Analysts and US officials say the disinformation-for-hire industry is booming, as influencers get approached by back-alley firms to spread falsehoods
Back-alley firms meddle in elections and promote falsehoods on behalf of clients who can claim deniability, escalating our era of unreality.
New York TimesMax Fisher
Context & Ripple Effects
The [[a:949428|global market for PR and marketing firms selling fake accounts, false narratives, and pseudo news sites]] was already mapped out a year before this report; what has changed is the labor model. Back-alley operators now recruit influencers directly as their distribution layer, letting clients buy falsehoods with built-in deniability.
The defensive side of this market has been hollow from the start: reporting found that [[a:948870|almost no political campaigns, including presidential ones, had teams to spot and push back on disinformation]], and platform expertise later leaked outward when companies began hiring laid-off and departed Twitter misinformation specialists to manage liability.
First-order effects
Influencers are being converted into an on-demand propaganda channel — approached directly by firms that pay them to spread client-directed falsehoods while the contracting party stays off the record.
Clients gain a deniability structure that formal media buys cannot offer: the influencer, not the sponsor, owns the byline on the falsehood.
Second-order effects
Demand for people who understand platform manipulation rises on both sides — buyers recruit influencers, while companies and campaigns scramble for scarce ex-platform misinformation specialists like those who left Twitter.
Campaigns that lacked disinformation-response teams face adversaries whose production costs keep falling, widening an asymmetry that researchers flagged before the last US cycle.
Third-order effects
If influence-for-hire keeps scaling ahead of campaign defenses, election risk shifts from single viral posts to coordinated purchased narratives — the scenario experts warned about heading into 2024, where a deepfake-timed piece of disinformation could have calamitous impact in high-stakes votes.
The industry's deniability-first structure points toward a persistent gray market that regulation will struggle to reach, since the visible actor (the influencer) and the paying client are deliberately separated.
The trend: Disinformation is professionalizing into a two-tier market — deniable buyers outsourcing to influencer labor — growing faster than the thin defensive capacity of campaigns and platforms.
I reported on the booming shadow industry of dark PR firms that spread disinformation for hire A DC lobbying shop boosting right-wing pols in LatAm. A Russian comms firm paying YouTubers to post anti-vaxx conspiracies. I talked to a couple. It got weird. https://www.nytimes.com/.…
(this has been a big problem for over a decade, speaking personally /Craig) Disinformation for Hire, a Shadow Industry, Is Quietly Booming Via @Max_Fisher https://www.nytimes.com/...
This week, I asked three hospitalized, unvaccinated COVID patients where they get their news from. The answers: 1.) Facebook 2.) Google 3.) a network of people/experts from all walks of life who communicate through a text chain and share what they know
A mysterious marketing agency secretly offered to pay social media stars to spread disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines. Fazze is a part of AdNow, which is a digital marketing company, registered in both Russia and the UK. https://www.bbc.com/...
It's about time we stopped talking about disinformation as if it's some kind of unfortunate but natural consequence of social media's “viral” dynamics, and started treating it as an industry: one enabled by platform economies but exploited by nefarious political actors. https://t…
It's pretty fun that our entire media will go after your aunt on Facebook but won't throw a single question at the WH Press Sec about WH messaging on the efficacy of vaccines while they all walk around still wearing masks.
Important report from @Max_Fisher. A few notes: 1) this is amplified by unbridled data collection, microtargeting and content commoditization 2) it's been 4+yrs since FB got away with burying its first million+ record purge of “spamouflage” so here we are. 3) CA *bought* FB data.…
Agree, Trolling-as-a-service - if you've heard of them in the news, those are just the ones that are not very good or worked for leaky clients. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Receiving daily emails from distressed vaccinated individuals who cannot convince their loved ones to get the COVID19 vaccine. Most often older parents of an adult, sometimes pregnant daughter, or adolescent. The antiscience disinformation empire has caused a national tragedy
works there, all of them, are vaccinated. The indifference of @IngrahamAngle @TuckerCarlson @seanhannity @rupertmurdoch, and Mark Zuckerberg to the death and suffering they have caused is evidence of their immorality and sociopathy.
How can we act like “disinfo” is a “back-alley” threat when the Iraq War, the surveillance state, and immunity for actors behind the Global Financial Crisis all happened? Well, if the same MSM that enabled all that is telling hundreds of millions that this is indeed the case. htt…
Who would have ever thought that Unreality would be profitable? Not lying scam artists out for self profit Entire companies promoting lies for their clients. Do the have culpability? Can they be sued? #ONEV1 #FreshVoicesRise https://twitter.com/...
@DavidBegnaud Every single major news organization in America, including the New York Times, has multiple social media accounts for sharing news and information. It's perfectly possible to read Time, WaPo, NBC, WSJ, Business Week, PBS and NPR on Facebook and a lot of people do.
behind at the clinic door. It is time for the majority, through the power of the private sector and the proper application of incentives to bring this to heel. Lastly, there is a vaccine mandate imposed by @newscorps on @FoxNews. Every person lying to the American people who
For more insight into where we are headed with disinformation for hire, @jonathan_c_ong has been my go to on this issue: https://items.ssrc.org/... https://twitter.com/...
This argues - as do many other civilizational risks of social media - for Sec 230 reform that heavily penalizes *any* use of algorithms for promotion or user/group interconnection Want 230 protection? Then you're basically a 1983 BBS. Mostly free speech, but ZERO “free reach” htt…
To expose evil conspiracy theories, you do have to air them. Many in the media just thought the Covid Denial movement would just go away if denied the oxygen of publicity. But they festered in Facebook groups and astroturfed cocoons. You have to fumigate them. No other way
The data doesn't lie. Hate speech, misinfo and polarization drive engagement on @Facebook's platform. However, Facebook has wasted time on claims of “anti-conservative bias” rather than actually fixing the issues on its platform. (1/2) https://www.npr.org/...