How To Track “Digital Mercenaries” Behind Misinformation
Falsehoods are important to counteract in journalism, but oftentimes journalists miss a key piece of the puzzle when refuting misinformation or malinformation. Who exactly are the actors behind the spread of this information disorder, and how do they otherwise operate on the internet?
The term “digital mercenaries” was coined by Giannina Segnini, an award-winning data journalist and the director of Columbia University’s Master of Science Data Journalism Program. “I call them digital mercenaries because one day they sell trousers; the next day they support a left wing candidate; the next day, a right wing candidate,” she said. “Some are ideologically consistent, but in general it is a [nonaligned] industry made of data scientists and publicists.”
Digital mercenaries are not always private citizens or individuals, but can indeed be backed by government powers, intelligence groups, or even church groups—and these powerful backers will target people they believe to be most susceptible to misinformation. They also often masquerade under legitimate political campaigns, covertly using resources to influence voters under false pretenses.
Legislators around the world have said it’s very difficult to regulate this volume and kind of disinformation campaign, therefore digital literacy is the key to counteracting the disordered landscape of information available to the American people. And digital literacy starts with journalists, but these methods of identifying bad actors must be taught to people operating on all levels of society. Liberal MP Yasir Naqvi of Canada said that digital literacy is about “making sure people know where the information is coming from, putting them in charge of the information they consume, not the other way around.” In order for the public to be aware, journalists must share their resources and processes for verifying information.
Journalists can start to find out who these “digital mercenaries” are by checking some public resources that identify them–for example, Google’s Threat Analysis Group and Meta’s Adversarial Threat Report. There’s also the FARA Index, a US government database used to track foreign agents. But Segnini implied that there’s always a money and paper trail that ultimately will lead back to the operation. “In [Latin America], there are massive campaigns of disinformation directed by the governments, and it's more difficult because it's the government itself that does the infrastructure, but contracts have to be paid,” she said. “You have to follow assets in a coherent way to get a better idea of the ecosystem. What budgetary allocation was used? By who? What assets are being liquidated there?”
The money connection is the telltale sign, says Segnini, because once a money connection is made between any party and one of the identified threats, the pieces of the misinformation campaign will begin to fall into place. Segnini urges journalists to be creative.
“If we have the names, we [can] look at local registrations, business registrations… think in real life terms of all of the operations that have to be done,” she said. “If there's a remodeling of a building, for example — if you have an address, you can find it in the Ministry of Public Buildings or the Buildings Registry, or whatever the government entity is. There can be inspections for remodeling; somebody signed that. You can be creative in following the names in all of the publicly available databases.”
Indeed, our current landscape of information online is overwhelming and saturated with so much flotsam and jetsam, misinformation and malinformation, that breaking down every single misstep and falsehood is intimidating. However, this painstaking work is crucial to upholding democracy and its values—only by radical pursuits of the truth can the fog of information war be cleared.
