Disinfo black ops: exposing the companies and states spreading false information
‘Story killers’ project brings together 30 news outlets to shine a light on industrial disinformation campaigns.
Disinformation has been compared to an “atomic bomb in our information ecosystem”, a problem so insidious that it allows hate, anger and conspiracy theories to spread faster than truth. In the words of the journalist and Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa, it renders democracy “a dream”.
From Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, to the January 6 2021 insurrection on the US Capitol, to deadly lies around Covid-19, disinformation is shaping major global events.
Disinfo black ops is a special investigation exposing the deliberate spread of false information around the world. It is part of Story killers, an international collaborative project involving journalists from 30 news outlets, including the Guardian, Observer, Haaretz, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Radio France, TheMarker, Paper Trail Media and the Washington Post.
The investigation shines a light on the usually hidden machinery behind industrial disinformation campaigns, run by state-sponsored entities or private mercenaries who spread fake information across the internet for profit. It also reveals how inconvenient truths can be erased from the internet by those who are rich enough to pay.
The project was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, the French nonprofit behind the Daphne project and the Pegasus project, whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
The eight-month investigation was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017.
Hours before she was killed by assassins, Lankesh had been putting the finishing touches on an article called In the Age of False News, which examined how so-called lie factories online were spreading disinformation in India.
In the Age of False News was published after her death. She wrote in her final sentence: “I want to salute all those who expose fake news. I wish there were more of them.”
Authorities have arrested 17 people in connection with the murder. The trials are still under way.
Nir Grinberg, an assistant professor at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, said the kind of commoditisation of disinformation that was being exposed by the Story killers project was relatively novel.
The biggest impact of such campaigns, he said, could be that they created a “facade of effectiveness that is larger than life”, which in turn made individuals question the authenticity of everything they saw.
“Unless civil society redraws the rules for these online spaces, steps in to defend them, and holds communication platforms accountable, we are looking at a future where anyone can be the target of such disinformation campaigns,” Grinberg said.
Female journalists around the world, in particular, have become targets. Ressa’s publication, Rappler, exposed the work of troll armies that manipulated information around Rodrigo Duterte’s 2016 presidency. Her breakthrough journalism has made her the target of vicious online attacks and prosecution.
In January, Ressa, who is widely considered the “face of the free press in the Philippines”, was acquitted of tax evasion charges, in a case she has described as part of a pattern of harassment.
Jessikka Aro, a Finnish journalist from Yle, Finland’s national public broadcaster, was targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign after she began investigating and reporting on Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a state-controlled troll farm that spreads online propaganda and influence operations.
Among the attacks Aro faced were smear emails and messages sent to colleagues and politicians, and attacks on Twitter. In one instance, Aro received a text message from someone claiming to be her deceased father, who said he was “observing [her]”.
Journalists have paid a particularly high price for the global disinformation crisis. One in four journalists killed in non-conflict zones between 2017 and 2022 were targeted by disinformation campaigns, according to a Forbidden Stories analysis of data compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
