A look at the worldwide industry of PR and marketing firms offering disinformation services including fake accounts, false narratives, and pseudo news sites
Peng Kuan Chin pulled out his phone, eager to show the future of online manipulation. — Unseen servers began crawling the web for Chinese articles and posts. Tweets: @craigsilverman , @talyagoldberg , @jovefrancisco , @jenmercieca , @lizcarolan , @peterjukes , and @vaughanbell Tweets: Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : NEW: Around the world, a new breed of shady PR firms is offering professional disinformation services. Fake accounts, trolling, AI-generated articles to manipulate search rankings — it's all available for the right price. A look inside this growing threat: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Talya Goldberg / @talyagoldberg : madness. 'customers have money, and i don't care what they buy,' he said. they're purchasing an end-to-end online manipulation system, which can influence people on a massive scale - resulting in votes cast, products sold, and perceptions changed.' https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Jove Francisco / @jovefrancisco : “Nowhere is the rise of black PR firms more intertwined with marketing and politics than in the Philippines. Many legitimate-seeming agencies here offer black PR services that include fake social media accounts, websites, and coordinated harassment campaigns.” https://twitter.com/... Dr. Jennifer Mercieca / @jenmercieca : “Around the globe, politicians, parties, governments, and other clients hire what is known in the industry as “black PR” firms to spread lies and manipulate online discourse.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Liz Carolan / @lizcarolan : For sale: information chaos “If 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers pushing fake news & Russian trolls, 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations to anyone willing to pay” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Peter Jukes / @peterjukes : The punishment for Cambridge Analytica and Russian troll farms was so minimal and the financial and political rewards (including Trump and Brexit) so great - for sure they have become a role model rather than a warning https://twitter.com/... Vaughan Bell / @vaughanbell : Disinformation For Hire: How A New Breed Of PR Firms Is Selling Lies Online https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Not sure they're a new breed. Commercial information operations are as old as the media itself.
Context & Ripple Effects
BuzzFeed News maps a service economy that grew up in the shadow of [[a:938486|Psy-Group, the Israeli private intelligence firm that ran avatar-based influence campaigns before shutting down in early 2018]] and the broader Cambridge Analytica fallout: what was once bespoke political espionage has been productized into off-the-shelf disinformation packages — fake accounts, trolling fleets, AI-generated articles, and pseudo news sites — sold by black PR firms to politicians, governments, and parties.
The arc since then confirms the report was early rather than alarmist: by mid-2021 analysts and US officials described the disinformation-for-hire industry as booming, with influencers recruited by back-alley intermediaries, and investigations traced state-scale operations like China's social media propaganda machine running on private content contractors feeding Facebook and Twitter.
First-order effects
- Politicians, governments, and parties gain a turnkey manipulation supply chain — fake accounts, coordinated harassment, and pseudo news sites purchasable without in-house capability, lowering the barrier from intelligence-firm budgets to ordinary PR retainers.
Second-order effects
- Facebook, Twitter, and Google absorb the enforcement cost, forced to distinguish paid astroturf from organic discourse while legitimate PR agencies face pressure to distance themselves from black-pricing competitors in their own industry.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, influence work consolidates into a two-tier market — deniable contractor networks for states and parties above, gig-economy influencers below — pushing regulators toward treating paid manipulation as an auditable industry rather than a platform moderation problem alone.
The trend: Disinformation is shifting from ad hoc campaigns run by intelligence-adjacent firms like Psy-Group toward a professionalized, globally distributed for-hire market built on private contractors and platform arbitrage.