View image in fullscreen Canaelan’s Twitter bio (left) was taken from the real Twitter page of Tom Van Rooijen, a journalist in the Netherlands. The photo of a beaming man on Canaelan’s Twitter bio, the Guardian has established, was taken from the real Twitter page of Tom Van Rooijen, 25, a freelance Dutch journalist living in the Netherlands. However, what seems clear is that the avatars peddling propaganda are doing so with the help of stolen photographs of real people. It is not possible to know who the clients were in any of the campaigns, or even what their objective was. A similar leafletting campaign was staged near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, before being circulated on social media by Aims bots. Three masked activists in baseball caps, sunglasses and masks filmed themselves waving placards. One case involved a fake protest staged outside a company headquarters on Regent Street, central London. We also identified real-world events that appeared to have been staged to provide ammunition that could be leveraged in social media campaigns. One of the Aims-backed campaigns targeted a Monaco-based superyacht company, accusing it of having direct links to several Russian oligarchs who were subject to sanctions. Please consider supporting it today.ĭo you have information about Tal Hanan or ‘Team Jorge’? For the most secure communications, use SecureDrop or see our guide. Investigative journalism like this is vital for our democracy. The Story killers consortium includes more than 100 journalists from 30 media outlets including Haaretz, Le Monde, Radio France, Der Spiegel, Paper Trail Media, Die Zeit, TheMarker and the OCCRP. In the final line of the article, which was published after her death, Lankesh wrote: “I want to salute all those who expose fake news. Hours before she was murdered, Lankesh had been putting the finishing touches on an article called In the Age of False News, which examined how so-called lie factories online were spreading disinformation in India. The eight-month investigation was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017. The investigation is part of Story killers, a collaboration led by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters. Our project, Disinfo black ops, is exposing how false information is deliberately spread by powerful states and private operatives who sell their covert services to political campaigns, companies and wealthy individuals. It also reveals how inconvenient truths can be erased from the internet by those who are rich enough to pay. The Guardian and Observer have partnered with an international consortium of reporters to investigate global disinformation. Using the Aims-linked avatars revealed by Team Jorge in presentations and videos, reporters at the Guardian, Le Monde and Der Spiegel were able to identify a much wider network of 2,000 Aims-linked bots on Facebook and Twitter. Hanan told the undercover reporters his avatars mimicked human behaviour and their posts were powered by artificial intelligence. Some even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts. The ICO campaign appears to have been relatively short-lived compared with others around the world that reporters have been able to link to Team Jorge’s Aims software, which is much more than a bot-controlling programme.Įach avatar, according to a demonstration Hanan gave the undercover reporters, is given a multifaceted digital backstory.Īims enables the creation of accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Hanan did not respond to detailed requests for comment but said: “To be clear, I deny any wrongdoing.” It is not known who commissioned Team Jorge to unleash the bots on the ICO, or why. “This is so typical from the UK …” one bot opined, “focusing on the wrong things.” Others just seemed nonplussed by the ICO’s insistence on transparency over the government’s pandemic procurement. As the replies continued, they became more trenchant, making wild and false accusations against the ICO about bribes, corruption and links to the far right. “Information Commissioner tries everything to destroy the government,” one said, while another described the ruling as a “desperate act”.Īll of the “replies” under that and other tweets were united in their outrage at the ICO, which they described as “a waste of time” and “lame”. That comment was part of a chorus of disapproval generated by the bots, who seemed aghast. 'Team Jorge' unmasked: the secret disinformation team who distort reality – video
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