Influence operation
An organized, usually covert effort by a state or other actor to shape opinion or behavior in a target population, by any combination of propaganda, deception, inauthentic accounts, and the cultivation of real voices. The term researchers use for the whole campaign rather than any one technique.
"Influence operation" entered common use in the late 2010s, as the investigations into foreign interference in Western elections needed a word broader than disinformation, which describes content, and broader than psyop, which describes a military function. An influence operation may use true content and false, foreign accounts and domestic ones, paid advertising and organic posting, and may aim at an election, a policy, a company, or simply at making a society more quarrelsome.
The analysts who study them tend to describe influence operations by their structure rather than their message: who runs them, how the accounts are created and connected, what they amplify, and how they try to graduate from fake voices to real ones. The last step is the important one. An operation that only ever speaks through its own puppets achieves little; the aim is to get a claim, a frame, or a grievance adopted by people who sincerely hold it, after which the operation can fall silent.
On this site the techniques of that graduation are Astroturfing, Manufactured Consensus, Citation Laundering, and Leak And Plant, alongside the Digital-era family. The term is also used of domestic actors, including political campaigns and public relations firms, whenever the defining features, coordination and concealment, are present.
Compare information operations and active measures.
Sources
- Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. ISBN 978-0374287269
- DiResta, Renée, et al. The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency. Austin: New Knowledge, 2018.
- Martin, Diego A., Jacob N. Shapiro, and Julia G. Ilhardt. "Introducing the Online Political Influence Efforts Dataset." Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, Princeton University, 2020.