As concern has risen around the mendacious influence fake news is having on western society, attention has turned to the infrastructure that fuels fake news.  The latest effort in this direction comes via a new report from the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, which examines four approaches to fake news taken by the facilities that produce it.

The report, which focuses primarily on the Philippines, aims to shed light on the various forms of political trolling, including the industries and political support that has sprung up around what is increasingly normalized and lucrative work.

“The typical troll in the Philippines is not the sad nerdy guy living in his parents’ basement, but the savvy entrepreneur hyping their digital skills and seeking both political and corporate clients,” the researchers say. “This kind of troll does not need to hide in the dark web or a black market; this troll is employed in the politician’s in-house team, or a PR firm or a digital marketing company.”

Trolling business models

The report identifies four clear organizational models used by troll farms:

1. An in-house staff model, whereby veterans of political campaigning expect their staff take on trollwork in addition to their normal duties.
2. An advertising and PR-based model, whereby private donors outsource trolling work to specific disinformation consultancies and agencies who deploy a team of disinformation producers on a project by project basis.
3. A clickbait orientated model, which is the most purely commercial model of the four, with the report citing organizations such as Twinmark Media Enterprises, whose significant online presence was shut down before the 2019 election season.
4. A state-sponsored model, which involves forms of formal intimidation and digital bullying that aim to silence and censor debate, especially among dissenters but also among the public at large.  The state-sponsored nature of this approach typically sees those at the very top directly involved, such as attacks on the judiciary or mainstream media by senior politicians.  These attacks are then amplified by a ‘keyboard army’ of supporters.

To combat the rise of such misinformation campaigns, the authors advocate greater communication about the risks trolls present to society, and a push for greater legal reforms around campaign transparency.  They also believe that a greater role exists for fact checking services, and urge social media platforms to be more transparent in how they operate.

“Whether driven by political or commercial imperatives, the political chiefs of staff, advertising and PR consultants, and technopreneurs have come to normalize, professionalize and rationalize disinformation work,” the authors conclude. “This has enabled them to downplay the political and moral consequences of what they do. This, in turn, has made it easy for them to carry on with fashioning themselves as nothing less than pioneering explorers shaping the frontierlands of digital politics. This could very well be feeding their desire to take the next step and go global.”