More than 29 million Americans may have seen an alarming dispatch on their Facebook feeds last year: “Trump’s grandfather was a pimp and tax evader; his father a member of the KKK.” The accusation, which is at best highly misleading, came from a website that publishes articles in English, written by Americans. The catch? These writers are paid by an operation based in Iran.

CNN reported last month on American Herald Tribune, a self-professed “genuinely independent online media outlet” that cybersecurity experts have determined is part of a far-reaching Iranian influence campaign. The strategy is simple: create a network of inauthentic news sites, then enlist associated accounts on popular platforms to spread the stories not only here but also in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

American Herald Tribune’s modus operandi matches what we’ve already learned about online disinformation: Adversaries “launder” their campaigns through sympathetic citizens of target countries, or just citizens they offer money to — from authors on propagandistic or outright deceptive news sites to run-of-the-mill social media users. The byline on the KKK story, for instance, belongs to a man from Salem, Oregon, who told CNN he believes the site is run by a man named Sam who lives in Brazil.

But there’s something else: Those cybersecurity researchers identified this influence operation way back in 2018. CNN’s investigation reveals that Facebook removed American Herald Tribune’s page then, along with 651 others in its network, and Google made similar takedowns. Twitter, however, booted American Herald Tribune only this past month. Whatever companies today are doing to coordinate with each other as they fight disinformation, it’s not enough. And that’s a real problem — because the manipulators themselves are very good coordinators.

On Jan. 14,researchers at the University of Washington published in a Harvard University review a look at disinformation across platforms, focusing on a campaign to discredit the White Helmets, an organization of brave and selfless volunteers who operate in opposition-controlled parts of Syria. What they found was striking: Once again, a mix of activists, journalists and media outlets — including state-sponsored channels such as Russia Today and Sputnik News — promoted each other in symbiosis. Key to their strategy was cross-posting content from YouTube to Twitter, building a bridge between the two platforms that plunged users on the latter into the cesspool of anti-White Helmet videos on the former.

Social media sites have established channels for sharing leads on terrorist and child exploitation material, but when it comes to disinformation, collaboration is ad hoc and scattershot. There are challenges, from the privacy concerns that could surround the sharing of the most useful data, such as IP addresses, to the basic problem that many of these sites haven’t come to their own definition of a disinformation or manipulation campaign, much less agreed on one. But the platforms that have long been saying they can’t fight these wars alone should be doing far more to fight them together.

— The Washington Post