Source Hacking [pdf]

Summary:

In recent years there has been an increasing number of online manipulation campaigns targeted at news media. This report focuses on a subset of manipulation campaigns that rely on a strategy we call source hacking: a set of techniques for hiding the sources of problematic information in order to permit its circulation in mainstream media. Source hacking is therefore an indirect method for targeting journalists—planting false information in places that journalists are likely to encounter it or where it will be taken up by other intermediaries.

Across eight case studies, we identify the underlying techniques of source hacking to provide journalists, news organizations, platform companies, and others with a new vocabulary for describing these tactics, so that terms such as “trolling” and “trending” do not stand in for concerted efforts to pollute the information environment.