In a short statement, the Defense Commissary Agency said only that the change took effect Wednesday and applied to commissaries worldwide. Commissaries in states or localities that mandate bags fees would still have to comply with those laws.

“The policy, introduced on April 6, which required commissary patrons to pay for single-use plastic and paper bags, has been rescinded,” the statement reads.

In a separate statement, Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Va., a former Navy helicopter pilot, took credit for the reversal, saying the commissary agency’s decision followed months of advocacy.

Kiggans penned a letter to Anthony Tata, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and she spoke about the issue directly with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee last week, she said.

“I was deeply frustrated when DeCA announced it would impose a charge for paper and plastic bags — an added cost that complicates a benefit intended to support our service members, retirees and their families,” Kiggans said in a statement. “I appreciate Secretary Hegseth for listening to my concerns and taking swift action to eliminate this fee.”

The policy required commissary customers to pay 5 cents each for plastic bags and 10 cents for paper bags.

Providing the single-use bags costs the commissary agency $17 million per year, spokesperson Keith Desbois said when the agency announced the policy in March.

The commissary agency receives about $1.5 billion per year in taxpayer dollars to operate these discounted grocery stores as a benefit for the military community.

The Defense Department’s goal is an overall savings of 25% compared to commercial stores outside the gate.

Military Times reporter Karen Jowers contributed to this story.

The nonprofit, We the Veterans, reached its goal this month of recruiting 100,000 people to serve as poll workers in their communities. As of Wednesday afternoon, 136,815 had signed up. In total, about 1 million temporary workers will be needed to staff polling locations across the country this November, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Those workers welcome and check in voters, issue ballots and explain how to use voting equipment. Having veterans and their family members perform those tasks lends credibility to the process and helps quash skepticism during a time when public trust in the government is low, We the Veterans believes.

“You can be pretty confident that when you go vote, somebody in the direct line of your ballot is a veteran or military family member,” Gustafson said. “We think this is a great opportunity to engage our population in an important civic service, and we think a side benefit is that having our most trusted group of Americans doing the work of running elections should absolutely bring more trust across America into the process.”

Widespread misinformation about the voting process first prompted We the Veterans to recruit veterans and their families to work the polls in 2022. That year, the group recruited 63,500 people.

The group launched a renewed “Vet the Vote” campaign in February at the Super Bowl. Now that the group has surpassed its goal, it’s going to continue signing up as many veterans and family members as it can. Many jurisdictions start training poll workers in August for the presidential election and cease recruiting by September or early October, said Dan Vallone, director of Vet the Vote.

“The new way we’re looking at it is that we want to have as large a proportion as we can get,” Gustafson said.

We the Veterans also plans to continue its voting education programs. The group began traveling state-to-state last year, hosting events with secretaries of state to teach communities about the election process. Group members have recently visited Nevada, Arizona and South Carolina, and they’re planning more events across the country this summer.

Aboard the USS Yorktown near Charleston this May, We the Veterans hosted an event during which veterans walked people through a mock election process, explaining the check-in process and how voting machines worked.

Experts are already tracking rampant misinformation and disinformation about the upcoming presidential election — including domestic campaigns, as well as efforts by Russia, China and Iran — designed to encourage Americans to question the validity and integrity of their voting process.

“We believe giving people that education is a really important service in this time when there’s so much confusion,” Gustafson said. “A baseline education in how elections work can go a long way in building trust in the system.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

An FBI investigation revealed that Teixeira, a 22-year-old who ran a server on Discord called “Thug Shaker Central,” spent much of his life online, talking primarily with other young men via message, video calls and voice chats. He chatted about guns and military gear, threatened his school, made racist and antisemitic jokes, traded conspiracy theories, discussed antigovernment sentiments, and in a bid to show off, shared some of the military’s most closely guarded secrets about the Russia-Ukraine war and the Middle East.

By the time the young airman was arrested in 2023, media scholar PS Berge had been studying Discord and its users for three years and had created an online consortium of other academic researchers who were doing the same. That an intelligence leak occurred on the site, creating a national security incident, didn’t come as a shock to her.

“My response was, ‘Of course. Of course this would happen on Discord,’” Berge said. “Because on a platform like this, you share everything with your people. Everything about your life. So, why not share national security secrets?”

Teixeira pleaded guilty in March to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. His sentencing is scheduled for September, and prosecutors are asking that he serve between 11 and 17 years in prison.

The same month Teixeira agreed to a plea deal, the FBI revealed it had investigated another service member in 2022 for leaking information on Discord.

Former Air Force Staff Sgt. Jason Gray, who served as a cyber analyst at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, admitted to running a Facebook group for followers of Boogaloo, a loosely organized, antigovernment movement that advocates for a second Civil War. Gray was disgruntled with his military career, and he discussed his dissatisfaction with the U.S. government in several Discord channels created for the Boogaloo movement, according to a 2022 FBI affidavit that was unsealed in March.

Gray, who used the account name LazyAirmen#7460, was accused of posting a classified image in a private Discord channel that he “likely obtained” from his access to National Security Agency intelligence, the affidavit states.

Investigators said the image could’ve been shared “in furtherance of the Boogaloo ideology,” but didn’t elaborate on the image’s details. It’s uncertain whether the FBI is still investigating the potential leak. But while searching Gray’s electronic devices for evidence of an intelligence breach, authorities discovered hundreds of images of child pornography. Gray is currently serving five years in federal prison on multiple child pornography charges.

Oversharing is a hallmark of Discord, an online world where members of certain channels talk all day, every day, and even fall asleep together on voice calls, said Megan Squire, a computer scientist and deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

People who study the platform agree that it’s not inherently bad — it’s used by millions of gamers, students, teachers, professionals, hobbyists and members of the military community to communicate and socialize. However, extremists have hijacked a part of the platform to radicalize and recruit others to their causes, said Jakob Guhl, senior manager for policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Following the leak of national security secrets and other high-profile, nefarious uses of the platform in recent years, researchers are grappling with what to think of the platform’s small but headline-grabbing dark side, and many disagree on whether Discord as a company is doing enough to root out bad actors.

“It’s always a bit difficult to strike the right tone between not scaring people off the platform, because the majority of users are completely fine, but also highlighting that there is an actual issue of radicalization,” Guhl said. “It’s not the biggest or most offending platform, but it definitely plays a crucial role among this network.”

‘Not inherently evil’

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, known as START, studied decades of violent extremist attacks and found a military background to be the most commonly shared characteristic among those who committed or plotted mass casualty attacks from 1990 through 2022, more so than criminal histories or mental health problems.

Researchers from START said the study revealed why extremist groups tend to focus recruitment efforts toward people with military service records: Even a small number of them can have an outsized impact inside extremist movements.

While such recruitment occurs on Discord, Guhl, Berge and Squire agreed that the mere presence of service members and veterans on the platform isn’t a cause for concern.

“It’s a popular platform and not inherently evil,” Squire said. “I’d be much more concerned about military folks on 4chan, Telegram, places like that. Nothing good is happening on those platforms, but Discord could be useful.”

In fact, Berge said, it can be a valuable forum for marginalized people to foster a sense of community. On its “about” page, Discord describes its mission as one that helps users find a sense of belonging.

“Discord is about giving people the power to create space to find belonging in their lives,” the company’s mission statement reads. “We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about. We want you to build genuine relationships with your friends and communities close to home or around the world.”

That’s what the veterans group Frost Call is doing on the platform. The nonprofit encourages veterans and service members to stay connected through gaming, one of its founders told Military Times last year. As of June, it boasted 390 members.

“When we founded Frost Call, we built an organization around this idea of bringing veterans together, helping to improve camaraderie that’s missing from military service,” Marine Corps veteran Wesley Sanders said last year. “It serves an enormous mental health need, but also … an existential need for a lot of veterans.”

Moreover, when new users join Discord, extremist elements of the platform are not easily visible.

Discord is made up of millions of servers centered on various topics. Users can join up to 100 servers, and each server has numerous text, voice and video channels. When a new user creates an account and searches servers to join, the platform will suggest “its most popular, most successful, public-facing communities,” rather than any disquieting, invite-only communities, Berge said.

“If you are a standard user, and if you’re signing in to Discord for your general interests — maybe you’re looking for fellow students or fellow veterans — 90% of the time, you’re not going to accidentally stumble upon an extremist group,” she said. “They actually go through a lot of effort to make these spaces insulated, to make them difficult to find.”

When using Disboard, a third-party search platform for Discord servers, prompts such as “Nazi” or “white supremacist” won’t elicit results like they used to, Berge said. In a 2021 study, she found thousands of Discord servers that marketed themselves on Disboard as hateful and Nazi-affiliated spaces.

“You used to be able to search for those terms and find communities. It was horrifying,” Berge said. “Those servers still exist, but they’ve changed the ways they’re identified, and in some cases, we know that high-profile, toxic communities have been shut down.”

Extremists find a foothold

Founders Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy created Discord in 2015 as a way to allow friends around the world to communicate while playing video games online. Its popularity exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns went into effect and many people became more isolated than ever before.

Just two years after it launched, Discord gained notoriety as the platform of choice for facilitators of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Organizers, including some veterans, used Discord to share propaganda and coordinate the protest, which turned deadly. James Fields was convicted of killing Heather Heyer when he drove his car into a group of counterprotesters. Fields had joined the Army in 2015 but was separated quickly because of a cited lack of motivation and failure to train.

In 2022, Discord made headlines again after a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed and dozens more injured. The suspected shooter ran his own Discord server called “SS,” where he complained about “commies,” short for “communists,” according to posts archived by the nonprofit website Unicorn Riot.

That same year, an 18-year-old white gunman killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The gunman, Payton Gendron, spent months writing plans for the attack in a diary he kept on a private Discord server, visible only to him. About 30 minutes before the attack, Gendron sent out invitations for others to view the diary, and 15 people accessed it, according to Discord.

The platform again faced scrutiny following Teixeira’s leak of national security secrets.

“It’s periodic. Every couple of years, it seems like there’s something,” Squire said. “There are other platforms that are worse, but Discord keeps coming up over and over again.”

Research institutions such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that Discord serves as a hub for socializing and community-building across far-right groups, including Catholic extremists, the white supremacist Atomwaffen Division and the antigovernment Boogaloo movement.

Extremist groups value the platform’s layers of privacy and anonymity, as well as its chat and video functions and collaborative nature, Guhl said. Berge described it as a walled garden, or an online environment where user access to content can be controlled. Servers come with the capability to assign hierarchy to different members and allow some members to access information that others can’t, the researchers said.

“In, say, a Twitter direct-messaging thread or Facebook DM, you don’t really have levels and hierarchies,” Squire said. “Discord really allows you to have more fine-grained ranking structures.”

Another reason for the prevalence of extremists on the platform stems from its roots in gaming, Guhl surmised.

Rachel Kowert, a globally recognized researcher on gaming and mental health, has spent five years researching extremism in video game communities. Though gaming itself is a powerful tool for connection and growth, extreme and hateful ideologies are now commonplace in those spaces, Kowert said.

“If you’re spending a lot of time in the social or gaming spaces where misogyny is commonplace, that can in turn start to internalize in the way you see the world and interact in it,” Kowert said.

Fighting a dark legacy

The existence of far-right groups on Discord — and the high-profile instances of extremism on the platform in the past several years — has spawned its “extremist legacy,” one from which it’s now trying hard to distance itself, said Berge.

Discord said it removed more than 2,000 far-right-affiliated servers following the “Unite the Right” rally. After the Buffalo killings, it removed Gendron’s server and worked to prevent the spread of content related to the attack, the company said. At that point, Discord agreed it “must do more to remove hate and violent extremism.”

“We created Discord to be a place for people to find belonging, and hate and violence are in direct opposition to our mission,” the company said in a statement at the time. “We take our commitment to these principles seriously and will continue to invest in and deploy resources.”

Earlier this year, the company reported that 15% of its staff works on its user safety team, which cracks down on harassment, hateful conduct, inappropriate contact, violent and abusive imagery, violent extremism, misinformation, spam, fraud, scams and other illegal behavior.

During the investigations into Teixeira and Jason Gray, Discord officials immediately cooperated with law enforcement, a company spokesperson told Military Times. And in recent months, Discord has leaned on machine-learning technology to moderate content.

“We expressly prohibit using Discord for illegal activity, which includes the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents,” the spokesperson said.

The company publishes reports each quarter showing actions taken against various accounts and servers. The latest report, published in January, says Discord disabled 6,109 accounts and removed 627 servers that espoused violent extremism during the last few months of 2023.

Squire and Guhl agreed that Discord is “pretty good” at responding to extremist content. Guhl credited the company for including extremism and hate speech in its community guidelines, as well as for deleting servers on a regular basis that breach its terms of service. Discord also created a channel where Squire could flag questionable content on the platform, and the company has been receptive to the concerns she’s raised, she said.

“I credit where credit is due, and I have to give them credit for that,” Squire said. “I think it’s taken seriously, and there are other platforms that I could not say that about.”

Extremists are ‘absolutely still there’

Berge applauded Discord for ramping up the technology behind its moderation and for introducing IP bans, which restrict a device from accessing the platform, rather than just an account. Still, she sees room for improvement.

Discord should place more emphasis on educating moderators and users about how to recognize when someone is being radicalized and pulled into an extremist space, Berge said. She also criticized the platform for disbanding a program in 2023 that included hundreds of volunteer moderators.

“It wasn’t Discord’s automated flagging systems that caught national security secrets being leaked by Jack Teixeira. It took other users and community moderators digging into it and someone finally reporting it,” Berge said. “Elevating people and giving them tools to moderate is absolutely central to protecting the platform, and that’s one area where I think they’re taking a step back.”

Berge is still researching communities on Discord, four years after she first uncovered a network of white supremacists using the platform as a recruitment ground. Despite its community guidelines and efforts to remove offending servers and accounts, Discord still serves as a meeting place for pockets of extremism.

“They’re harder to find, but they are absolutely still here. We’re still finding them,” Berge said. “It is still one of the most popular spaces for people to congregate, share and be in community with each other, for better or for worse.”

Discord remains the “platform of choice” for some hate groups, noted Squire, who described the company’s fight against extremists as playing whack-a-mole: As soon as one is removed, another pops up. A lack of institutional knowledge among far-right extremist groups is partly to blame, she said.

“Everybody’s always fresh, and they don’t have any structure for teaching one another and learning from mistakes of the past,” Squire said. “That’s convenient for us, because as we keep amassing knowledge, they make the mistake of reusing the technology that’s most convenient, rather than being strategic.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

Nicholas Rasmussen, the DHS counterterrorism coordinator, blamed prominent voices in the political arena that frame politics as zero-sum, encouraging the belief that one political party’s gain is the other’s loss.

That type of framing leads to extreme political views, some of which gain footing among military and veteran communities, and increases the chance that people will be prompted to commit violence, Rasmussen said. The DHS labels that type of threat as domestic violent extremism.

“The toxic political environment in which we live as Americans right now, and the existentialist ways in which voices in our public square frame our politics — not only zero sum terms, but the worst kind of zero sum terms — all of that leaves us far more vulnerable than ever to targeted violence here,” Rasmussen said.

The FBI and DHS categorize extremism into four subtypes: racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism, animal rights or environmental violent extremism and abortion-related violent extremism.

Of those, Rasmussen said he is most concerned about racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, which “continues to grow in scope and scale.”

The conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip exacerbated those risks, putting both Jewish and Muslim communities in the U.S. at greater risk of being targeted in attacks, he explained.

While other types of threats are currently more pressing, domestic violent extremism “has the potential to be more undermining of our social fabric than any other form of terrorism threat we face,” he added.

Data shows that the involvement of veterans and service members with extremist ideologies is furthering this type of violence.

Domestic extremists who plot or commit mass killings often share characteristics, such as histories of mental health and criminal issues. But the most common thread is a record of military service, according to research by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, which analyzed three decades of attacks in the U.S.

The findings illustrate a “small numbers, high impact” problem, said Ellen Gustafson, co-founder of We the Veterans, a non-partisan nonprofit that focuses on preserving and strengthening democracy.

“Seeing that there’s a potentially deadly outcome of more involvement by veterans in these extremist groups, it is imperative for us as a group of concerned citizens and also members of the veteran and military family community to try to do something about it,” Gustafson said when the research was released last year.

Rasmussen outlined the threats facing the U.S. during a speech in Omaha, Nebraska, where counterterrorism experts gathered for a conference hosted by the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center.

Threats of violence are “more challenging, more complex and more complicated” than ever because of increasing risks of domestic violent extremism, combined with concerns of terrorist networks gaining entry to the country through the U.S.-Mexico border, he told the crowd.

“I’ve often been called upon to articulate the details of the threat environment and to try to make sense of what we should be most worried about,” Rasmussen said. “It’s harder now, today, here in this moment, than it’s ever been before. We face more challenges, harder challenges.”

Highest on Rasmussen’s list of priorities are vulnerabilities at the southern border, where the U.S. has struggled to manage a record number of migrants over the past year. Tensions between state and federal authorities peaked in January amid record levels of unauthorized border crossings, during which the Texas National Guard and state troopers blocked U.S. Border Patrol agents from a 2.5-mile stretch of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas.

During the feud, the Texas Military Department posted a photo to its official X account, showing a flag from the Texas Revolution flying above its headquarters in Austin.

Renae Eze, a spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, said at the time that the state was using multiple tactics to deter people from crossing and blamed President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

“Texas will continue to deploy Texas National Guard soldiers, [Texas Department of Public Safety] troopers, and more barriers, utilizing every tool and strategy to respond to President Biden’s ongoing border crisis,” Eze said at the time.

Migrants continue to travel from all over the world to seek asylum, and while DHS tries to vet them for ties to terrorist networks, the agency isn’t always successful, Rasmussen said.

Earlier this month, the FBI arrested eight Tajik men with ties to the Islamic State who entered the country through the southern border, the New York Times reported. It’s unclear whether the men were planning a terror attack.

Rasmussen argued against the notion that terrorists are “streaming” across the border. However, the immigration crisis does increase the country’s vulnerability to attacks, he said.

“DHS employs rigorous screening and vetting of those arriving migrants to try to identify any individual who may present a terrorism-related threat to the homeland,” Rasmussen said. “Even in the midst of all of that work, we find ourselves facing a situation in which individual migrants or travelers do arrive here … and we subsequently learn that they in fact have some form of potential threat. When that happens, we work … closely with the FBI and local law enforcement around the country to deal with and mitigate that threat.”

In addition to border issues and threats of domestic violent extremism, homegrown violent extremists present another challenge for DHS, Rasmussen said.

Such threats, which come from longterm U.S. residents inspired by foreign terror organizations to reject Western culture and commit violence, comprise a significant share of the U.S.’ threat profile, he added.

According to data from START, approximately 15% of individuals with military backgrounds who were charged with plotting or committing mass killings during the past three decades were inspired by or linked to foreign Islamist extremist groups, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State.

DHS needs more resources to address these threats, Rasmussen said. The agency warned earlier this year that it faced a budget shortfall, and it urged Congress to approve a bipartisan immigration deal that would provide more than $15 billion to DHS to bolster security at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Senate Republicans blocked the deal for a second time in May after former President Donald Trump described the measure as a “gift” for Democrats and Biden’s reelection chances.

Because of the funding shortfall, DHS is relying on the intelligence community, as well as academic and private-sector counterterrorism researchers, to help it prioritize threats, Rasmussen said.

“We are today a counterterrorism community of finite resources. Not something I ever thought I would say in the post-9/11 environment, but it’s true,” Rasmussen said. “We must make choices and deal most urgently with the most threatening things on our worry list. We can’t treat every problem as a top priority.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

We the Veterans kicked off its Vet the Vote campaign in February with the goal of hiring 100,000 poll workers. Ellen Gustafson, the group’s co-founder, said Thursday the group would likely hit that target, making veterans and service members a significant fraction of the overall number of volunteers needed to work the polls in November.

“We will get to 100,000, easily, of poll workers that we have personally recruited,” Gustafson said. “A little over a million across the country are needed for the national presidential election. So, we know we’re going to be 10% of that, and we think we can go higher.”

To reach the goal, the group is traveling state-to-state, hosting events with secretaries of state to teach people about the election process and relay the importance of getting involved in the voting process. Group members have recently traveled to Nevada, Arizona and South Carolina, and they’re planning more events across the country this summer.

Many jurisdictions start training poll workers in August for the presidential election and cease recruiting by September or early October, said Dan Vallone, director of Vet the Vote.

“A lot of states have concluded their primaries and have been gearing up for the election, which is why we’re really trying to make a big push on recruiting, as the need increases dramatically,” Vallone said. “Our big push and most intensive cycle starts in June and continues to mid-September.”

Widespread misinformation about the American voting process first prompted We the Veterans to recruit veterans and military families to work the polls in 2022. According to the group, their idea was to harness the social credibility and standing that veterans and military families hold and ask them to serve as trusted messengers about elections.

Experts are already tracking rampant misinformation about the upcoming presidential election, including domestic campaigns, as well as efforts by Russia and China to encourage Americans to question the validity and integrity of their voting process.

To further push against the idea that elections are “rigged,” We the Veterans is bringing together leaders of various veterans groups next week to discuss methods for using their positions of trust to renew Americans’ faith in democracy, Gustafson said. The event, held at Mount Vernon on June 13, aims to fight against the notion that the country is deeply divided.

“There’s an undercurrent of Americans working together all the time without regard to their political allegiance,” Gustafson said. “We’ll showcase how our community works together across many different backgrounds to accomplish things… and how other Americans can follow our lead and get in the game, not just sit on the sidelines behind a screen.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

Chinese actors exploited the unfolding chaos and took to social media, where they shared a conspiracy that the fire was the result of a “meteorological weapon” being tested by the U.S. Department of Defense. According to new analysis from Microsoft Corporation, a worldwide technology company, the Chinese accounts posted photos that were created with generative artificial intelligence, which uses new technology that can create images from written prompts.

The situation exemplifies two challenges that some experts are warning about ahead of the presidential election in November: The use of generative AI to create fake images and videos, and the emergence of China as an adversary that stands ready and willing to target the United States with disinformation. Academics are also voicing concerns about a proliferation of alternative news platforms, government inaction on the spread of disinformation, worsening social media moderation and increased instances of public figures inciting violence.

An environment rife for disinformation is coinciding with a year during which more than 50 countries are holding high-stakes elections. Simply put, it’s a “very precarious year for democracy,” warned Mollie Saltskog, a research fellow at The Soufan Center, a nonprofit that analyzes global security challenges. Some of the messaging meant to sow division is reaching veterans by preying on their sense of duty to the U.S., some experts warned.

“Conspiracy theories are a threat to vulnerable veterans, and they could drag your loved ones into really dark and dangerous places,” said Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who published a book this year about domestic terrorism.

“The seeds are there for this kind of activity again, and we need to make the argument that protecting people from conspiracy theories is in their best interest, not just in the country’s.”

The threat of state-backed disinformation

China kept to the sidelines during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, watching as Russia targeted the U.S. with chaos-inducing disinformation, according to the U.S. Intelligence community. But Beijing’s disinformation capabilities have increased in recent years, and the country has proven a willingness to get involved, Saltskog said.

In a report published in April, Microsoft warned that China was preparing to sow division during the presidential campaign by using fake social media accounts to discover what issues divide Americans most.

The accounts claimed that a train derailment in Kentucky was deliberately caused by the U.S. government, and they polled Americans about issues like climate change, border policies and racial tensions. China uses the information gathered to “understand better which U.S. voter demographic supports what issue or position and which topics are the most divisive, ahead of the main phase of the U.S. presidential election,” the technology behemoth warned.

“The primary concern today, in our assessment, is Russia, China and Iran, in that order,” Saltskog said. “Specifically, when we talk about China … we’ve seen with the Hawaii wildfire example that they have AI-powered capabilities to produce disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. It’s certainly very concerning.”

Envoys from China and the U.S. are set to meet this week to discuss the risks of artificial intelligence and how the countries could manage the technology. A senior official in President Joe Biden’s administration told reporters Friday that the agenda does not include election interference, but noted the topic might come up in discussion.

“In previous engagements, we have expressed clear concerns and warnings about any [Peoples Republic of China] activity in this space,” a senior administration official said. “If the conversation goes in a particular direction, then we will certainly continue to express those concerns and warnings about activity in that space.”

Logically, a British tech company that uses artificial intelligence to monitor disinformation around the world, has been tracking Russian-sponsored disinformation for years. Kyle Walter, the company’s head of research, believes Russia is positioned to increase its spread of falsehoods during the run-up to the November election, likely focusing on divisive issues, such as immigration and the U.S. economy.

Russia isn’t seeking to help one candidate over another, Walter added. Rather, it’s trying to sow chaos and encourage Americans to question the validity and integrity of their voting process.

Microsoft’s threat analysis center published another report at the end of April, saying that Russian influence operations to target the November election have already begun. The propaganda and disinformation campaigns are starting at a slower tempo than in 2016 and 2020, but they’re more centralized under the Russian Presidential Administration than in the past, Microsoft officials said.

So far, Russia-affiliated accounts have been focusing on undermining U.S. support for Ukraine, pushing disinformation meant to portray Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as unethical and incompetent, and arguing that any American aid to Ukraine was directly supporting a corrupt and conspiratorial regime, the report states.

State-backed disinformation campaigns like these have used images of U.S. service members and targeted troops and veterans during the previous two presidential elections.

A study from Oxford University in 2017 found Russian operatives disseminated “junk news” to veterans and service members during the 2016 election. In 2020, Vietnam Veterans of America warned that foreign adversaries were aiming disinformation at veterans and service members at a massive scale, posing a national security threat.

“It’s certainly happened historically, and it’s certainly a threat to be aware of now,” Saltskog said.

A social media ‘hellscape’

In March, the pause in public sightings of Kate Middleton, along with the lack of updates regarding her health following abdominal surgery, created a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.

Scores of memes and rumors spread in an online fervor until Middleton posted a video March 20, in which the Princess of Wales shared the news that she had been diagnosed with an undisclosed type of cancer. Some who shared conspiracies responded with regret.

The situation offered a public example of how conspiracy thinking snowballs on social media platforms, as well as the real harm it can cause, said AJ Bauer, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, where he studies partisan media and political communications.

“It does reinforce the fact that social media gives us an opportunity to crowdsource and spin conspiracy theories and conspiracy thinking,” Bauer said. “It can be done for a kind of whimsy, or it can be done for harm, and the line between whimsy and harm is a fine one. It can tip from one to the other pretty quickly.”

Social media platforms were blamed during the presidential election seasons in 2016 and 2020 for the influential campaigns that gained traction on their sites. Since then, the situation has only worsened, several experts argued.

Bauer specifically blamed recent changes at X, formerly Twitter, which was taken over in 2022 by billionaire Elon Musk.

Musk has used the platform to endorse at least one antisemitic conspiracy theory, and several large corporations withdrew from the platform after their ads were displayed alongside pro-Nazi content. Bauer described the site as a “hellscape” that is “objectively worse than it was in 2020 and 2016.”

“One really stark difference is that in 2020, you had a lot of big social media platforms like Twitter and Meta trying at least to mitigate disinformation and extremist views because they got a lot of blame for the chaos around the 2016 election,” Bauer said. “Part of what you see going into this election is that those guardrails are down, and we’re going to experience a free-for-all.”

In addition to the changes at X, layoffs last year struck content-moderation teams at Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet (the owner of YouTube), and have led to fears that the platforms would not be able to curb online abuse or remove deceptive disinformation.

“That timing could not be worse,” Saltskog said. “We’re going to have a much thinner bench when it comes to the people inside social media platforms who do this.”

Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor at American University who studies extremist propaganda, argued that social media platforms don’t have financial incentive to moderate divisive or misleading content.

“Their profits are driven by engagement, and engagement is often driven by outrage,” Braddock said.

Because of this, Braddock believes there should be more focus placed on teaching people — especially younger people — how to spot disinformation online.

A study last year by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that teenagers were more likely than U.S. adults to believe conspiracy theories. Another study by the University of Cambridge found that people ages 18 to 29 were worse than older adults at identifying false headlines, and the more time people spent online recreationally, the less likely they were able to spot misinformation.

The average age of the active-duty military is 28.5, according to a Defense Department demographic profile published in 2023, and new recruits are typically in their early 20s. Because of the young age of the force, Braddock thinks the Defense Department should be involved in teaching news literacy.

The Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs did not respond to a request for comment about any efforts to help service members and veterans distinguish accurate information online.

“They’ve grown up in the digital age, and for some it’s been impossible to differentiate what’s real and what’s not real,” Braddock said. “They’ve essentially been thrown to the wolves and don’t have the education to be able to distinguish the two. I think there needs to be a larger effort toward widespread media literacy for young people, especially in populations like the military.”

AI speeds disinformation

Overall, people are getting better at spotting disinformation because of awareness efforts over the past several years, Braddock believes.

However, just as more people were becoming accustomed to identifying false information, the landscape changed, he said. Generative AI gained traction last year, prompting the launch of tools that can create new images and videos, called deepfakes, from written descriptions.

Since Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, these digital tools have been used to create propaganda about the ensuing conflict. Some AI images portray injured or frightened Palestinian children running from air strikes in Gaza, while others depict crowds of people waving Israeli flags and cheering for the Israeli Defense Forces.

“This is a new thing, and most people aren’t prepared to differentiate between what’s real and what’s not,” Braddock said. “We need to stay on top of these different technologies which can be used to reach a large amount of people with propaganda. It only takes one person to do a lot of damage.”

The Soufan Center and Council on Foreign Relations consider AI to be the top concern heading into November. The technology is developing faster than Congress can work to regulate it, and social media companies are likely to struggle to moderate AI-generated content leading up to the election, Ware said.

As Congress grapples with reining in AI, some states are taking the lead and scrambling to pass legislation of their own. New Mexico is the latest to pass a law that will require political campaigns to provide a clear disclaimer when they use AI in their advertisements. California, Texas, Washington, Minnesota and Michigan have passed similar laws.

Ware said that among those working to counter domestic terrorism, AI has been treated like “a can getting kicked down the road” — a known problem that’s been put off repeatedly.

“We knew it was a specter that was out there that would one day really affect this space,” Ware said. “It’s arrived, and we’ve all been caught unprepared.”

The technology can accelerate the speed and scale at which people can spread conspiracy theories that radicalize others into extremist beliefs, Ware added. At The Soufan Center, researchers have found that generative AI can produce high quantities of false content, which the center warned could have “significant offline implications” if it’s used to call for violent action.

“You can create more false information at scale. You can just ask an AI-powered language model, ‘Hey, create X number of false narratives about this topic,’ and it will generate it for you,” Saltskog said. “Just the speed and scale and efficacy of it is very, deeply concerning to us experts working in this field.”

The creation of AI images and videos is even more concerning because people tend to believe what they can see, Saltskog said. She suggested people look at images and videos carefully for telltale signs of digital deception.

The technology is still developing, and it’s not perfect, she said. Some signs of deepfakes could be hands that have too many or too few fingers, blurry spots, the foreground melding into the background and speech not aligning with how the subject’s mouth is moving.

“These are things the human brain catches onto. You’re aware of it and attune to it,” Saltskog said. “Your brain will say, ‘Something is off with this video.’”

As Congress and social media platforms lag to regulate AI and moderate disinformation, Americans have been left to figure it out for themselves, Ware argued. Bauer suggested people do their homework about their source of news, which includes determining who published it, when it was published and what agenda the publisher might have. Saltskog advised people to be wary of anything that elicits a strong emotion because that’s the goal of those pushing propaganda.

Similarly, Ware recommended that if social media users see something that seems unbelievable, it likely is. He suggested they look for other sources providing that same information to help determine if it’s true.

“People are going to take it upon themselves to figure this out, and it’s going to be through digital literacy and having faith in your fellow Americans,” Ware said. “The stories that are trying to anger you or divide you are probably doing so with an angle, as opposed to a pursuit of the truth.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

The findings, released in a report Tuesday, add to other evidence that suggests negative experiences in the military could be a risk factor for people becoming radicalized into extremist ideologies, according to Todd Helmus, a co-author on the report. Data compiled last year by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism revealed a pattern of failed military recruits who were later charged with extremist-driven plots and crimes.

“A number of folks in our study had problematic experiences,” Helmus said. “We and other scholars have suggested before that those problematic experiences in the military could lead people to be vulnerable to these groups. So, we think that’s a significant finding.”

Helmus and his co-author, Ryan Brown, aren’t sure on the broader significance of their findings, and they said more studies would need to be done to understand the connection.

To compile the report, Brown and Helmus interviewed 21 veterans who had indicated in a RAND survey last year that they held extremist views. The veterans had either expressed support for specific groups, such as Antifa and the Proud Boys, endorsed political violence, black nationalism or white supremacy or supported conspiracy theories like QAnon or the Great Replacement theory.

Three-quarters of the veterans interviewed were forthcoming about negative life events during their military service, Brown said. One veteran described developing post-traumatic stress disorder after recovering casualties from the bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 241 US service members in 1983, the report states.

Another veteran said he developed a substance-abuse problem while serving and drank because he disliked the routine of the military and being told what to do. Two women veterans described physical, psychological and sexual abuse they experienced at the hands of fellow service members.

Some of the veterans said they faced problems while transitioning into civilian life. They experienced financial issues or severed romantic relationships and others become homeless or were arrested and imprisoned.

“I was surprised how clear the descriptions were of some extremely negative events, and the extent of how negative life experiences compound each other,” Brown said. “There’s a lot of hardship. You start to get a sense for how and why these beliefs develop.”

When asked about how they came to believe in their extreme viewpoints, most of the veterans said they became highly interested in politics after historic events. They cited Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency in 2016, the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2020 riots following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the coronavirus pandemic and the U.S. Supreme Court decision that settled a recount dispute in Florida’s 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Six of the 21 veterans said they developed their current beliefs while in the military or afterward while working in law enforcement.

“When I got into the military, I started to get into conspiracy theories because of conversations with my peers,” one veteran is quoted as saying. “That’s when I learned about the Illuminati… a bunch of Satanists that run the world. Now I’m a full tin hat.”

Sixteen veterans cited specific news organizations, alternative news sites, political influencers or social media platforms that helped shape their viewpoints, the report states. Those ranged from traditional news outlets such as CNN and Fox News to the right-wing outlet Newsmax and Russia Today, a channel funded by the Russian government, as well as specific Reddit and Telegram channels and Facebook groups.

Thirteen veterans interviewed said their friends or families held the same extreme views. Some said their parents influenced their political beliefs, while others said they developed their viewpoints through their involvement in social or college clubs. One veteran described having a large network of like-minded friends who he regularly met with in person and online.

“I am not fighting this battle alone. I have several people who are right on board with me,” he’s quoted as saying. “We meet three times a week to put documents together and fight the battle… there’s a lot of people that are digging.”

Four veterans in RAND’s original survey had previously expressed strong support for the Proud Boys, a white supremacist organization that’s known to have recruited veterans. When interviewed as part of RAND’s newest report, those four veterans all denied supporting the group.

Conversely, nearly all the veterans who originally said they believed the Great Replacement theory affirmed that support during their interviews. The Great Replacement theory refers to a baseless idea that lenient immigration policies are being designed to replace the power and culture of white people in the U.S. The theory has become more popular in recent years and has incited multiple instances of violence.

The five veterans whose views aligned with QAnon also said during their interviews that they still supported at least some of the conspiracy theories claimed by the group. QAnon is an umbrella term for several theories that falsely allege a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles run the world.

“People laugh about this because it’s so sick and twisted, but I 100% agree with it,” one veteran was quoted as saying.

Many of the veterans who were interviewed said they supported the notion that American patriots would have to resort to political violence in order to save their country. However, none talked about specific plans to participate in violence in the near future, Helmus said.

The veterans who supported political violence offered several issues they believed would justify it, including the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border or “overzealous” government policies to curb climate change. They also cited baseless ideas about the government stripping away First Amendment and Second Amendment protections and forcing children to receive coronavirus vaccines without parents’ permission.

One participant made baseless claims that a Democratic win in the November presidential election would lead to “the loss of the First Amendment,” which he said would ignite a civil war.

“It was disconcerting the degree to which people were willing to highlight how violence is a potential solution – and at times, a necessary solution – to address the current political state,” Helmus said. “Their notions of threats were highly exaggerated. You could see how, if they believed those threats, then those ideas of violence become more palpable.”

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

The group was present at the Super Bowl Experience on Wednesday, an event that precedes the game every year and allows fans to get autographs from National Football League players, shop for merchandise and snap photos with the Vince Lombardi Trophy. There, Vet the Vote organizers were given a platform to share the message that U.S. elections are safe and effective — and have the support of tens of thousands of veterans and military families who have participated in the process in recent years.

During a time when misinformation is eroding trust in U.S. elections, the group believes veterans are the key to restoring confidence.

“We’re seeing some cracks in the consensus around democracy here in the United States,” said Ben Keiser, a Marine Corps veteran and co-founder of We the Veterans. “So what we really need is an effective messenger to break through all of that who’s seen as credible and trustworthy by all of America, and that is veterans and military families. They’re able to cut through division, build bridges and catalyze social cohesion.”

Distrust in U.S. elections reached a climax in 2020, when former President Donald Trump and his supporters made unsubstantiated claims that he lost because of widespread voter fraud.

Leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, distrust in the process was still rampant. According to a survey by the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research, about 65% of Democrats and 48% of Republicans said they trusted U.S. elections before the midterms. That trust rose after the midterm elections to 83% among Democrats but dropped to 46% among Republicans, the report found.

We the Veterans organized its first Vet the Vote campaign in 2022 and recruited more than 63,500 veterans and military family members to work the polls. The volunteers filled about half of the shortage of election workers that year.

“The reason that we’re doing the work we’re doing and getting so much support is that the vast majority of veterans and the military community just wants to see what’s best for the country,” said Ellen Gustafson, co-founder of We the Veterans.

Seeing similar levels of distrust in the voting process in the lead-up to the presidential election, as well as increased threats toward election workers, We the Veterans quickly set its sights on 2024.

According to research from the University of Nebraska, threats against public officials increased from 2013 to 2023, and elected officials — as well as people who run elections — were the second most-targeted category. A report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that more than half of the people who manage elections in the U.S. are concerned that the threats will harm the retention and recruitment of poll workers.

Ahead of this week’s launch of Vet the Vote at the Super Bowl, We the Veterans was already at work to fortify voters against election misinformation. Members of the nonprofit traveled to five states in 2023, launching local campaigns to explain the election process and encourage veterans and military family members to get involved.

We the Veterans is now working with the NFL — and using its massive platform — to reach its goal. The NFL is one of 36 groups that comprise the Vet the Vote coalition.

“Particularly during this time of political polarization and partisan divisions, the league wanted to leverage our platform to promote the fundamental values that bind us together as a country,” Ken Edmonds, a lobbyist for the NFL, said this week on the We the Veterans podcast.

The NFL also runs its own initiative, NFL Votes, which encourages fans to become informed and effective voters. Through that campaign, NFL players have shared personal stories about voting.

“People look up to NFL players, but we also know people look up to and respect people who have served our country,” said Anna Isaakson, the league’s vice president of social responsibility. “There’s no better group to do this.”

While in Las Vegas this week, Vet the Vote organizers are expected to give away two tickets to Super Bowl 58 to a local election volunteer.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

Just a few hours before a planned “pep rally” Thursday, the gathering appeared much smaller than organizers first touted, comprising personal vehicles instead of the semi-trailer trucks used in promotional videos for the event. Organizers spent the first two days of the convoy dispelling confusion about routes and the intended destination, which is a town 20 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, rather than the border itself.

The convoy has been the subject of mockery from late-show hosts and has battled unclear intentions, with some organizers advertising it as a peaceful assembly of prayer, while others claim they’re responding to a call from ousted Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson on X (formerly Twitter) to defend the border.

Leaders of the convoy, who have encouraged service members and veterans to join their cause, planned the roadtrip from Virginia to Texas this week — in addition to a series of rallies in Texas, Arizona and California — in response to a standoff between the Texas government and federal authorities over border security. As of Thursday afternoon, the group had raised nearly $160,000, which organizers said would be used for gas, permits and staging equipment.

While it was uncertain Thursday whether the planned events would meet the level of participation promised by organizers, the hype surrounding the movement was already proving to be a successful recruiting tool for fringe groups advocating for violence against migrants, multiple extremism experts said Thursday.

Experts from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, the Western States Center and Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights also warned that the attention garnered by the convoy was bringing tenets of the ”Great Replacement“ conspiracy theory into mainstream conversation.

The conspiracy contends that lenient immigration policies are being designed to replace the power and culture of white people in the U.S. The theory has been tied to multiple mass shootings over the past several years, including the 2022 killing of 10 people in Buffalo, New York, and a shooting in El Paso, Texas, that left 23 people dead in 2019.

“We’ve seen the white supremacist Proud Boys group, neo-Nazi active clubs and the Aryan Freedom Network all taking advantage of the standoff to push their propaganda and recruit new members,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

In social media posts reviewed by Military Times, various chapters of the Proud Boys in Ohio, Texas, North Carolina and Rhode Island had shared information about the convoy and encouraged its members to get involved. One post on Telegram claimed that a “confrontation was imminent” and another read, “Let’s do this grab your guns n let’s party.”

The Proud Boys romanticize a traditional, male-dominated version of Western culture, and the group is rooted in white nationalism and misogyny, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

Dozens of its members were defendants in criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and four of its leaders, three of whom have military backgrounds, were sentenced to 15 or more years in prison for their involvement in the riot.

Despite the online calls for violence, organizers of the “Take Our Border Back” convoy insisted this week that their group would remain peaceful. In an update about the pep rally planned for Thursday night, organizers told participants to avoid bringing weapons or tactical gear. Organizers also warned of “infiltrators and provocateurs” who might be planning to disrupt their efforts but claimed they were prepared to intervene with such individuals.

Devin Burghart, president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, described the convoy as a “stunt” and said he was more concerned with the long-term effects of the event, such as bringing a sense of normality to far-right ideas.

“It may not have an impact this week, but this type of rhetoric about an ‘invasion’ and another Civil War have longer, broader implications for us as a nation,” Burghart said. “We’ve witnessed the bitter fruit of this type of rhetoric far too many times in this country. It’s time for America to stand united against such threats.”

The spread of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory has an effect on communities of color, argued Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, which advocates for immigration reform.

“It puts a target on people’s backs,” Cárdenas said.

To successfully counter the rhetoric about migrants, elected officials should publicly condemn vigilantism and pass legislation to improve the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, Burghart argued. As of Wednesday, Senate negotiators were struggling to finalize a bipartisan deal that included policy changes at the border. A key measure would allow the Department of Homeland Security to close the border if too many migrants were showing up with asylum claims. The bill faces opposition from House Republicans and Donald Trump.

The protest convoy arrived in Dripping Springs, Texas, on Wednesday night, where one organizer shared a photo of a small stage adorned with an “Appeal to Heaven” flag. The flag has been adopted in recent years by Christian Nationalists who see it as a rallying call to seek protection from God, rather than the government. The flag was present during the attack on the Capitol in 2021.

Organizers of the convoy planned to hold the pep rally Thursday night at a brewery in Dripping Springs. Next, the convoy is expected to travel on Friday morning to Quemado, where participants will hold a rally on Saturday.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

The flag, which reads “Come and Take It” underneath an image of a cannon, is the best-known flag of the Texas Revolution and originated at the Battle of Gonzales, according to the Texas Historical Commission. In the post on X, it’s shown flying below the Texas flag at Camp Mabry.

No message was posted with the photo. The post had garnered more than 20,000 views about an hour after it went online.

The Texas Military Department could not be reached immediately for comment Tuesday afternoon. A spokesperson for the National Guard Bureau said he could not provide context about the post. The Texas Military Department is a state agency that supports the Texas Military Force, which includes the Texas National Guard. Both are led by the state adjutant general, Maj. Gen. Thomas Suelzer.

The post on X comes amid a standoff between Texas and the federal government over authority and security at the U.S.-Mexico border as the country sees record levels of unauthorized crossings.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he would continue to use the Texas National Guard to secure the border and ordered troops last week to roll out more concertina wire to deter migrants at the bank of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. Guard members at the border are on state orders and are constitutionally obligated to obey Abbott.

The order to roll out more wire came after a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision that gives the U.S. Border Patrol the authority to cut the concertina wire. The decision was narrow in scope, and while it says Texas can’t block federal authorities from the border, it doesn’t prevent the state from taking action.

Twenty-five Republican governors issued a joint statement Thursday supporting Abbott, arguing that states have a right to self defense.

The standoff has sparked outrage nationwide, and on Monday a protest convoy left Virginia for Texas, where participants plan to hold a rally in support of the Texas government.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.