For American newspapers, the past decade-plus has been all about seeking digital subscribers. The print business is shot. Digital advertising is shot. And while not everyone can be The New York Times — now the proud provider of 13 million subscriptions — even most local and regional newspapers have made digital subs Priority No. 1.

But even those who don’t have an unpopular billionaire owner to blame can still see disappointing results. America’s largest chain USA Today Co. (née Gannett) has seen total subscriber count decline 28% in the past year (even as digital subscription revenue has increased thanks to less discounting). And today’s leadership change at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — which has been one of the biggest talkers about the importance of digital subs — shows the strains as well. Here’s NPR’s David Folkenflik:

Andrew Morse had helped usher ABC, Bloomberg and CNN into the digital age. In January 2023, he turned his sights on Atlanta, with a $150 million plan to reinvent its leading daily newspaper.

In taking the reins of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Morse set an ambitious goal: to grow the number of digital subscribers from 53,000 to a half-million by the end of 2026. He laid out a new strategy, with new content and an infusion of new energy. The paper abandoned print at the end of last year to go all-in on digital innovation. The plan so far has achieved modest results: 101,000 digital subscribers.

Morse acknowledges falling short, but says the paper ultimately will reach what he calls its “North Star.” Morse won’t be there when it happens. After nearly three and a half years, he says it’s time for him to step aside.

Morse had previously led an earlier Atlanta-tied digital subscription disappointment: the short-lived and ill-fated CNN+, which lasted all of 32 days in 2022. The AJC is one of only two newspapers still owned by the Cox family, which has made many billions in other businesses but has not been known as a digital innovator in news.

On one hand, the AJC has the advantages of being in a massive market (about 6.5 million people) and being the state’s unquestioned dominant newspaper. Killing print entirely, as the paper did on Jan. 1, should have also been a major pivot point for remaining print subscribers to move to digital.

But modern Atlanta has a reputation as a weak market for newspapers, with a population heavy on recent transplants. (It’s sort of the opposite of the Advance Local markets — places like Flint, Syracuse, and Cleveland — where the economy might not be booming, but the residents are much more likely to be long-term local news readers.) Atlanta’s the seventh-largest media market in the United States, but in the time we’ve been tracking local newspaper web traffic since last summer, the AJC has never cracked the top 30 nationally. And its print circulation before shutting off the presses was only around 40,000 — which, for comparison’s sake, was already below peers in much smaller markets like Hartford (DMA No. 32), Milwaukee (No. 38), Little Rock (No. 58), Albany (No. 62), and Syracuse (No. 88).

Morse’s departure — though “Morse says family concerns drove his choice” — suggests the numbers after that Jan. 1 pivot have not been encouraging.

Tim Heffernan lights five matches with a single stroke and waves them up and down to spread the smoke. He sets them on a dinner plate as the small conference room fills with the smell of burning wood.

He checks his particle meter to make sure the room is sufficiently smoky, then steps around the table to turn on an air purifier on the floor. This is no ordinary air purifier. It is the Coway Airmega Mighty, the longtime top pick at Wirecutter, where Heffernan serves as the chief reviewer of products that clean our air and water.

This is a big moment for the Mighty. This test, followed by identical procedures for other purifiers over the next two days, will determine if it retains the crown it has held since 2014. Heffernan will test seven purifiers, including the Mighty and its new sibling, the Mighty2. It is down the hall still packed in its original box. It will be tested tomorrow.

“Yeah, man,” Heffernan says with a hint of sarcasm. “This could be the end of an era.”

Flaws, not dealbreakers

Wirecutter is headquartered in an unmarked black building in Long Island City, New York, that also serves as a laboratory and photo/video studio. Ben Frumin, Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief, likens the office to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory — full of energy and oddities. Much of the testing happens on the lower level, in big rooms filled with everything from living room chairs to robot vacuums. Upstairs is a studio where stylists assemble artsy photos of axes and nail clippers and the 39 best gifts for your mother-in-law.

Wirecutter employees are invited to take part in many of the tests. In one room, eight mattresses are lined up in two rows. “WELCOME TO MATTRESS TESTING!” says a sign on the wall. “Grab a pillow and a disposable pillowcase! Get comfy!” In another room, six massage guns are displayed on a table for staffers to test. The instructions say:

The qualities we’re most interested in

• Grip options
• Massage options (speed, patterns, etc.)
• Device weight
• Button placement

Indeed, device weight and button placement are important considerations for Wirecutter testers because they are representing us, a nation of consumers that doesn’t have time to lie on eight mattresses or use six massage guns before we decide what to buy. Wirecutter testers are our surrogates in a confusing economy, helping us choose the best stuff.

Wirecutter could be seen as a web-savvier knock-off of Consumer Reports, the granddaddy of review publications that was especially popular with your granddaddy. But instead of publishing pages of complex charts as Consumer Reports does, Wirecutter narrows recommendations to a few top choices. It tells you “the best office chair for most people” while also revealing “flaws, but not dealbreakers.”

It was founded in 2011 by Brian Lam, a former editor from the technology site Gizmodo, and relies largely on affiliate revenue, fees paid by retailers such as Amazon when customers click through to buy products. Wirecutter also earns money from advertising.

The New York Times bought Wirecutter in 2016 for $30 million as part of a strategy to increase reader retention with products beyond news. It’s joined by cooking, games, and The Athletic, and the strategy has paid off: Far more subscribers buy a Times bundle than just news alone. Frumin says being part of the Times has enabled Wirecutter to more than double its editorial employees, from about 80 when he arrived in 2019 to 180 today. He says traffic has more than tripled in the past few years, to 15 million readers per month.

Product guides such as the one for air purifiers are the Wirecutter staple. But writers also publish essays such as “The Victorinox paring knife has been our favorite as long as Wirecutter has existed,” Heffernan’s ode to a $7 kitchen tool. Frumin says the publication has a distinctive voice of “your obsessed helpful geeky cool friend.”

Wirecutter employees emphasize their respect for Consumer Reports and the rigor it brought to this unique form of journalism. “They are the OG,” Heffernan says. “Anybody doing this stuff owes an awful lot to them.”

As he says this, a woman across the big room is moving from bed to bed, testing the mattresses.

Impressed by the Blueair

Heffernan’s tests could have dramatic consequences for the Mighty’s long reign, but they are quite boring to watch. He goes through the same steps for each one: lighting the matches, waving them up and down, checking his particle counter and then switching on the machines. He leaves the room for about 30 minutes and returns to check the meter.

He typically does two tests for each machine — one at a high setting that he calls “when you burn dinner” and one at a setting that is just below his quiet-room level of 50 decibels,

Over the two days, he tests seven machines, including the Windmill, the Winix 5520 and the Dyson HushJet. (Wirecutter has evaluated more than 70 purifiers over the past decade, but Heffernan only retests models that have become picks.)

Heffernan says an air purifier is wonderfully simple, just a fan and a filter. The fan sucks in air, moves it through a filter and blows out the cleaner air. “One thing we’ve never figured out how to do is make a video of an air purifier test because it is so boring. It literally is just a machine sitting alone in a room.”

The tests are rigorous and will play a big role in his final ratings. But his choice will also reflect subjective aspects such as ease of use, style and whether the device has design problems such as lights that glow too bright at night.

The classic Mighty performs impressively in Heffernan’s tests. In the burned-dinner test, it reduces particulates by 99.6%. He also is impressed by the Blueair’s large Blue Signature. “Good lord!” he says after he sees the results. “That was an effective air purifier.”

As the testing continues, it becomes clear that his choice has come down to a battle of the siblings: the Mighty vs. the Mighty2.

“I need somebody to write about shovels”

Heffernan, 48, is well-suited for this unusual job. He has a degree in economics and is a seasoned journalist who has written for publications such as The Atlantic and Esquire. He also is a do-it-yourselfer who loves building and fixing things. In addition to writing for Wirecutter, he publishes a monthly DIY column in the Times on topics such as “Let’s learn how to paint furniture” and “Let’s restore all your rusty metal.”

He has a goatee and rectangular glasses and wears the same thing pretty much every day: jeans, a T-shirt or sweatshirt, and a yellow knit cap that he rarely removes. He has two identical caps because one has a hole. A former colleague recommended him for the job, which led an editor to recruit him. Heffernan remembers the email as “I need somebody to write about shovels.” (Heffernan had just written a piece for Slate about how much he loved his coal shovel for clearing snow.)

His reviews show his versatility for assessing air and water purifiers, as well as door locks and artificial Christmas trees. (“If you’re planning on sticking with a tree for a long while, the unlit Balsam Hill 7.5-foot Unlit Classic Blue Spruce looks great and lasts for years.”)

Unlike many of his readers, Heffernan is not a big shopper. “I don’t want more shit in my house,” he says.

He is passionate about great devices and frustrated by lousy ones. He marvels at the smart design of the O-Cedar Quick Wring Bucket (“everything you could wish for in a mop bucket”) and he adores the Cuisipro Surface Glide 4-Sided Box Grater (“makes quick work of fussy tasks that would take me much longer if I used my knives”).

Heffernan can be equally passionate about the worst products. Don’t get him started about the Molekule purifier, which was so loud that he could hear its “jet-like whine” from 40 feet away on the other side of a heavy door. (He disliked the Molekule so much that he removed its innards and repurposed it as an umbrella holder now at Wirecutter’s main entrance.)

He takes his work seriously and emphasizes his independence. Although Wirecutter earns money when readers click links to the products he and other writers recommend, he says he feels no pressure to recommend or criticize anything. He doesn’t talk with people on the business side of Wirecutter and has no idea how much the company earns from his reviews.

“Trust is the only thing that makes this place survive,” he says.

Surprised by the new design

At last, it is time for the unboxing of the Mighty2.

The new model is something of a gamble for Coway, the South Korean company that makes the Mighties. The original has been Wirecutter’s top pick for 12 years, so the new model risks being a flop like New Coke or Caddyshack II. But the original Mighty has become dated because of its rounded corners and round buttons and a big round intake that looks like it came off a jet engine on an old Boeing. The time has come for a fresh design.

Heffernan cuts open the carton and lifts out the new model. He removes the wrapping and steps back to take a good look.

The Mighty2 is boxy, with sharp corners and less prominent buttons. The air intake is still round, but it lacks the almost cartoonish look of the original. The intake on the Mighty2 is subtle and less garish.

Heffernan is surprised by the new design. He puts the old and new Mighties on the table in the conference room. They are about the same size, but the rounded corners of the original make it look dated compared to the sleek design of the new one. For Heffernan, it is like an old friend has suddenly appeared at his door looking lean, clean-shaven and well-dressed. He says this “is more of a moment than I expected it to be. It kind of just feels wrong.”

He puts the Mighty2 on the floor, plugs in the cord and then goes through his routine lighting the matches and turning on the purifier. As it comes to life, it makes a few gentle beeps and a blue light comes on. He leaves the room to let it do its work.

When he returns about 30 minutes later, he notes the particle count and does some quick math. In the burned-dinner test, the Mighty2 has reduced particulates by 99.1%. It is essentially no different than the Mighty, which reduced it by 99.6%. That means his decision about the top pick will now depend on other factors — the buttons, the lights, noise and ease of use.

The new model “clearly is going to get strong consideration,” he says, laughing at his own serious answer. “I mean that seriously. I need to think more about it. I need to live with it longer.”

“Exceptional, efficient and easy to live with”

On May 4, Heffernan’s review was published on Wirecutter’s home page. A headline shouted the news: “For the first time in 10 years, we have a new favorite air purifier.”

Heffernan’s review got right to the point: The Mighty2 outperformed its older sib and was the new top pick. “It’s quieter, more energy efficient, and easier to adjust and maintain than the original Mighty it’s based on.”

Heffernan praised the new model’s modern style, energy efficiency, its intuitive control panel, the easy removal of its prefilter, and its new sound. “It’s a special kind of quiet…pleasantly reminiscent of cabin noise.”

Of course, the Mighty2 had a flaw, but not a dealbreaker. “The control panel is less tactile than we’d like.”

His 6,500-word review mentioned dozens of other models but emphasized his longtime admiration for the Mighty. “A legend for a reason,” said one subhead.

After the review was published, Heffernan discussed what it takes for a company to have a top product for so long. “The original Mighty is a great machine and had just proven itself time and again,” he said. “It’s a machine that does pretty much everything well and does it reliably for a long time.”

But the Mighty2 was better.

Heffernan said Coway listened to feedback over the past 10 years and methodically addressed the problems that bothered its users. “They really took their time to come out with a new one — and I think it shows.”

The Mighty2, he said, “is awesome.”

War has never been fought only on the ground. Clausewitz’s concept of the “fog of war” once described the uncertainty and confusion that cloud battlefield decision-making. Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary made the phrase a shorthand for the moral and informational ambiguities of modern conflict. But in the digital age, where war is also filmed, edited and promoted online, the fog is getting thicker, and wars are becoming more difficult to cover.

The conflict between the United States and Iran makes this point clearer than ever. As images, videos, and narratives flood social media, it is now becoming even harder to tell what’s real and what’s not, with both the rise of AI and the changes in digital platforms reshaping how war is seen and understood.

This is not the first conflict after the launch of ChatGPT. But it may be the first one where generative AI has played a key role in the information war.

In 2026, AI-generated content has surged across social media, both in volume and visibility. Fake drone footage, fabricated satellite images, edited clips, and synthetic statements are spreading widely, often reaching millions of viewers.

In earlier conflicts, such as the early Israel-Hamas war, misinformation still relied more on recycled or miscaptioned real footage. Now, even official accounts are openly sharing false content. To understand how these narratives spread (and how to cut through them) I spoke to five investigators, researchers, and journalists working on the front lines of this treacherous information environment.

A war of memes

The U.S. and Iran are waging a parallel struggle over narrative, image, and public perception online. In doing so, both camps have adopted a distinctive style of communication that speaks fluently the language of the internet: trolling.

What might once have been dismissed as online provocation has increasingly become part of the grammar of geopolitical messaging, where irony, mockery, and spectacle are used to project power, ridicule opponents, and shape how audiences interpret the conflict.

On the U.S. side, official White House accounts have posted videos featuring drone footage of bombings and strikes intercut with clips from films like “Top Gun” and “Braveheart,” as well as references to video games like Wii Sports.

The Iranian camp, by contrast, has fully embraced AI-generated media, producing Lego-style animated videos, obviously fabricated deepfakes, stylized music videos, and even old, unrelated funny clips as in this tweet from Iran’s embassy in Spain.

The U.S. projects a message of military dominance and authority. Iran mocks Trump and U.S. foreign policy, using humor and parody to undercut American authority, and adapting his messages to different audiences around the world.

While deepfakes and other types of disinformation are trying to deceive audiences, AI and non-AI slop pursue a different goal: Despite the obvious fakeness of it all, these images are used to push a specific narrative and worldview.

Emerson T. Brooking is director of strategy at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council and the author of the book Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media. He says Iranian propaganda and U.S. propaganda tap into two different sides of internet culture. But he thinks they both represent a new generation of war propaganda that started to take shape after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023.

Research supports the notion that this is not an entirely new phenomenon: In Ukraine, memes rallied around battlefield defiance and Russian embarrassment. But after October 7, memes were indeed used to justify retaliation, challenge sympathy for Gaza, or accuse opponents of selective outrage, making the attacks a recurring engine of propaganda.

This time both Iranians and Americans have been leaning into different internet aesthetic cultures while pushing for different narratives. For example, Iran has presented itself as a global defender against U.S. aggression, painting Trump as a “puppet” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while taunting him about the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“The White House is leaning into a different internet cultural aesthetic, with sizzle reels and supercuts that incorporate video game imagery and periodic uses of AI,” said Brooking. “There is no story in that content. It is a series of explosions or acts of destruction. The subtext is: If you do not do what we say, we will do more of this to you.”

Brooking points to Iran’s famous Lego videos as the real innovation of the war. “They are so novel that people keep watching them,” he told me. “They are actually quite long, running several minutes. But the point is that they are telling a story, and you only really get it if you sit through them.”

This inflation of memes, parody and slopaganda presents a real shift in information warfare. As combat is presented through playful or entertaining lenses, it can dehumanize and desensitize the public to civilian harm. That’s the view of Sam Dubberley, director of the Technology, Rights & Investigations Division at Human Rights Watch. Dubberley and his team use open-source investigation tools (often known as OSINT) to verify, expose and document human rights abuses.

I recently met Dubberley at a neighborhood coffee shop in Oxford. During our conversation, he shared his concerns about this trend. The rise of memes in war is not an issue in terms of verifying the events they investigate, but it can present a human rights issue.

“Our great fear is a ramping up of the rhetoric of war as a game,” he said. “For us, the important thing in conflict is to minimize civilian harm as much as possible. But if you are using memes, video games or Lego videos, war doesn’t seem real. If you’re having this kind of memeification of war, the rhetoric then ramps up, which could lead to more conflict and more civilian harm.”

Alexios Mantzarlis is a true pioneer of fact-checking. He co-founded Italian fact-checker Pagella Politica and was the founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which he led from 2015 to 2018. He recently founded Indicator Media, an outlet that specializes in open-source reporting and online investigations, as well as studying and exposing digital manipulation.

Mantzarlis told me that AI-generated content is most effective and most misleading when it appears alongside real material, because people are less able to scrutinize it in the quick, distracted way in which they usually consume information online. Even if viewers could recognize something as fake if they paused to examine it, in practice people just scroll down and take in a quick impression of what they see.

“Unfortunately, for most people, even the Iran war doesn’t really matter that much,” he said. “So, as they scroll down, [AI-generated content] just sticks around in the back of their mind whether it is realistic or not.”

The liar’s dividend

Governments are not using AI just for trolling. More notably, and perhaps more insidiously, they are also deploying it to spread false narrative and manipulate global audiences.

Propaganda has always been part of war. But according to the sources I spoke with, AI and social media have amplified it to an almost unfathomable scale. It’s not just AI slop. Bad-faith actors are using these tools to fabricate military footage and even deepfake images of the war’s victims.

The U.S. attack that killed more than a hundred Iranian girls in a school in Minab became perhaps the clearest example of this. After the strike, false and AI-generated images circulated alongside authentic images of the victims and their graves, making even real evidence easier to doubt.

Mahsa Alimardani, associate director of the Technology Threats and Opportunities program at Witness, has seen this in her own investigations. Her team has received an unprecedented number of requests for AI forensic examinations in recent weeks. She says that the problem we are seeing in Iran is the structural collapse of trust in authentic content and documentation.

“What we’re seeing in Iran is a textbook case: Opposition media and diaspora accounts dismissed verified images of civilian casualties from the Minab school strike as AI-generated or recycled, based on nothing more than aesthetic judgments,” she explained. “‘The lighting is too good.’ ‘It looks like a performance.’ No forensic methodology, just vibes. And those claims spread widely before fact-checkers and other investigators confirmed the images were authentic.”

Alimardani is Iranian herself, so she has also been receiving requests from friends, asking her to verify what they see online amid the fog of war.

“Iran is this laboratory for the worst types of pollution that can exist in an information space,” she told me. “This is a laboratory for us to see worst-case scenarios, especially the kind my team at Witness has been talking about for a long time: how AI is really going to affect what we trust and what we believe.”

Manisha Ganguly operates in a similar space. She is the visual forensics lead at The Guardian and a pioneer in using OSINT to investigate war crimes in conflicts. While she doesn’t rely on single artifacts or sources for her own work, AI-generated images remain a concern because they can make false or misleading information appear credible.

“The influx of AI-generated satellite imagery is allowing state-aligned actors to cosmetically validate official accounts, or knowingly, incorrectly apply OSINT to align with ideological narratives,” said Ganguly.

She offered the example of The Tehran Times, a state-linked English-language newspaper that shared a post on X with satellite images of “an American radar in Qatar” destroyed in an Iranian drone strike, which was found to be AI-generated. The post was viewed almost a million times under the banner of what seems to be a legitimate news outlet.

That example points to a broader problem. Once AI-generated images circulate under the authority of seemingly legitimate outlets, they do not just spread falsehoods but also erode trust in authentic evidence.

Alimardani argues that AI has introduced a new kind of fog to war, one in which real photos can be dismissed as fake and fake images can be used to depict real events. Once even a single fabricated image is exposed, it can be used to undermine trust in genuine evidence as well, making reality itself harder to verify and even real evidence of war crimes easier to deny.

“The lies spread much faster and we haven’t quite tackled how to deal with this. This has created just a lack of trust for everyone,” she told me.

Dubberley from Human Rights Watch said the growing volume of deepfakes has not fundamentally changed how investigators examine potential war crimes, but it has made the work slower and more difficult. Investigators can quickly identify obvious fakes. But the wider spread of false content causes broader public doubt, creates more noise to sort through, and makes it harder to establish the facts of what actually happened.

“While it doesn’t affect our investigations, it slows us down,” Dubberley said. “It makes people question everything and it takes us longer to pierce through this fog of the noise online and in social media. That’s what’s challenging.”

The slowdown matters beyond public debunking. Organizations like Human Rights Watch and Bellingcat are also preserving digital evidence for possible future legal proceedings. AI adds another layer of authentication: investigators must now show not only where and when an image was taken, but whether it was synthetic or manipulated.

How to fight propaganda

Most of these narratives spread online. But under which conditions do they become mainstream? Online platforms are not just channels for distribution. They are also part of the machinery that helps create, shape, and amplify this kind of content.

Brooking, the investigator from DFRLab at the Atlantic Council, said algorithms are central to this process. “No social media platform today allows you to discover content solely based on who you follow or what your stated interests are,” he said. “Algorithms have been instrumental. You would not have this kind of information conflict without them.”

That makes provenance — the ability to verify where an image came from and how it has been altered — increasingly important. But Alimardani said standards such as C2PA are not yet widely deployed enough to help most people during fast-moving conflicts. “Most phones don’t sign images at capture, most models do not embed provenance when they create content, and most platforms don’t display provenance signals to users,” she said. “So in terms of the immediate information environment around, say, the Iran conflict, provenance isn’t yet a factor.”

If adopted widely, provenance would not stop misinformation from spreading, Alimardani said, but it could give authentic content a verifiable chain of custody. The bigger issue, she said, is the collapse of trust in authentic documentation, as it happened in the case of the Minab school. “This is what we call the liar’s dividend. The mere existence of synthetic media gives people — and especially bad actors — a rhetorical tool to dismiss real evidence,” she said.

Mantzarlis from Indicator Media stressed this is an especially difficult moment for information integrity. Platforms have rolled back some of their interventions and pulled back support for journalism at the worst possible time. Even so, he argued, platforms still have a responsibility to reduce harm, and this starts with recognizing that not all AI content poses the same kind of threat.

Mantzarlis drew a distinction between AI content that is deliberately deceptive and AI content that is merely low-quality or spammy, and argued each requires a different response.

“We need takedowns, labels, and explicit interventions for the truly fake material,” he told me. “But we also need some broader agreement to contain the spaces in which visibly fake but still harmful slop exists — either because it is hateful, or because it is propaganda pushed by state media or authoritarian regimes. It may not violate platform policies, but that does not mean it should be force-fed and available to everyone at all times.”

Platforms are not the only actors making verification more difficult. Satellite imagery coming from the Middle East is currently being restricted or limited by the companies providing it. Many of the investigators I spoke to found this deeply concerning, since those restrictions make it harder to verify events on the ground and create more room for deception. The lack of reliable imagery makes it far more difficult to understand what is happening on the ground.

“With the new imagery restrictions being imposed by these commercial satellite providers, this process [of verification] is significantly delayed and is harming public interest reporting,” Ganguly said.

Despite these challenges, journalists, investigators and fact-checkers still serve as an evidentiary authority tasked with piercing through this AI-powered fog of war, and provide a counterweight to state-sponsored propaganda.

Many of the experts I spoke to mentioned that the best defense against AI-driven disinformation is still basic reporting: being on the ground, talking to trusted sources, and understanding what is credible.

Mantzarlis argued that, for journalists who cannot access a place directly, that means being transparent about uncertainty, sharing what is known and unknown before full verification is complete, and using available AI and other technological tools.

“It is a continuous kind of escalation between defenders and their opponents. Fact-checkers, journalists, and platforms are always going to be playing catch-up. But that does not mean they have to be miles behind,” he said.