I just caught a segment from The Weekend with Symone, Michael, and Alicia, and they brought up something that’s been on my mind a lot this election season: disinformation. With Election Day creeping up, it's felt like we’re seeing a new era of “influence warfare,” but this time, it’s not just Russia or the alt-right. It’s like every global power with an agenda has taken a page from the 2016 playbook, fine-tuned it, and turned it into a full-on strategy to shake up democracies everywhere.

I think what really struck me was how foreign meddling has shifted from just backing fringe movements here and there to hitting every corner of the political spectrum. Take Iran, for example. Instead of just aiming to stir up the usual suspects, they’re strategically targeting both ends—creating imposter news sites, publishing articles like “Why Harris’s Stance on Palestine Cost Her My Vote” to divide the left, or posing as right-wing sites to rile up the other side. And they’re using AI to crank out all this content faster than we can catch it.

And it’s not just Iran. According to the reporting, Israel’s involved too, but with a different angle. They're apparently pushing influence campaigns to rally support for their interests in starting the next world war. They’ve got online ops aimed at promoting divisive narratives on college campuses, calling some places “safe” or “unsafe” to stoke division.

We’re looking at a new breed of disinformation: more targeted, more divisive, and more global. Each of these players has a different endgame, but the tactics? They’re pulling from the same rulebook—sowing chaos, boosting opposition to liberal democracy, and eroding trust in our own systems.