Illustration: Tokwa Penaflorida

Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines is an 82-page report based on one year of interviews and observation of the high-level strategists and digital support workers behind fake news and “digital black ops.” This report results from a British Council-funded ethnographic project that gained unprecedented access to the shadow industry of political trolling in the Philippines. Authors Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jason Cabanes mapped out a professionalized hierarchy of digital operators that hides in plain sight — individuals they call “architects of networked disinformation.”

“[D]isinformation architects engage in moral justifications that their work is not actually ‘trolling’ or ‘fake news.’ They employ various denial strategies that allow them to displace moral responsibility by citing that political consultancy is only one project (or ‘sideline’) that does not define their whole identity. The project-based nature of disinformation work makes moral displacement easier given the casual, short-term nature of the arrangement, which downplay commitment and responsibility to the broader sphere of political practice.” — Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jason Cabanes [page 29]

Illustration: Tokwa Penaflorida

Key findings include:

How the Ad and PR industry normalizes and incentivizes political deception work

Trolling in the Philippines has often been attributed to high-profile bloggers who support President Rodrigo Duterte and amplify his offensive and misogynist speech. However, our report finds advertising and PR strategists are the real chief architects of disinformation. They take on political disinformation projects as undisclosed and unregulated side hustles. They transpose their tried-and-tested tricks of the trade — brand bibles, campaign objectives, artificially trending hashtags, among others — onto digital political campaigning.

Chief disinformation architects assemble click armies of celebrity influencers, anonymous digital influencers, and community-level fake account operators based on their client’s objectives. These digital support workers then take strategy to the street by weaponizing their fluency in popular vernaculars and “gutter languages” to activate the public’s real emotions of anger and resentment.

The principles of networked disinformation campaigns, which involve controlled interactivity and volatile virality, closely resemble advertising and PR communications plans. The financial incentives and valuation structures for a political disinformation project are similar to those of a standard PR campaign.

Mental acrobatics of disinformation architects to justify their work

Chief disinformation architects tend to express discourses of both normalization and fictionalization. They claim that mobilizing click armies and discreetly slipping in promotional content in digital influencers’ feeds are standard industry practices. Sometimes, they draw from popular culture to block feelings of real involvement and make light of the dangerous consequences of their work (“I’m like Olenna Tyrell of Game of Thrones. No one knows it was me!”).

Many digital influencers and community-level fake account operators belong to the precarious middle class, some of whom have slipped into the digital underground after failure or rejection from more respectable work in the creative and digital industries­. They primarily take on disinformation work as a sideline to secure financial stability.

Nobody admits to being a troll. The distributed labor arrangement of digital disinformation enables workers to displace moral responsibility and claim that it’s always other people who are the worst offenders of hate speech, misogyny, and historical revisionism.

Examining disinformation in global context

The Philippines, with its highly organized digital labor force and global reputation as the business process outsourcing capital, represents a “stockpile of digital weapons” that have potentially grave consequences for democracies in the West.

The report argues against a one-size-fits-all approach to disinformation interventions in a global context. Local-level interventions are valuable in targeting specific vulnerabilities in local political and media ecosystems (e.g., campaign finance regulation, advertising and PR self-regulation, transparency mechanisms for digital influencers) to complement global-level reforms aimed at Big Tech.

LINK to full report: http://newtontechfordev.com/newton-tech4dev-research-identifies-ad-pr-executives-chief-architects-fake-news-production-social-media-trolling/