Massimo Flore

My latest piece, just back from disinfo2026 in Vilnius. 👇

Cyberattacks to supermarkets in France and Belgium. We can guess who is behind them... www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Big Tech simply don't care about what governments and states consider dangerous. It's all about money. www.ft.com/content/5d6a...

Far left party BSW proposed a coalition pact to neonazi AfD in Germany. They are United by their allegiance to Putin. Do you still think the horseshoe theory isn't real? Do you still believe Russia is not the primary threat to Europe? www.politico.eu/article/alli...

Not surprised by any of this. 👇

It's unbelievable how trump's petty hatred against Obama destabilised the middle east, destroyed decades of diplomatic work, estranged historical allies, wasted billions of $, killed thousands, and made a rogue, oppressive, dangerous country stronger. www-cnbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.cnbc...

Most reactions to Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas seem trapped in the news cycle. Some see confirmation of their own views, or political targets. 📬 This week, Future Frontiers argues that the encyclical becomes intelligible when read on the Vatican's timescale. open.substack.com/pub/massimof...

Lesson to America: this is what Biden and the democrats had not the courage to do in 2020. And now, everyone is paying the consequences. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

China doesn't need to beat America's AI. It just needs to write the rules everyone else has to follow. warontherocks.com/2026/05/chin...

This is the inevitable result when incompetence meets arrogance. The Trump administration managed to destroy U.S. global hegemony in less than two years. It took decades to build, yet so little time to dismantle. www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

Trump phone story is a peculiar one. In this instance, he is grifting his own most loyal supporters. It represents an unprecedented level of money grabbing, leaving U.S. institutions with a massive task to restore normalcy. If they survive. eu.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

A new interpretability tool lets developers look inside LLMs and trace the circuits behind their answers, and even intervene. The interesting shift is here, we move from explaining outputs after the fact to shaping how they are produced. www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/30/1...

Help me understand: China helps Iran targeting US bases with their satellites, but we cannot help Ukraine against Russia. The reason given is "russia nuclear weapons". What about US nuclear weapons? Are they less scary? www.ft.com/content/1fdd...

This looks like institutionalized post disinformation. Not just contesting results, but weakening the conditions that make outcomes binding. In 2020 institutions still closed the conflict. Now the risk is a system where closure no longer holds.

There’s a crucial angle that’s rarely discussed: what is the U.S. Congress actually doing to protect NATO? Everyone is focused on Trump, but what are Democrats and Republicans doing to support the Alliance? Their silence speaks volumes. www.dw.com/en/trump-lea...

I wonder how historians will cover this period of time in the future.

Hybrid networks exploit vulnerable urban contexts, using low-skill actors, minimal costs, and online platforms like Snapchat. A pattern of outsourced, scalable micro-terrorism is emerging, changing how violence is organized. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Iran’s information warfare and disinformation campaigns largely predated the current war. It was the best-kept open secret that everyone chose to ignore. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/b...

The informational ecosystem is becoming increasingly fluid, with boundaries dissolving. The rise of DAOs points to a deeper shift: the emergence of self-organized systems that can define and enforce their own rules, without relying on shared institutional authority. www.wired.com/story/a-dang...

What’s striking here is that Fuentes is employing the same tactics Russia has used against Western democracies for the past 20 years. He knows that each side will only latch onto the parts of the message they agree with and dismiss the rest. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

If relevance no longer accumulates in a stable way, then recognition becomes less reliable as a foundation. What worked yesterday does not extend into today. The system still registers the past, but it no longer translates it into durable position. 🔗

We thought the shift from celebrities to creators explained how the media ecosystem works today. That is no longer enough. Relevance does not accumulate and hold as it once did, it is continuously recalculated. 🔗

How should we treat FIMI when it comes from inside the EU? How should we treat EU governmente that directly cooperate with an hostile enemy country? www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...

For centuries, producing knowledge required time. The effort of research, reading, and writing also created understanding. Generative AI changes that balance. Results can now appear before the reasoning behind them has fully settled in the mind. 🔗

When we read a book, the mind spends hours engaging with a single topic. Connections emerge, and ideas slowly reshape the way we think. AI can now produce analyses in seconds. The interesting question is what happens between those two speeds. 🔗

Generative AI can now produce analyses and structured arguments almost instantly. Human understanding still grows through slower cycles of reading, reflection, and connection. What happens when ideas appear before the mind has had time to absorb them?

Much of the debate on disinformation still assumes that manipulation spreads through public platforms. When people increasingly turn to conversational systems to interpret events, political influence can move from public feeds into private dialogue 🔗

Last week I presented the latest developments of my research on AI companions and disinformation. Synthetic friends raise uncomfortable questions about how influence works when it moves from public feeds into private conversations. 🔗

If Iran regime falls, Russia loses one of its key allies in the aggression against Ukraine.

A new hybrid front Is opening on European western front. We should update the list of FIMI actors and start protecting citizens from disinformation narratives coming from where we did not expect.

I think it's sadly time to expand the list of FIMI actors beyond Russia and China. www.ft.com/content/f869...

Hold on, this thing has a name... it was called co... col... colo... ah, I can't remember. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/u...

[surprised pikachu] www.ft.com/content/674b...

Bitchat is a reminder of something we keep forgetting: the internet is not a switch, it’s a network. It was built to route around damage, even extreme disruption. You can shut down access points, but the network logic adapts. www.reuters.com/business/med...

I keep saying this: tech companies cannot be trusted with public health. Without oversight, they will always push boundaries in their own interest. mashable.com/article/goog...

Strong analogy, but the damage goes deeper. In markets, broken contracts create instability. In politics, broken contracts erase obligation. Trump isn’t just extracting value from politics, he’s showing that political commitments no longer bind.

What if the core democratic challenge today isn’t fixing information, but preserving the ability to decide together under conditions of permanent disagreement? The last Future Frontiers issue of 2025 is a reflection on orientation, not prediction.

We talk a lot about misinformation and polarization. But 2025 revealed many of the frameworks we still rely on no longer help societies translate disagreement into shared decisions. 📬 This is the last issue of Future Frontiers for 2025. See you next year!

The so-called “global censorship-industrial complex” is a tiny world of academics and NGOs, journalists, and disinformation researchers who for the last decade have been trying to understand the power and reach of the tech platforms and how they are invisibly manipulating our information spaces.

We are in a post-disinformation phase where the core problem is no longer false content, but the collapse of shared standards for knowledge and collective action. This matters for security too. I connect these dots in this week’s Future Frontiers.

The US willingness to act alone is not new. What’s new is the reason behind it. Democratic values once justified unilateral action; today they are treated as constraints. 📬 This week in Future Frontiers, I try to explain why that matters, especially for Europe.

When Merz says the “American peace” as Europeans knew it is over, he’s pointing to a long shift, not a sudden break. 📬 This week in Future Frontiers, I look at how US security thinking evolved from post-9/11 universalism to today’s far narrower logic. open.substack.com/pub/massimof...

I wrote about the strange sensation of knowing more while understanding less, and how this shapes the future of journalism. The piece is less a verdict and more an open question. How do we build shared reality in a fragmented information climate.

Media debates often ask how to fix newsrooms or regulate platforms, but what if the real crisis is that stories no longer stay. This week Future Frontiers reflects on journalism as a space where orientation might still be built.

Sometimes it feels like we are living inside an information climate rather than an information system. 📬 This week Future Frontiers explores what happens when journalism can no longer guarantee a shared foundation for public understanding. open.substack.com/pub/massimof...

That's what a russian asset would do. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The real challenge today is not the volume of information but the pathway it follows through our minds. This week in Future frontiers I look at how attention and identity now guide the first steps of understanding.

I have been thinking about how attention works today. Not the usual story of distraction, but the deeper shift in how ideas reach us. Emotion sets the tone, identity frames the reaction and reasoning negotiates what remains.