As Donald Trump’s administration bows to Russia in disturbing ways, top MAGA influencers in the “America First” movement are getting in on the Russophilia by increasingly wedding themselves to leaders and nations that are effectively under Vladimir Putin’s thumb.

And a newly announced conference in Serbia is a prime example.

On Monday, the Conservative Political Action Conference revealed plans to hold a convention in Belgrade in November. Other recent CPAC conventions abroad have effectively served as authoritarian pep rallies, and the Serbia gathering seems like it will be no different. CPAC is touting an appearance by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who has earned the moniker “Little Putin” for his deference to the Russian strongman.

Announcing the inaugural CPAC Balkans — Belgrade, Serbia, November 18–21, 2026.

President Aleksandar Vučić will headline our first-ever conference in Southeastern Europe, bringing together conservative leaders from across the region united around sovereignty, faith, family, free… pic.twitter.com/J4OpPU5ryz

— CPAC (@CPAC) October 19, 2026

It’s notable that this convention was announced amid reporting, including from MS NOW’s David Rohde, about former Trump campaign officials’ advocacy on behalf of pro-Putin Serbian nationalists.

Vučić is comparable to Trump in that he is viewed by some as a Putin stooge who has opposed sanctions on Russia and effectively aided the Kremlin’s efforts to destabilize the European Union. And, like Trump, he has been the standard-bearer for an increasingly illiberal political party, one that has sought to manipulate electoral systems in its favor.

Given all of this, it’s no wonder why MAGA world adores Serbia’s current leadership: This is a movement broadly infatuated with authoritarianism. But it’s noteworthy that, much like with Russia, even some conservatives are wary of Serbia’s antidemocratic backsliding.

Ahead of Serbia’s parliamentary elections this weekend, a bipartisan group of seven senators — including Republicans from Iowa, Mississippi and North Carolina — issued a warning about Vučić’s party.

“Unfortunately, both Serbian and international election observers found serious infringements to the integrity of the previous parliamentary elections in 2022. We are now seeing similarly troubling signs ahead of the October 25 vote,” the senators said in a statement. “Reports of unlawful wiretapping of opposition members and attempts to discredit and undermine election observation missions are deeply concerning, and Serbian authorities must ensure a level playing field for all parties and open access to the polls for all citizens.”

It’s telling of the MAGA movement’s broad disdain for democracy that one of its most prominent activist groups is openly choosing to associate with such a party. And it speaks to a movement that seems more obsessed with expanding its influence in foreign lands than addressing the numerous crises their dear leader has created for Americans at home.

The post Republicans are taking CPAC to Serbia as the party bows to Putin appeared first on MS NOW.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to test dangerous anti-vaccine conspiracy theories on African babies appears to be in doubt after U.S.-backed researchers in Guinea-Bissau had their offices raided by government officials.

Kennedy has been a staunch supporter of and has allocated federal funds for a controversial experiment that Dutch scientists have been trying to conduct, denying thousands of babies in Guinea-Bissau doses of the hepatitis B vaccine during their first six weeks after birth. The study has garnered comparisons to the racist Tuskegee experiment, and the controversy around this proposed test has put a spotlight on Kennedy’s history of promoting racist pseudoscience, including a claim that Black people and white people shouldn’t be on the same vaccine schedules.

Last week, officials in Guinea-Bissau challenged claims that the experiment had been approved, and now it appears to have been stopped in its tracks.

The Guardian reported on Tuesday:

Controversial vaccine researchers who have been praised by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, had their offices in Guinea-Bissau raided by judicial police, who seized doses of hepatitis B vaccines, officials said on Facebook. The researchers have been at the heart of an ongoing dispute over research on African newborns, supported by $1.6m from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and matched by the Pershing Square Foundation and the Bluebell Foundation for a total of $3.2m. The police search took place on Monday, involving “investigative procedures aimed at clarifying the circumstances related to the said batch of vaccines”, according to the social media post, which was translated from Portuguese. The announcement noted that seizing the immunizations did not point to “irregularities in the quality, safety, or effectiveness of the vaccines”.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.

But the prospects for the study moving forward seem grim, to say the least. In a LinkedIn post, one of the researchers, Frederik Schaltz-Buchholzer, said on Wednesday that “it is now clear” that the study “will not move forward,” adding that “we were not given the necessary governmental approval.”

When it comes to its relations with Africa, the Trump administration has taken a fundamentally racist approach, seeking to exploit and strip of the continent of its resources, from precious minerals to health data.

And while the administration has seen successes on that front, officials in Guinea-Bissau seem unwilling to comply.

The post RFK Jr.’s push for anti-vaccine experiment on African babies was never a good idea appeared first on MS NOW.

Meta is finally being forced to pay for its near-decade-old falsehoods about the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw millions of users’ data harvested for political purposes.

On Wednesday, a judge in New Mexico ordered the social media company to pay a $25 billion penalty following a jury’s determination in late September that the company’s executives broke state laws with knowingly false statements they made in the wake of the scandal.

“The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act,” New Mexico State District Court Judge Francis Mathew wrote in a court filing.

To refresh your memory, the scandal involved Cambridge Analytica — a political firm financed in part by pro-Trump benefactors — harvesting private data from tens of millions of Facebook users, which was eventually conveyed to members of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and used for political targeting. To be clear, this case was an entirely separate trial from the other landmark trial Meta lost in New Mexico, which found the company liable for placing profits over consumers and knowingly putting children at risk of harms it knew to exist on its platforms.

As Tech Policy Press reported, the false statements deemed willfully deceptive by the jury include comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and other executives about things like the company’s response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, users’ data protections, and misinformation and hate speech on its platforms.

For example, the statements include comments from both Zuckerberg and Sandberg about when access to users’ private data was closed off. They also include a comment from Zuckerberg in 2017 saying that Meta — then known as Facebook — had “always taken down any post that promotes or celebrates hate crimes or acts of terrorism.” Another comment deemed willfully deceptive came from Zuckerberg in 2020, when he claimed there were no exceptions for politicians who broke the platforms’ rules about content that “may lead to violence or deprive people of their right to vote.” The jury also found willfully deceptive a 2020 comment from former Meta executive Nick Clegg, who claimed that Meta “doesn’t profit from hate” and that the company applied a “zero tolerance approach” to hateful posts on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta, which has allegedly assisted the Trump administration’s efforts to suppress free speech and target critics of federal officials, disputed the jury’s ruling in September, vowing to appeal it and framing its actions as a free speech matter.

As the Santa Fe New Mexican reported: “‘Meta’s platforms are forums for free expression. We have a First Amendment right to manage those platforms in a way we believe best serves the interests of our community,’ the spokesperson wrote in an email. ‘This means prioritizing free speech, protecting our users’ information and giving them control over their data.’”

The post Meta ordered to pay $25 billion over data privacy deception appeared first on MS NOW.

Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, some of the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.

Democrats decry push for AI robocalls

Democrats are fighting Republican-led efforts to get the Federal Communications Commission to approve the use of artificial intelligence-generated robocalls ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections. The conservative Club for Growth is behind a proposal currently under consideration by the FCC and its pro-Trump chair that would authorize robocalls like the Joe Biden deepfake in 2024, which was intended to suppress voter participation in New Hampshire’s Democratic presidential primary.

The FCC could issue a ruling by month’s end, The Associated Press reported. If approved, the move could allow conservatives to bombard the public with AI-enabled misinformation in the lead-up to Election Day — and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is warning the public about what’s at stake.

“The FCC MUST reject the request made by a Republican group that would allow political groups to make robocalls to cell phones without people’s permission,” he wrote on X, adding: “Putting Americans in a position where they can be fed misinformation through AI-generated deception ahead of a crucial election is yet another attempt by Republicans to mislead voters.”

The FCC MUST reject the request made by a Republican group that would allow political groups to make robocalls to cell phones without people’s permission.

Putting Americans in a position where they can be fed misinformation through AI-generated deception ahead of a crucial…

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) October 19, 2026

States sue OpenAI

Several states have filed lawsuits accusing OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, of violating consumer protection laws and putting users at risk with its chatbot — which has been used to plan school shootings. I wrote about the lawsuits and the increasing scrutiny toward OpenAI. (A spokesperson said the company has “built industry-leading age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack.”)

Read more at MS NOW.

FBI arrests OpenAI employee

The FBI arrested a Saudi national who was working for OpenAI and accused him of illegally planting a recording device in one of the company’s executive conference rooms.

Read more at Tech Crunch.

CBS News’ election coverage

Some staffers at CBS News reportedly have complained that Bari Weiss, their Trump-friendly editor-in-chief, has urged employees to pursue stories about progressive candidates that have been ginned up by conservatives on social media, such as the recent disinformation that MAGA world promoted about James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas.

Read more at Semafor.

Meta’s machinations

Meta’s temporary suspension of the primary Instagram account for last weekend’s No Kings demonstrations is fueling concerns about the company helping enable authoritarian movements. I explained why the controversy involving the anti-Trump protests, combined with accusations about the company’s role in Brazil’s elections, proves that Meta hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt.

Read more at MS NOW.

Musk and the midterms

MS NOW’s Soorin Kim wrote about how Elon Musk is unleashing a deluge of money to boost Republicans in Texas and elsewhere as the midterms threaten to put the GOP’s control of Congress — and the spigot that Republicans have used to shower Musk with federal benefits — at risk.

Read more at MS NOW.

Trump administration’s Ukraine policy

As President Donald Trump continues to bow to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in disturbing ways, members of his administration — chiefly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — are trying to downplay allegations that Team Trump has sought to hinder Ukraine’s efforts to fend off Russia’s invasion, such as by not sharing information and by delaying the delivery of crucial weapons systems.

Read more at Politico.

‘Digital blackface’

A MAGA-linked super PAC is has been accused of “digital blackface” for ads in Ohio’s Senate race promoting a Black socialist candidate whose campaign could draw votes from the Democratic nominee, Sherrod Brown.

Read more at Axios.

Election disinformation in Arizona

MAGA conspiracy theorists promoted a video lobbing baseless accusations of potential election misconduct at the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. There was no reason to believe the claims were true, but that didn’t stop Maricopa election official Justin Heap from trying to get the FBI involved. The fiasco spotlights the MAGA movement’s conspiracy theory-fueled push to establish a pretext for federal intervention in the midterms.

Read more at MS NOW.

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