Survey of 100 Journalists Reveals Scale of Disinformation Industry

On June 27, 2022, journalist Mohammed Zubair was arrested. A month earlier, he had posted a series of tweets highlighting the controversial comments of a spokesperson for India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Bharatiya Janata Party, or “Indian People’s Party”, Hindu nationalist right), against the prophet Muhammad. Co-founder of a renowned fact-checking site known for its coverage of online content targeting the Muslim minority in India, Mohammed Zubair will remain in prison for more than three weeks. The arrest is seen by press rights advocates as a retaliatory measure by the authorities against his work deciphering disinformation and his criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has faced online attacks and lawsuits since the publication of her investigation into the manipulation of information by the Philippine president’s “armies of trolls”. Rodrigo Duterte when he took power in 2016. Today, she no longer travels without a bulletproof vest and often travels accompanied by a security team.

Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro, one of the first to investigate the Internet Research Agency’s troll farm in Saint Petersburg, was the victim of a violent disinformation campaign from Russia: online attacks, insulting emails , filing complaints against her and her public broadcaster, Yle. The journalist even received a text message from someone posing as her deceased father, claiming that he was alive and “watched him”.

>> “Story Killers”: at the origin of an investigation into disinformation, the death of an Indian journalist

In her city of Bangalore, in central India, journalist Gauri Lankesh also covered disinformation. Particularly that propagated by the right-wing Hindu nationalist party BJP. A way for her to denounce the methods of the extreme right in her country. In September 2017, when she planned to publish an op-ed titled “In the Age of Fake News” in which she denounced the “factories of lies“, the journalist was shot and killed by an individual associated with a Hindu nationalist organization.

100 journalists mobilized

More than five years after the murder of Gauri Lankesh, Forbidden Stories, whose mission is to continue the work of journalists who are threatened, imprisoned or murdered, has brought together more than 100 journalists from 30 international media, including Radio France’s investigation unit, to continue his work. With this “Story Killers” investigation, it is the first time that an international consortium of investigative journalists has investigated the dark market of disinformation mercenaries.

For more than six months, the consortium was able to identify major players in this activity. From India to Saudi Arabia, via Israel, Spain and the United States, the consortium investigated the companies and mercenaries who now sell “turnkey” services to states or men policies with the aim of influencing opinions, manipulating elections, or destroying reputations to the detriment of information and democracy. While representing an often invisible global threat, this highly profitable new industry is booming. It develops all the more easily with avatars, bots and fake accounts, as no regulation really regulates it. According to a report by the Oxford Internet Institute, in 2020 at least 81 countries used organized manipulation campaigns on social media.

Several days of revelations

Journalists are often among the first victims of these increasingly popular services by authoritarian or corrupt regimes. According to an analysis of data from the NGO Committee to Protect Journalists carried out by Forbidden Stories, one in four reporters killed outside a conflict zone between 2017 and 2022 was targeted by disinformation campaigns or received direct threats via social networks before to be murdered. Among them in particular:

• Daphne Caruana Galizia, killed in the explosion of her car bomb in Malta in 2017.

• Gauri Lankesh, shot dead outside her home by assailants on a motorbike, in India in 2017.

• Jamal Khashoggi, assassinated at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

• Rafael Emilio Moreno, shot dead in his restaurant in Montelíbano, Colombia in 2022.

Despite the threats made against her, Maria Ressa continues to expose the mechanisms of misinformation to make them known to as many people as possible. “They are using free speech to silence you. But I refuse to be silent”, claims the Nobel Prize. During the following days, the journalists of the “Story Killers” operation, including those of Radio France and the French newspaper The worldwill publish their revelations and unveil the often amazing backstage of this industry which raises the question of the regulation of social networks whose current functioning blurs the benchmarks and undermines the foundations of democracies, when they are not diverted to be used as weapons in the hands of pharmacies that act in the shadows.

Media members of the consortium: Radio France, The Guardian and The Observer, Le Monde, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, ZDF, Paper Trail Media, Die Zeit, Proceso, OCCRP, Knack, Le Soir, Haaretz, The Marker, El Pais, SverigesTelevision, Radio Télévision Suisse , Folha, Confluence Media, IRPI, IStories, Armando Info, Code for Africa, Bird, Tempo Media Group, El Espectador, Der Standard, Tamedia, Krik.

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