Inside the disinformation-for-hire economy: 27 operations traced to PR firms since 2011

At least 27 online information operations have been partially or wholly attributed to PR or marketing firms since 2011. Nineteen of those took place in 2019 alone. The figures come from a BuzzFeed News review of platform takedowns and investigations by security and research firms, published in partnership with the Reporter, an investigative news site in Taiwan.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, told BuzzFeed News that "the professionalization of deception" is a growing threat. "The broader notion of deception and influence operations has been around for some time, but over the past several years, we have seen [...] companies grow up that basically build their business model around deception," he said.

The dossier's clearest individual case is Peng Kuan Chin, a 32-year-old who showed the Reporter his "Content Farm Automatic Collection System." Servers crawled the web for Chinese articles and posts. The system reorganized the words into new text. A set of websites he controlled published them while thousands of fake social media accounts spread them across news feeds, messaging apps and search results. "I developed this for manipulating public opinion," Peng said. His clients, he said, are companies, brands, political parties and candidates in Asia. "Customers have money, and I don't care what they buy."

Peng's company, Bravo-Idea, is not alone. The Archimedes Group, an Israeli firm, built networks of hundreds of Facebook pages, accounts and groups worldwide. It boasted on its website that it would "use every tool and take every advantage available in order to change reality according to our client's wishes," according to the BuzzFeed News report. In Mali, it ran a fake fact-checking page claiming to be run by local students. In Tunisia, it ran a page titled "Stop a la Desinformation et aux Mensonges." In Nigeria, it ran pages both advocating for and against former vice president Atiku Abubakar. Researchers suggested the pro-Abubakar page "was likely designed to identify his supporters in order to target them with anti-Abubakar content later."

In Ukraine, the firm Pragmatico employed dozens of young, digitally savvy people to post positive comments on fake Facebook accounts about clients, the report says. In Poland, Cat@Net managed networks of fake Twitter accounts operated by staffers with disabilities working from home. The agency hired them because it could pay below-market rates while they received government subsidies. Reporting by Investigate Europe also found Cat@Net performed work for one of Poland's most prominent PR agencies, Art-Media. The company denied working with Cat@Net.

The commercial model is not confined to one region. In late December, Twitter removed more than 5,000 accounts it said were part of "a significant state-backed information operation" in Saudi Arabia carried out by the marketing firm Smaat. The same day, Facebook announced a takedown of hundreds of accounts, pages and groups engaged in "foreign and government interference" on behalf of the government of Georgia. Facebook attributed the operation to Panda, an advertising agency in Georgia, and to the country's ruling party. Similar takedowns and investigations have involved firms in Israel, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Brazil, Indonesia and Poland.

Cindy Otis, a former CIA officer and author of True or False: A CIA Analyst's Guide to Spotting Fake News, told BuzzFeed News that information operations by nation-states like Russia and Iran have provided "a playbook for individuals and groups that are financially motivated to enter this space." Investigators at platforms, security firms and within the intelligence community are, she said, "spending increasing amounts of time looking at the disinformation-for-hire services that are out there."

Not every strand of the dossier points the same way. A study by UC Riverside and USC education scholars, published in the journal New Media & Society and covered by UCR News, found that Black and Latino teens report significantly more digital literacy skills, such as detecting online disinformation, than their white peers, particularly regarding content related to race and ethnicity. "This work reveals that adolescents of color are already engaging in sophisticated forms of digital literacy," said Avriel Epps, an assistant professor in UC Riverside's School of Education and lead author. "They have developed these critical skills in many cases from their lived experiences navigating online racism, not necessarily from school-based instruction."

The study drew on the National Survey of Critical Digital Literacy, a longitudinal project led by Brendesha Tynes of the University of Southern California, funded by a Lyle Spencer Award to Transform Education from the Spencer Foundation. More than 100 Black adolescents, alongside comparable numbers of Latino and white peers, reported daily in diaries how often they analyzed, responded to or ignored race-related digital content. The findings run counter to a 2021 study by the Stanford History Education Group, now the Digital Inquiry Group, in which Black students scored significantly lower than other racial-ethnic groups on analyzing real-life digital media, though that research did not examine reactions related to race or racism.

Scale is the other constant. CNN reported in November 2023 that the Chinese government has built the world's largest known online disinformation operation, known as "Spamouflage" or "Dragonbridge," and is using it to harass US residents, politicians and businesses, at times threatening targets with violence. Meta said in August it had taken down a cluster of nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to the group in the second quarter of 2023 alone. Google told CNN it had shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years. X has blocked hundreds of thousands of China "state-backed" or "state-linked" accounts, according to company blogs.

What the dossier does not settle is whether platforms can keep pace. Facebook's Gleicher framed the problem as a business model, not a tactic. The BuzzFeed News count of 27 attributed operations, 19 of them in a single year, suggests the model is still being sold.