At the core of online disinformation is the false flag type of fake sockpuppet activity.
And its very sophisticated.
Way back in the 1980s and 1990s i had a much wider circle of friends than I have today and one of my friends was an artist whose main gigs were in the advertising industry. Before he had come to the US, he had become well known for making posters and at some point he became involved doing artwork for the tobacco industry. However he could not talk about it or take credit for his work because some aspects of it "were secret". or so he said. So secret he was not supposed to tell anybody anything about his job or the bizarre culture that existed among his tiny elite group of disinformers. Because that is what they did. I actually had several friends at one point who worked in advertising related industries but his was by far the most mysterious.
That was 20-30 years ago. Anyway, thing changed, he moved elsewhere and so did I and now I live near a center of advertising again.
In 2007 or early 2008 while there I ran into him on the street and we went out for a drink. Since the Internet had exploded since the last time I had seen him we discussed the Internet and one of the things he told me about was the huge Internet disinformation industry that had sprung up, which he again could not tell me much about (his words "or they would kill me"
but he did give me some tantalizing hints about its scope and activities. But the one thing I remember which he and I laughed about was that - just by way of illustrating how they thought, he pointed to the work of a group of scientists with robotic cockroaches as having had a significant impact on the thinking of people involved in online influencing.. Here is one study from the group of work that i am pretty sure he was talking about. From this paper I hpe you can see how the concept of false flag activities is key- basically that is what the perfumed cockroach robots are- (they use the scents to convince real cockroaches - who have terrible vision apparently, that they are fellow members of their families- because they smell right- it works- and by using these fake robotic cockroaches real cockroaches can be convinced to act against their own best interests by slightly altering the robots cockroach like behaviors. In this paper the real cockroaches can be convinced to prefer less dark hiding spaces. (the red plastic is used because evidently cockroaches cannot see red light as well as other wavelengths)
You can find this paper on Google Scholar
Social Integration of Robots into Groups of Cockroaches to Control Self-Organized Choices
J. Halloy, et al.
Anyway, basically, this paper was significant because it illustrates how a deep pocketed would be influencer can literally throw mney at a "problem" and by fielding these armies of fake online sock puppets who "smell right" can manipulate the behavior of real people, say in voting and in influencing others. They may do it in nonobvious ways.
At that time (2007 or early 2008) a huge amount of money was being spent just in the one area he gave me a figure on to influence the outcome of the election- which had a bearing on this one or two industries.
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