DigitalMANIPULATIVE

Influence Operations for Hire

What it is

Marketing, PR, and so-called dark PR firms that run fake-account networks and front media for paying clients, which hides the true sponsor behind a commercial contract and makes attribution to any state or party much harder.

How it works

Outsourcing gives a sponsor two layers of protection. Technically, the accounts, servers, and working hours lead to a private company, possibly in a third country, that serves many clients at once. Legally and politically, the sponsor can say it hired a communications firm and did not know the methods. For analysts this breaks the comfortable chain from network to operator to government. A platform can often attribute a network to a firm with confidence, because firms reuse staff accounts, payment methods, and infrastructure, yet be unable to say who paid. Meta's 2021 threat report describes the growth of this market and notes that the company names the operator it can prove and does not name clients it cannot. The Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika have documented the same firms working for opposing sides, and both state and non-state clients. The practical lesson for readers is that location and language tell you where the contractor sits, not whose interests were served, and that a private-sector finding is not evidence of a state campaign without more.

Real-world examples

  • •In May 2019 Facebook removed 265 accounts and pages run by the Israeli firm Archimedes Group, which had targeted elections in several African, Latin American, and Southeast Asian countries; Facebook attributed the network to the firm and banned it, without naming clients.
  • •In August 2019 Facebook attributed networks focused on the Middle East and North Africa to marketing firms in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates; in 2020 it removed accounts linked to the U.S. firm Rally Forge, which worked for Turning Point USA and another client.
  • •In February 2023 the Forbidden Stories consortium reported on an Israeli group it called Team Jorge, whose operator claimed on hidden camera to have worked on dozens of elections using an automated persona platform; the claims of effect were the seller's own.
  • •The Stanford Internet Observatory's takedown analyses have covered PR firms running inauthentic networks for political actors in countries across the spectrum, including a 2020 network tied to the Canadian-registered firm Estraterra focused on Latin American politics.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●Clients are responsible for the methods of the firms they hire; ignorance purchased by contract is not innocence.
  • ●Analysts should attribute to the firm when that is what the evidence shows and resist pressure to name a government.
  • ●Treat vendors' sales claims about their own effectiveness as marketing.
  • ●Legitimate communications work discloses its sponsor; concealment of the client is the defining breach.

How to defend against it

  • ►When a report names a firm, read for the sentence about clients. If none is named, no sponsor has been established, whatever the headline says.
  • ►Do not read the contractor's country as the sponsor's country.
  • ►Look at who consistently benefited from the network's content across time, and treat that as a lead, not a conclusion.
  • ►For local news sites and grassroots pages with no named staff, check domain registration history, shared analytics or advertising identifiers, and whether sister sites exist in other countries.
  • ►Support disclosure rules for political advertising and consultancy, which attack the concealment directly.

References

  1. Meta (Gleicher, N., Franklin, M., Agranovich, D., Nimmo, B., Belogolova, O., & Torrey, M.) (2021). Threat Report: The State of Influence Operations 2017-2020. Meta (Facebook), May 2021 · link
    The growth of commercial influence-operation providers and the practice of attributing to the operator that can be proven.
  2. Gleicher, N. (Facebook Newsroom) (2019). Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior From Israel. Facebook Newsroom, May 16, 2019
    The Archimedes Group takedown and attribution to a commercial entity.
  3. Forbidden Stories consortium (2023). Story Killers: Team Jorge. Forbidden Stories and partner outlets including The Guardian, Le Monde, and Haaretz, February 2023
    Undercover reporting on a private election-manipulation vendor and its self-reported client work.
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