-based OSNs, and reflected their findings (and therefore, trust) in the form of a list of servers they choose not to interoperate with based on the OSNs' content (https://www.threads.com/moderated_servers). cont'd

4. (p36) "From an organisational perspective, establishing interoperability with a P2P network for Facebook would involve either: ● Establishing trust relationship with as many users as there are servers. ● Establishing trust relationship with a gateway provider" cont'd

(The section completely ignores the fact that as of April 2025 there were roughly 17M registered accounts on the Fediverse.) cont'd

I should add, the only posts absolutely not visible to to C users are those made on closed, proprietary, non-interoperating social networks. I'll do a more detailed review of the document as soon as I can, but overall this seems a missed opportunity to fully describe the consumer demand already in place and demonstrable through hard data.

1.(p23) "The largest Mastodon instance, mastodon.social, reported 289K registered users as of June 2025" This cites a conservative monthly active users metric, not total accounts, which was 2.6M at the time and has grown to over 10M today. cont'd

2. (p23) "while the majority of other Mastodon servers serve only tens of users" This (a) links to a non-existent source and (b) ignores that there's 10,000 such servers, which IMO specifically demonstrates the intent of consumers to use interoperable OSNs themselves (self-hosting their own network node). Further - as the attached image shows, while there is a long tail of smaller OSNs operating on ActivityPub, a broad range of community sizes exists and is thriving. cont'd

Spot-the-not-a-bot answer reveal... Nicely done Fediverse! Dad rock aficionado is indeed the only authentic account in the bunch! I'll try to make it harder on the next batch 😈

🤖🤖🤖🧑🤖🤖🤖 Spot-the-not-a-bot! One of these profile bios is NOT a spam bot, can you tell which one? 1️⃣ Please review the PR 🐯 2️⃣ Work in School IT & Technical Theatre. Scout Leader 3️⃣ Celebrate small wins! 👧 4️⃣ Plumber by day, brewing German Wheat And Rye Beer after hours in New York City Remember, choose the one you think is MOST likely a human, not the most botlike! #BotWatching Review the PR School IT and technical theatre Small wins Plumber by day