Creating Disinformation Is Easier Than You Think

Fake news is perhaps more common these days than ‘real news’. On April 24, 2018 Bloomberg Politics reported “G-7 Says Tech Firms Like FaceBook and Twitter Will be ‘Held to Account’. (see: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-24/tech-firms-like-facebook-twitter-to-be-held-to-account-by-g-7; which is also the photo source. I wondered just how hard it would be for two people to create their own disinformation (fake news).

As many of you know, I regularly participate in joint exercises as the IO SME and Role Player. In my most recent exercise I worked with a colleague to create two streams of disinformation.

At first I thought the idea of planning and executing a disinformation campaign would be pretty daunting. Frankly – it’s not.

Our targeting mission was pretty simple. It would be our job to confuse the friendly Public Affairs Team and Media Operations Center (MOC).

1. Pick The Media

Our first step was to pick our media. We decided to concentrate on a single media so that we could concentrate our efforts. Fortunately the exercise takes place in a closed, off the net, isolated system so we were not unduly concerned with leakage.

2. Adopt A Role

Next we adopted a fictional persona. Just as if we were in a play we did a mini-character analysis of our new identity and developed what we believed would be the key messages they would want to transmit.

3. Build A Couple of Story Lines

Once we knew who we were portraying and what we wanted to say we created a couple of story lines and drafted messages.

4. MESL Injection

Our finally step was to create a time to inject each message. Our chosen medium was a Tweeter Take Off - this meant we had to limit what we could say to remain inside the character limit.

The end result was that the students spotted one of our characters and crafted some very responsive counter-propaganda messages. The other character slipped through the cracks and was never picked up.

The key to success was a combination of creativity and sensitivity to the situation so that your disinformation campaign is credible and blends in with the rest of the journalistic landscape.