“A virtual event with Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller was canceled on Thursday after the Zoom video conference was ‘hijacked’ by a participant who displayed pornographic images,” Reuters reports.

Matteo Wong: “The field of artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly since the 2018 deepfake panic, and synthetic media is once again the center of attention. The technology buzzword of 2022 is generative AI: models that seem to display humanlike creativity, turning text prompts into astounding images or commanding English at the level of a mediocre undergraduate.”

“These and other advances have experts concerned that a deepfake apocalypse is still very much on the horizon. Fake video and audio might once again be poised to corrupt the most basic ways in which people process reality—or what’s left of it.”

“Nearly 20 months after allegations of unwanted sexual advances derailed his campaign for New York City mayor, Scott Stringer sued one of his accusers for defamation on Monday, arguing that she smeared his reputation with falsehoods and misrepresentations,” the New York Times reports.

“A judge on Tuesday ordered Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, two right-wing conspiracy theorists behind robocalls that sought to intimidate Black voters here out of casting mail-in ballots in the 2020 presidential election, to spend 500 hours registering voters in low-income neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C., area,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports.

BuzzFeed News: “On Wednesday morning, Sandy Gilson noticed four political signs, including one supporting Senate candidate John Fetterman, missing from her front lawn — the second time in two weeks this had happened. When Gilson, a longtime resident of Tredyffrin Township, an affluent Philadelphia suburb where she serves as a committee member for her precinct, drove around her neighborhood, she noticed more signs — all supporting Democrats ahead of next month’s midterm elections — gone too.”

“But when she decided to file a report with the local police department, the cops already knew where her signs would be — in a large commercial dumpster behind a strip mall in the area. How? Because someone had put an Apple AirTag on one of the signs.”

“The mayor of a provincial French city is being investigated by the police after it was alleged that he blackmailed his deputy after setting him up in an encounter with a male escort,” the Times of London reports.

Monkey Cage: “The media has routinely reported on these falsehoods, making it seem like misinformation is rampant in politics. But are candidates for Congress actually sharing more misinformation in 2022 than 2020?”

“Yes, according to our analysis of congressional candidates’ Facebook posts. We found that politicians in the 2022 election are sharing more links to unreliable news sources than they did in 2020, and the increase appears to be driven by nonincumbent Republican candidates.”

“A third candidate for public office has come to forward to say a sheriff on Florida’s Space Coast offered help in getting a job in exchange for leaving a race and backing his favored candidate,” the AP reports.

Tim Miller has a good look at the Democratic efforts to prop up extreme candidates in Republican primaries.

“They’re playing with matches, and they’ve got lighter fluid on their hands. If one of these political candidates win, it’ll be arson.”

— GOP strategist Doug Heye, quoted by the Washington Post, on Democrats boosting extreme right candidates in Republican primaries.

Jonathan Bernstein: “That doesn’t mean that Democrats shouldn’t contest the seat, which is in a western Michigan district where Democrats seem to be strong, and is therefore one of a small number of pickup opportunities for the party. Of course they should.”

“But the case for trying to take Meijer out in a primary by helping him to lose to an extremist is a lot weaker. Incentives matter in politics, and if Democrats treat those who stood up for democracy when it mattered the same way they treat those who didn’t, what kinds of incentives will that create? The more that those who stood up to Trump lose in primaries, the more Republican party actors will believe in Trump’s influence, which in turn will make him that much more influential within the party.”

Frederick Frazier (R), a Texas House candidate backed by Donald Trump “has been indicted on a charge of impersonating a public servant,” the Texas Tribune reports.

“Jestine Iannotti, one of three ‘ghost’ candidates who ran as independents for Florida Senate seats in 2020, has been arrested on several criminal charges, alongside a political consultant involved in launching her campaign and Seminole County’s Republican Party chairman,” the Orlando Sentinel reports.

Ashley Biden’s diary — kept as she recovered from addiction — was passed around at a Donald Trump fundraiser in September 2020 at the home of a Trump donor who ultimately helped steer it to Project Veritas, the New York Times reports.

New information about the case suggests that the effort to make the diary public reached deeper into Trump’s circle than previously known.

New York Times: “Mr. Prince’s role in the effort, which has not been previously disclosed, sheds further light on how a group of ultraconservative Republicans employed spycraft to try to manipulate the American political landscape. Mr. Prince — a former C.I.A. contractor who is best known as the founder of the private military firm Blackwater and whose sister, Betsy DeVos, was Mr. Trump’s education secretary — has drawn scrutiny over the years for Blackwater’s record of violence around the world and his subsequent ventures training and arming foreign forces.”

“His willingness to support Mr. Seddon’s operation is fresh evidence of his engagement in political espionage projects at home during a period when he was an informal adviser to Trump administration officials.”