The Architecture of Deception: Global Disinformation Landscape 2024-2025

Since its acquisition, X has evolved from a contested public square into a major node for right-wing disinformation. Research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that false or misleading election claims posted by Elon Musk himself amassed nearly 1.2 billion views—and none of the posts examined displayed a Community Note. ^[6]

In a separate CCDH sample of 283 misleading election posts on X, 209 (74%) had accurate Community Notes written for them that were never displayed to the public. These unchecked posts generated 2.2 billion views. ^[7]

During the 2024 UK riots—sparked by false rumors spreading on X about a Southport stabbing suspect's identity—Musk amplified related posts and declared that "civil war is inevitable" in the United Kingdom, prompting the UK government to say there was "no justification for comments like that." ^[8]

If X is the megaphone, Telegram is the staging ground. Operating with minimal content moderation, it has become a hub for extremists who have been deplatformed elsewhere.

In January 2025, the US State Department designated the "Terrorgram Collective," a neo-Nazi group operating on Telegram, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists—a rare move acknowledging the platform's role in facilitating real-world violence. ^[9]

The Southern Poverty Law Center mapped Telegram's "similar channels" recommendation feature and found it builds dense webs of interconnection between extremist communities—neo-Nazis, antisemitic channels, Proud Boys, and QAnon influencers—helping users discover and move between them; Telegram restricted the feature after the report's release. ^[9]

Forensic analysis by the Atlantic Council identified a network of 3,634 inauthentic accounts that posted more than 316,000 pro-Russian comments across channels focused on Ukraine's occupied territories, from January 2024 to April 2025. ^[10]

Disinformation is not just a political project—it is a thriving economic sector. Programmatic advertising is the financial lifeblood: brands don't choose specific sites; they bid on audiences. This "black box" sends an estimated $2.6 billion a year in ad revenue to misinformation and disinformation publishers. ^[20]

A Stanford and Carnegie Mellon study published in Nature in 2024 found that, in the 2019-2021 period it examined, two-thirds of advertisers unknowingly bought ads on websites the researchers classified as misinformation sources. ^[21]

A major structural shift is the decline of human-curated partisan blogs in favor of automated, AI-driven content farms masquerading as local news—"pink slime" journalism.

The most pervasive network is Metric Media, operating over 1,200 websites organized into statewide networks that adopt the aesthetics of local news, with sites often named for the cities and towns they claim to cover. ^[52]

By November 2024, NewsGuard had separately identified over 1,121 Unreliable AI-Generated News (UAIN) sites—content farms built largely or entirely with generative AI and no human oversight. ^[30]

The 2024 DOJ indictment of Tenet Media exposed a new evolution in state-sponsored influence: Influence Laundering.

Instead of using bots (the 2016 Internet Research Agency model), Russian operatives laundered nearly $10 million through shell companies to hire authentic North American influencers. ^[51][35]

These influencers were allegedly unaware of the Russian funding, believing they were paid by a private European investor through a fictitious persona named "Eduard Grigoriann." They were paid exorbitant sums—one commentator received $400,000 per month plus a $100,000 signing bonus, another $100,000 per weekly episode—to produce content opposing Ukraine aid and promoting US division. ^[35]

The "Tenet" model represents an evolution in foreign interference: outsourcing propaganda to the gig economy of political influencers. By coopting established voices with organic followings, adversaries bypass content filters and achieve higher credibility.

This incident represents the perfect storm of "trading up the chain"—an unverified, secondhand Facebook post that escalated from local social media into a national political talking point—compounded by xenophobia and post-truth politics. ^[37]

Modern disinformation is often post-verification: Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, called the pet-eating claims "a piece of garbage that was simply not true," and Springfield's city manager separately told a campaign staffer the rumors were false. Senator JD Vance nonetheless continued amplifying them, telling CNN, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do." ^[37][38]

Academic research on partisan asymmetry consistently finds a stronger association between conservative partisanship and misinformation sharing than for liberal partisanship, even though both sides show some susceptibility. ^[56]

Combined with the platform, funding, and foreign-influence patterns documented above—X's amplification under Musk, the right-coded pink slime and Tenet Media networks—the volume and systemic integration of the disinformation examined in this dossier skews predominantly right-wing, while susceptibility to conspiracy theories more broadly is becoming bipartisan. ^[56]