Disinfo black ops' sting exposes active disinformation ring

A sting operation has exposed secretive companies behind disinformation campaigns that have employed hacking techniques and armies of multilayered bots (automated avatars each using multiple social media accounts with the same fake identity) to influence commercial disputes and even elections in dozens of nations.

Disinfo black ops

The eight-month investigation named “Disinfo black ops” was carried out by “Story Killers,” an international collaborative project involving journalists from major news outlets including The Guardian, The Observer, Haaretz, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and The Washington Post. 

The complex operation included 30 different news organizations and was coordinated by “Forbidden Stories,” a French organization which endeavors to continue the work of assassinated, threatened, or jailed reporters in order to nullify the impact of attempts to silence journalists. Forbidden Stories previously exposed the use of Pegasus spyware by various governments to spy on journalists, political opponents, activists and business people.

Story Killers found the groups behind the campaigns to be deliberately spreading false information and blocking the reach of accurate information, sometimes at the behest of governments, as reported by The Guardian.

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.

Middle East mastermind

The Guardian produced a video exposing one of the groups that wage hacking and bot based disinformation campaigns. Entitled, “Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections,” the undercover video captures a former Israeli special forces operative boasting of his group's abilities to spread misinformation. The Times of Israel detailed the findings of the expose.

A secretive Israeli team of contractors operating from the central [Israel] city of Modiin was unveiled Wednesday as a global source of successful disinformation campaigns that has meddled in elections and commercial disputes in dozens of countries around the world.

Tal Hanan, 50, a former special forces operative who goes by the pseudonym “Jorge,” was named as the mastermind behind the Israeli operation, which runs a sophisticated software known as Aims that is capable of hacking social media accounts of senior officials and of easily creating networks of up to 30,000 propaganda bots on social media.

If Hanan is to be believed, his disinformation campaigns have seen marked success.

Hanan’s team, known as “Team Jorge,” says it has meddled in 33 presidential-level elections around the world, with successful results in 27 of them, according to The Guardian, one of the 30 investigating news outlets. The exposé only named one of these elections — the 2015 presidential vote in Nigeria — while saying no elections in the United States are known to have been affected.

That success extends to impersonating government officials.

Hanan also demonstrated his team’s ability to hack the social media accounts of high-ranking officials in targeted countries, retrieving information from the Gmail account of a senior Kenyan election official and posting a message from the Telegram account of a Kenyan political strategist.

“One of the biggest things is to put sticks between the right people, you understand? And I can write him what I think about his wife, or what I think about his last speech, or I can tell him that I promised him to be my next chief of staff, okay?” said Hanan.

Making fake news look real

In an effort to bolster the impact of their fake bots, Hanan fed fake news stories to mainstream media personalities who would then use that initial report, often made in the middle of the night so as to avoid scrutiny, as the source of the bots' claims. An overnight presenter for France's most-watched news channel, Rachid M'Barki, has been suspended by the channel, BFM, for doing just that. His role in providing legitimacy to fake news was discovered by Le Monde's representatives in Story Killers. BBC reported that M'Barki has already made a partial admission.

The suspension of a senior journalist at France's leading TV news channel has uncovered what appears to be a well-organised system of corruption and influence buying in the international media . . .

M'Barki, a respected BFM veteran, had been summarily removed from his duties as overnight presenter pending an internal enquiry. . . . M'Barki ran reports on a variety of subjects - luxury yachts in Monaco, a Sudanese opposition leader, allegations of corruption in Qatar - that had all one thing in common: they were planted by an Israel-based outfit specialising in 'news for hire'.

M'Barki has denied being paid to run the stories, but he admits to bypassing BFM's editorial checks. [Emphasis in original]

The investigation into the creator of the fake news led to Hanan's group.

He says he was offered the reports by an intermediary and exercised his own professional judgment in selecting to use them. But the investigators say they have evidence that the origin of the stories lies in the shadowy Team Jorge, an operation based in Tel Aviv.

Bots welcome, second medical opinion not

While social media giants failed to delete these tens of thousands of bot accounts, allowing them to spread false information, and even failed to secure real accounts from hacks, they did demonstrate their ability to crack down on information that they prioritize for removal. The Media Research Center (MRC)’s Free Speech America CensorTrack, which monitors Big Tech censorship, found that

[C]ensorship translated to no fewer than 275,396,336 times that platforms harmed social media users by keeping information from them through secondhand censorship. . . .

Tech companies denied people access to COVID-19-related content 24,730,381 times during the full year of 2022. [Emphases in original]

The Daily Caller detailed the credentials of the doctors and scientists who were found to be censored by Big Tech in an earlier CensorTrack report.

Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of over 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 misinformation. . . .

Free Speech America CensorTrack . . . identified over 41 instances between March 2020 and February 2022 in which doctors, scientists and medical organizations were censored . . .

The study focused on acts of censorship on major social media platforms and online services, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Ads and TikTok.

Instances of censorship included Facebook’s decision to flag the British Medical Journal with a “fact check” and “missing context” label, reducing the visibility of a post, for a study delving into data integrity issues with a Pfizer vaccine clinical trial. Facebook also deleted the page of The Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter led by dozens of medical professionals, including Dr. Jay Battacharya, a Stanford epidemiologist, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former employee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which advocated for less restrictive measures to address the dangers of COVID-19. . . . 

Big Tech also scrubbed podcast host Joe Rogan’s interviews with scientists Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone, the latter of which was instrumental in pioneering mRNA technology. Twitter banned Malone from its platform permanently in late December 2021 over the virologist’s tweets questioning the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine. [Emphases added].

Backfire

Dan Gainor, the vice president of Free Speech America, believes that if Big Tech's goal has been to increase trust in the mRNA injections and other public health policies, they have failed.

Big Tech set up a system where you can’t disagree with ‘the science’ even though that’s the foundation of the scientific method. If doctors and academic journals can’t debate publicly, then it’s not science at all. It’s religion . . . 

We tallied 32 different doctors who were censored, including mRNA vaccine innovator Dr. Robert Malone. Censoring views of credentialed experts doesn’t ensure confidence in vaccines, it undermines faith in government COVID-19 strategies.” [Emphases added].