Profiting off the protests

[jmbar2]

The Guardian has just released an interesting article about the business of grifting off of the various protest movements. It's nothing we didn't suspect, but focuses new attention on how these scams have become profitable businesses for overseas disinfo firms.

Platforms like Facebook have cracked down on such “inauthentic activity” since 2016, but the global misinformation industry remains. In recent years, these for-profit disinformation networks have seized on the popularity of conspiracy movements and far-right groups online, creating content aimed at anti-vaccine protesters and QAnon followers.

“It can be an extremely lucrative industry for people in other parts of the world to very closely monitor US and Canadian political climates, then capitalize on moment-to-moment trends,” Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, told the Guardian. “If you’re out for money, and measure success not by sowing discord in a country but by maximizing ad revenue, there’s still a lot of benefit to these operations.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/20/facebook-disinformation-ottawa-social-media