Rabbit Hole
See what people are claiming online - rumors, conspiracy theories, and questionable content.
What is this?
We collect stories that are spreading online - things like conspiracy theories, fake videos, and propaganda - so you can see what's being said and make up your own mind about what's real.
Propaganda
Agenda-pushing content
Rumor
Unverified theories
Deepfake
AI-generated fakes
Influence Ops
Organized campaigns
AdversaRiskQA: An Adversarial Factuality Benchmark for High-Risk Domains
Hallucination in large language models (LLMs) remains an acute concern, contributing to the spread of misinformation and diminished public trust, particularly in high-risk domains. Among hallucination types, factuality is crucial, as it concerns a model's alignment with established world knowledge. Adversarial factuality, defined as the deliberate insertion of misinformation into prompts with varying levels of expressed confidence, tests a model's ability to detect and resist confidently fram...
Jared Moskowitz - Under Trump, more FEMA disaster assistance applications are in limbo for longer
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s “backlog of unanswered disaster assistance applications has exploded to the largest in its history.”
On the Insecurity of Keystroke-Based AI Authorship Detection: Timing-Forgery Attacks Against Motor-Signal Verification
Recent proposals advocate using keystroke timing signals, specifically the coefficient of variation ($δ$) of inter-keystroke intervals, to distinguish human-composed text from AI-generated content. We demonstrate that this class of defenses is insecure against two practical attack classes: the copy-type attack, in which a human transcribes LLM-generated text producing authentic motor signals, and timing-forgery attacks, in which automated agents sample inter-keystroke intervals from empirical...
Donald Trump - Trump says the U.S. leads China ‘by a lot’ in AI. Experts say that lead is measured by a few months
In artificial intelligence, “We're leading China by a lot.”
Industrialized Deception: The Collateral Effects of LLM-Generated Misinformation on Digital Ecosystems
Generative AI and misinformation research has evolved since our 2024 survey. This paper presents an updated perspective, transitioning from literature review to practical countermeasures. We report on changes in the threat landscape, including improved AI-generated content through Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Central to this work are our practical contributions: JudgeGPT, a platform for evaluating human perception of AI-generated news, and RogueGPT, a controlled stimul...
What’s driving down US overdose deaths? Experts cite drug supply changes, increased naloxone
What's driving down US overdose deaths?
A Marketplace for AI-Generated Adult Content and Deepfakes
Generative AI systems increasingly enable the production of highly realistic synthetic media. Civitai, a popular community-driven platform for AI-generated content, operates a monetized feature called Bounties, which allows users to commission the generation of content in exchange for payment. To examine how this mechanism is used and what content it incentivizes, we conduct a longitudinal analysis of all publicly available bounty requests collected over a 14-month period following the platfo...
Democratic fight over DHS funding could lead to government shutdown. How could it play out?
Democratic fight over DHS funding could lead to shutdown
Explainable Deepfake Detection with RL Enhanced Self-Blended Images
Most prior deepfake detection methods lack explainable outputs. With the growing interest in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), researchers have started exploring their use in interpretable deepfake detection. However, a major obstacle in applying MLLMs to this task is the scarcity of high-quality datasets with detailed forgery attribution annotations, as textual annotation is both costly and challenging - particularly for high-fidelity forged images or videos. Moreover, multiple studi...
A parent’s guide to measles: What to look for and how to prevent infection
Parents’ guide to measles: How to prevent infection
Towards Token-Level Text Anomaly Detection
Despite significant progress in text anomaly detection for web applications such as spam filtering and fake news detection, existing methods are fundamentally limited to document-level analysis, unable to identify which specific parts of a text are anomalous. We introduce token-level anomaly detection, a novel paradigm that enables fine-grained localization of anomalies within text. We formally define text anomalies at both document and token-levels, and propose a unified detection framework ...
Revealing the Truth with ConLLM for Detecting Multi-Modal Deepfakes
The rapid rise of deepfake technology poses a severe threat to social and political stability by enabling hyper-realistic synthetic media capable of manipulating public perception. However, existing detection methods struggle with two core limitations: (1) modality fragmentation, which leads to poor generalization across diverse and adversarial deepfake modalities; and (2) shallow inter-modal reasoning, resulting in limited detection of fine-grained semantic inconsistencies. To address these,...
Trump leaders say Minnesota officials withhold detained immigrants from ICE. Is that true?
Fact-check: Do Minneapolis and MN cooperate with ICE?
Agentic AI Microservice Framework for Deepfake and Document Fraud Detection in KYC Pipelines
The rapid proliferation of synthetic media, presentation attacks, and document forgeries has created significant vulnerabilities in Know Your Customer (KYC) workflows across financial services, telecommunications, and digital-identity ecosystems. Traditional monolithic KYC systems lack the scalability and agility required to counter adaptive fraud. This paper proposes an Agentic AI Microservice Framework that integrates modular vision models, liveness assessment, deepfake detection, OCR-based...
Audio Deepfake Detection at the First Greeting: "Hi!"
This paper focuses on audio deepfake detection under real-world communication degradations, with an emphasis on ultra-short inputs (0.5-2.0s), targeting the capability to detect synthetic speech at a conversation opening, e.g., when a scammer says "Hi." We propose Short-MGAA (S-MGAA), a novel lightweight extension of Multi-Granularity Adaptive Time-Frequency Attention, designed to enhance discriminative representation learning for short, degraded inputs subjected to communication processing a...
MARE: Multimodal Alignment and Reinforcement for Explainable Deepfake Detection via Vision-Language Models
Deepfake detection is a widely researched topic that is crucial for combating the spread of malicious content, with existing methods mainly modeling the problem as classification or spatial localization. The rapid advancements in generative models impose new demands on Deepfake detection. In this paper, we propose multimodal alignment and reinforcement for explainable Deepfake detection via vision-language models, termed MARE, which aims to enhance the accuracy and reliability of Vision-Langu...
Audio Deepfake Detection in the Age of Advanced Text-to-Speech models
Recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems have substantially increased the realism of synthetic speech, raising new challenges for audio deepfake detection. This work presents a comparative evaluation of three state-of-the-art TTS models--Dia2, Maya1, and MeloTTS--representing streaming, LLM-based, and non-autoregressive architectures. A corpus of 12,000 synthetic audio samples was generated using the Daily-Dialog dataset and evaluated against four detection frameworks, including semant...
Five Shots in Five Minutes: Analysing One Federal Agent’s Use of Less-Lethal Launcher in Minneapolis
This investigation is part of a collaboration between Bellingcat and Evident Media. You can watch Evident’s video here. The fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 sparked nationwide protests, with often violent clashes breaking out between protesters and federal agents. Some of […] The post Five Shots in Five Minutes: Analysing One Federal Agent’s Use of Less-Lethal Launcher in Minneapolis appeared first on...
Alex Pretti: Analysing Footage of Minneapolis CBP Shooting
To stay up to date on our latest investigations, join Bellingcat’s WhatsApp channel here On January 24, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System, was shot and killed by federal agents on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The shooting comes just over two weeks after Renee […] The post Alex Pretti: Analysing Footage of Minneapolis CBP Shooting appeared first on bellingcat .
Identifying ‘Less-Lethal’ Weapons Used By DHS Agents in US Immigration Raids and Protests
To stay up to date on our latest investigations, join Bellingcat’s WhatsApp channel here. Federal agents have frequently used so-called “less-lethal” weapons against protesters, including impact projectiles, tear gas and pepper spray, since the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration raids began last year. The use of less-lethal weapons (LLWs) has been controversial. While designed to incapacitate or […] The post Identifying ‘Less-Lethal’ Weapons Used By DHS Agents in US Immigration Ra...