With the United States set to undertake its first Presidential election since the Russian-tinged 2016 race, state governments and social networks are upping their game.
This from the team at Cisco Talos, which cautioned in a new report that while governments and sites are better prepared for disinformation campaigns, the way hostile nation states go about their business has also evolved.
Specifically, said the Talos team, influence campaigns have been outsourced from thinly veiled government operations to multi-level efforts that often use a middle level of marketing firms.
These firms, it is said, operate as digital marketing firms for the most part, but will also use their expertise on behalf of governments that want them to sway public opinion in an election. One such example was election disinfo operations evolved state governments
