[rossdavidh]

"Given their expertise in subterfuge, it is perhaps surprising that Hanan and his colleagues allowed themselves to be exposed by undercover reporters."

Surprising, unless the guys are actually just good at lying to potential customers, to fleece them of as much $$ as possible. I'm not saying they don't use sock puppet social media accounts, etc. but really, how would any of their customers know if it was at all effective? They wouldn't. After the fact, if they won, they wouldn't know if this helped, and if they lost, it's not like they could sue in court, or even just complain loudly to trash this group's reputation.

It seems quite ripe for inflated claims and ineffective results. Of course, they might also be trying, or who knows maybe even succeeding, but it would be a lot simpler just to put up a show for your customer and collect the money.

[SimianSci]

The Venn diagram overlap between grifters, and mercenary hacker groups is very close to a single circle. Any group with slight competence will find their client an easier and more profitable target than their intended quarry. Do some bare-minimum intelligence work while simultaneously inflating the results with fabricated evidence.

I don't see how the realities of such an industry wouldn't be a race to the bottom

[alisonatwork]

One of the tropes of spy novels is you can never trust a spy, and I think it'd be fair to say you can never trust a hacker or disinformation merchant either. Nevertheless, intelligence agencies and organized crime continues to exist, because the people employing said sources make their own risk assessments and incorporate that into the cost benefit analysis. And it appears that there is still at least some perceived benefit in trying to manipulate the outcomes of democracy on a grander scale than was previously achievable due to vulnerabilities of modern communication platforms.

A more interesting question is why haven't governments - or even the platforms themselves - worked hard to shut down these known vulnerabilities? Doesn't it undermine the trust of the users to know that there are professional organizations actively creating thousands of fake accounts that deliberately spread (at best) partisan propaganda and (at worst) outright disinformation? Doesn't it work against the lofty ideals of social media being a community space where real people can engage with one another? The fact the companies are so unresponsive to removing abusers shows their incentives are not aligned with those of their users.

[from]

Facebook, Twitter, etc remove coordinated influence campaigns like these all of the time. There is a headline in major publications almost every time and an article on their corporate blogs. What these political consulting companies do is not exactly illegal in countries with free speech which is why there isn’t as much governmental effort. The American governments argument for “conspiracy to defraud the United States” in the IRA case is tenuous and untested to say the least which is why they mostly focused on the fact that they used fullz to register PayPal accounts in the indictment.

[rossdavidh]

1) well, they do remove some, and in order to not reveal how they identify them, they may not wish to talk all that much about it 2) it is baked into the model of free social media, not only that attention=advertising=money, but also that cost per user is very low (so they can keep the accounts free). If you add $1/user cost (to monitor with humans), for Facebook that would be billions more in cost. I don't know that a responsible social media company could be profitable; it may be that the very business model requires not policing it very well.