A US spy chief's parting gift, a MAGA influencer's mea culpa, and a deepfaked CEO

A US spy chief's last act revived a Russian war narrative – and the bots were ready

On June 12, in one of her final moves as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard released declassified slides claiming the US had funded more than 120 biolabs across 30-plus countries, over 40 of them in Ukraine. Her framing, that the labs had been kept hidden, resurrected a story the Kremlin built in early 2022 to justify the invasion.

The amplification came fast. AntiBot4Navalny, which tracks the Kremlin-linked Matryoshka operation, told The Insider that the network spun up fake videos and counterfeit front pages of The Guardian and Le Figaro built around the biolabs claim. One slide's map placed Kyiv in the wrong region and invented a Ukrainian city called "Cherniv"; the Financial Times' Christopher Miller picked apart the errors.

The veterinary-project list in the slides was lifted from a publicly available 2019 report. Gabbard, who has since left the post, said her words had been misinterpreted and that the labs' vulnerability was "beyond dispute."

Laura Loomer says she fell for it

On June 18, MAGA influencer Laura Loomer used her podcast to walk back years of pro-Russia commentary on Ukraine. Loomer has a standing invitation to the Oval Office and a following near a million, and her recommendations have preceded the firing of national security officials. She told listeners she had been emotionally manipulated by what she'd been reading online.

She said RT courted her after she was deplatformed, and credited her show's correspondent, who embedded in Odesa and Kyiv during Russian strikes, with changing her mind. The conservatives she named as still pushing the lines she abandoned: Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, the latter just back from praising Russia at a forum in St. Petersburg.

Four fakes in four months: the CEO deepfake that keeps coming back

Four times since January, a video of Sundararaman Ramamurthy, who runs the Bombay Stock Exchange, Asia's oldest, has surfaced on WhatsApp and Telegram. In it he offers "super-normal profits" and a fast route to millions for anyone who joins a tipping group. He recorded none of them. The exchange put out advisories on January 12, again in March, and a fourth-incident warning on April 24, each time calling the footage fabricated.

The method is the one state operations run on: a trusted face on a familiar app, a believable ask. Here the operator is a criminal network and the mark is a retail investor. Investigators have tied the BSE clips to a China-linked fraud syndicate blamed for hundreds of crores in losses across India. What makes it so hard to stamp out is the price. A synthetic-identity kit good enough to impersonate an exchange chief reportedly sells for around five dollars, and people correctly flag high-quality fakes only about a quarter of the time.

The exposure runs well past India. LastPass's chief executive, himself an impersonation target, told the BBC that deepfake usage has climbed nearly 3,000% in two years. India's IT Rules amendment, in force since February, now gives platforms three hours to pull flagged synthetic media once someone reports it. The EU AI Act's disclosure rules for deepfakes take full effect in August.

The world's fact-checkers gathered in Vilnius, 30km from the Belarusian border

From June 17 to 19, more than 500 fact-checkers from over 80 countries came to Vilnius for GlobalFact, the field's largest summit, now in its 13th year. The venue put them about 30 kilometres from the Belarusian border, on one edge of the information war they spend their days mapping. Delfi and LRT co-hosted, across more than 50 sessions.

Two questions ran through the programme. One was money. Since Meta dropped its US third-party fact-checking partners at the start of 2025, the field has been hunting for sponsors and revenue that don't cost it its independence, and the IFCN arrived in Vilnius having just awarded $750,000 in sustainability grants. The other was AI: how models handle politically contested claims, and the "answer economy" that routes people to chatbots instead of original sources.

The summit closed by handing out the Global Fact-Checking Awards, with finalists drawn from 189 IFCN signatories that publish in more than 100 countries. It was the first time GlobalFact had been held in the Baltics, a short drive from the border.