The essence of the article is that the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook incident has stimulated disinformation into a big business. While nation states such as Russia, Iran and China among others employ shell proxies, now this service is available to anyone who will pay for it. According to the article, "The result is an accelerating rise in polarizing conspiracies, phony citizen groups and fabricated public sentiment deteriorating our chared reality beyond even the depths of recent years".
The article summarizes the business this way:
"Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies. They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and pus viral conspiracies, mostly on social media And they offer clients something precious: deniability."
Business is so good that some experts believe that the for profit disinformation segment is actually bigger than the government proxy segment. It's quite the global business with Oxford University (UK) researchers believing that operations were run in at least 48 countries.
I'll leave the bulk of the article to your reading, but let me offer two final paragraphs in conclusion:
"But governments may find that outsourcing such shadowy work also carries risks, Mr. Graham Brookie, direct of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab said. For one, the firms are harder to control and might veer into undesired messages or tactics. For another, firms organized around deceit may just as likely to turn those energies toward their clients, bloating budgets and billing for work that never gets done.
As always, reader comments encouraged, but --- no resumes please.
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