The American Sunlight team recently noticed an odd and misleading narrative gaining traction in fringe communities online: Allegations that philanthropist George Soros was “funding” pro-Palestine campus protesters.

We isolated the birth of this narrative to anonymous chat boards. From there, it traveled through the mainstream media (The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and several others) to the halls of Congress — becoming the centerpiece of a major Republican fundraising campaign and a planned congressional hearing involving the secretary of the Treasury (including an official document request) — in about a month.

Antisemitic conspiracy theories about Soros have been a feature of the internet for years, but it’s not so common for them to end up as the set pieces to major Republican fundraising campaigns and Congressional hearings, as this one did.

We know that effective disinformation usually builds a false narrative based on a kernel of truth and marries it to pre-existing biases to achieve a strategic objective. In this case, it exaggerated and contorted a funding relationship and built on the long-running antisemitic conspiracies about George Soros. Philip Bump wrote a thorough op-ed debunking the financial claims these groups made, but he didn’t have the message provenance information we tracked.

That said, the Soros narrative and the extent of its falsity isn’t really the story. The reason this narrative matters is that the specific accusation that Soros was funding protesters didn’t exist prior to April 12. This made it easier for us to isolate and track information laundering in action as it metastasized across the Internet.

The cycle isn’t new, but we believe exposing it will drive Americans to demand better. Our elected officials set the tone for discourse in this country. They should uphold a higher standard than platforming and fundraising off of narratives that originated from anonymous sources in closed spaces on the internet.

Read the full report here.

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The Stanford Internet Observatory, which published some of the most influential analysis of the spread of false information on social media during elections, has shed most of its staff and may shut down amid political and legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation.

U.S. officials who track disinformation campaigns say they have issued more warnings to political candidates, government leaders and others targeted by foreign groups in recent months as America’s adversaries seek to influence the outcome of the 2024 election.

Many writers like him — who publish falsehoods to fringe websites and social media accounts in a bid for clicks that can translate into profitable ad revenue — have also leaned into culture war topics. The success of those posts underscores an increasing reality on Facebook and similar platforms: Fake news is still finding an audience online.

Russian hackers are already on full display in the lead-up to next month's Summer Olympics in Paris.