In May, several French and German social media influencers received a strange proposal.
A London-based public relations agency wanted to pay them to promote messages on behalf of a client. A polished three-page document detailed what to say and on which platforms to say it.
But it asked the influencers to push not beauty products or vacation packages, as is typical, but falsehoods tarring Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine. Stranger still, the agency, Fazze, claimed a London address where there is no evidence any such company exists.
Some recipients posted screenshots of the offer. Exposed, Fazze scrubbed its social media accounts. That same week, Brazilian and Indian influencers posted videos echoing Fazze’s script to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
The scheme appears to be part of a secretive industry that security analysts and American officials say is exploding in scale: disinformation for hire.
Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies.
They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and push viral conspiracies, mostly on social media. And they offer clients something precious: deniability.
“Disinfo-for-hire actors being employed by government or government-adjacent actors is growing and serious,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, calling it “a boom industry.”
Similar campaigns have been recently found promoting India’s ruling party, Egyptian foreign policy aims and political figures in Bolivia and Venezuela.
A wave of anti-American posts in Iraq, seemingly organic, were tracked to a public relations company that was separately accused of faking anti-government sentiment in Israel.
The trend emerged after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, experts say. Cambridge, a political consulting firm linked to members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was found to have harvested data on millions of Facebook users.
The controversy drew attention to methods common among social media marketers. Cambridge used its data to target hyper-specific audiences with tailored messages. It tested what resonated by tracking likes and shares.
The episode taught a generation of consultants and opportunists that there was big money in social media marketing for political causes, all disguised as organic activity.
Ahh, the stench of dark free speech in the morning. There's nothing quite like it. But, plausible deniability comes pretty close.
Questions: How can democracy and truth defend themselves against the endless onslaught of lies, deceit, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation (fear, anger, bigotry, distrust, hate, intolerance, etc.), motivated reasoning and the like? How can any defense intended to protect democracy and truth be prevented from use by demagogues, tyrants, crooks and kleptocrats to attack, and maybe even destroy, democracy and truth? Is the dark free speech market just a reflection of capitalism and the invisible hand doing its free market thing, or is it something else? And then, there's Israel, again.
The best answers get awarded a gold star: ⭐
Perfect answers get two: ⭐⭐
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