Who Pays for Disinformation? New Research Exposes the Industry Behind the Lies

For years, the Daily Guardian has positioned itself within the global fact-checking movement. We publish verifications, we stand by them, and we will continue to do so. Facts matter, and the record must be corrected. But the limits of this work have become increasingly clear as we look deeper at the machinery of falsehood. A fact-check can debunk a viral claim, expose a manipulated video, or reveal a fabricated quote. What it rarely does, however, is tell the reader who actually paid for the deception to reach their screen. It tells us the post is wrong, but not who funded its creation, orchestrated its spread, or profited from its impact. This glaring omission is precisely what a significant new academic chapter seeks to address, arguing that the entire approach to combating disinformation has been misfocused for years. It is not enough, the researchers contend, to fixate on the posts themselves. We must understand the industry that produces them, the paymasters who commission them, and the deeply embedded structures that allow this shadow economy to flourish. The problem is not a pile of false posts; it is a system of paid influence that operates with near impunity across borders, platforms, and political systems, and journalists have been complicit in letting its architects hide in plain sight.

This is the central thesis of a powerful new chapter by researchers Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jose Mari Hall Lanuza, published this year in the prestigious “De Gruyter Handbook of Technology, Media, and Democracy” (2026, pp. 293–310). The authors argue that disinformation is far better understood as an industry than as a sporadic collection of false content. They call it “disinformation-for-hire,” and the concept is deceptively simple. It is a chain of command: someone pays, someone designs the campaign, and someone else executes the posting. The people at the bottom of this chain, the foot soldiers who spend their days flooding comment sections and crafting inflammatory tweets, are rarely the true believers we might imagine. Drawing on Ong’s foundational 2018 study of Philippine political campaigns, conducted with Jason Cabañes, the research reveals a workforce of young, precarious digital laborers who treat trolling as just another gig alongside data annotation, content moderation, and other piecemeal tasks in the growing global gig economy. They are not ideological warriors; they are low-paid workers desperate for income, churning out vitriol as dispassionately as they might annotate images for an algorithm. Above them sit the strategists, many drawn from the polished ranks of advertising and public relations, who sanitize the filth with industry jargon—calling it “reputation management,” “narrative architecture,” or “digital strategy”—giving their dark work what the study describes as a “cloak of respectability.” And above the strategists sit the clients. These are the politicians seeking to bury scandals, the corporations aiming to crush competitors, and the vested interests hoping to manipulate public policy.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable observation in this research is directed squarely at the journalism profession itself. The identities of the chief architects of these disinformation campaigns, Ong and Lanuza write, are something of an industry “open secret.” Everyone knows who they are—the consultants, the PR executives, the digital whiz kids—and yet journalists seldom expose them. Why? The answer is stark and discomfiting. These are executives who hold influence over newspaper advertising revenue, and many of them enjoy the direct protection of powerful politicians they have helped elect. To name them is to risk economic retaliation from advertisers or political retribution from a corrupt administration. It is easier, and safer, to report on the bots and the fake accounts than to track the money to the boardrooms and the political back rooms. But this system does not operate in the shadows, as one might hope. A 2019 study for the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence found that sellers of fake engagement advertise on ordinary websites, take payments openly through legitimate channels, and buy search-engine ads to attract new customers. The industry is a business like any other, marketing its services to anyone willing to pay. Yet when consequences actually arrive, they are wildly uneven. The London firm Bell Pottinger was expelled from the Public Relations and Communications Association in 2017 after a racially divisive campaign in South Africa, a rare punishment that sent shockwaves through the industry. In 2023, an international team of reporters exposed “Team Jorge,” Israeli contractors whose sophisticated software could control some 30,000 fake social media profiles for clients across the globe. And yet, as the chapter notes, this exposé triggered no follow-up national investigations, no new industry regulations, and virtually no accountability for the individuals behind it.

This pattern of non-accountability has a well-known precedent. The Cambridge Analytica scandal followed a remarkably similar arc. In 2018, the world erupted in anger when it was revealed that the political consulting firm had harvested millions of Facebook profiles without consent. However, the public fury crystallized almost entirely around Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s failure to protect user data. Far less attention, and far less legal or professional consequence, fell upon the consultants, PR firms, and political campaigns that had been intimately involved in commissioning the work and using the stolen data to manipulate voters. Cambridge Analytica was a client, and the scandal exposed a thriving ecosystem of influence peddling that went far beyond one British firm. But the media coverage largely let the broader industry off the hook. Here, the press itself failed again. Citing other scholars, Ong and Lanuza fault news outlets for celebrating the scandal’s whistleblowers as heroic reformers without questioning the narratives that also conveniently sold their tell-all books. The journalists turned outrage into a product, profiting from the very story they were supposed to cover critically. This is not just a failure of accountability; it is the commodification of scandal itself. The cognitive dissonance is staggering: the media will happily run endless stories about the dangers of disinformation, but will rarely follow the money trail to identify who is funding the next election’s campaign, or who drafted the messaging strategy for the latest smear campaign, because doing so might upset an advertiser or a political ally.

The standard response to this crisis, according to Ong and Lanuza, is what they call “whack-a-mole.” Platforms take down accounts in bulk, fact-checkers correct individual posts with red flags and warnings, and life goes on until the next viral falsehood appears. This approach is not just futile; it is a deliberate distraction. While Facebook and X are busy deleting millions of posts, the contract that produced them remains in force. The strategist still has a payroll, the client still has an objective, and the campaign still has a budget. The mole dies, but the hole remains. The authors are not naive in their proposed alternatives; they admit the flaws in every potential solution. They point to advertising watchdogs as one avenue of resistance, noting that organizations can pressure brands to stop funding disinformation sites. In Brazil, an outside analysis found that the activist group Sleeping Giants succeeded in more than 80% of its requests to companies to pull their ads from disinformation-adjacent content during the 2022 elections. This approach works because it hits the industry where it hurts: the bottom line. Industry dialogue can also produce rules, as seen in Ong’s work with the legal group LENTE, which helped update Commission on Elections (Comelec) regulations on social media campaigning in the Philippines. However, a later attempt to get PR firms to sign a voluntary code of ethics against disinformation produced nothing substantive; the industry refused to cede any ground. Protecting digital workers could bring insiders forward to expose the system, but a podcast Ong co-hosted with former campaign operators was attacked at home for giving villains a platform to spout their justifications. And of course, defunding campaigns gets branded as censorship, while ethics codes remain voluntary and unenforced. The study does not hide any of this desperation; it presents the difficulty honestly.

Despite these sobering limitations, the central point of Ong and Lanuza’s work holds with unshakable force. Asking whether a post is true remains an essential part of the journalistic mission, but asking who paid for it tells us the entire rest of the story. A fact-check on a lie is a tree falling in an empty forest if the machinery that planted the lie continues to churn. This question belongs not only in our newsrooms but in the halls of our electoral commissions. In the Philippines,Comelec already requires candidates to file statements of contributions and expenditures. These documents are publicly available and could be a goldmine for accountability journalism. But we must ask ourselves: how many of those statements actually name the agencies running their pages? Who is checking payments to influencers against what actually appears online? Has any single candidate ever been asked to produce a contract for “digital consultancy” that ties a known disinformation architect to a political war room? We suspect the answers are short and embarrassing. The research stands as a challenge to every journalist, every regulator, and every voter to stop looking at the posts and start looking at the pockets. The industry of disinformation-for-hire is a business, and to shut it down, we must treat it like one. When a falsehood goes viral, the question should not merely be “what is the truth?” It should be “who paid to hide it?” In our language, in our own soil: Sin-o gid bala ang nagabayad? Who, in the end, is really footing the bill?