Who pays the trolls?

Daily Guardian is part of the fact-checking movement. We publish fact-checks, we stand by them, and we will keep doing so.

But we have also learned the limits of the work. A fact-check corrects a post but It rarely tells readers who paid for it.

A new chapter by researchers Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jose Mari Hall Lanuza makes that case with some force. Published this year in the “De Gruyter Handbook of Technology, Media, and Democracy” (2026, pp. 293–310), it argues that disinformation is better understood as an industry than as a pile of false posts.

The authors call it “disinformation-for-hire.” The idea is plain enough. Someone pays, someone designs the campaign, and someone else does the posting.

The people at the bottom are rarely the true believers we imagine. Ong’s 2018 study of Philippine campaigns, written with Jason Cabañes, found young and precarious digital workers who treated trolling as one more gig, alongside data annotation and content moderation.

Above them sit the strategists, many drawn from advertising and public relations. Industry jargon, the study found, gives their work a “cloak of respectability.”

Above the strategists sit the clients.

That same study made an uncomfortable observation about our own trade. The identities of the chief architects are an industry “open secret,” yet journalists seldom expose them. These are executives who influence newspaper advertising revenue, and some enjoy the protection of politicians they helped elect.

We will not pretend that observation spares provincial newsrooms as none of this happens in the dark. A 2019 study for the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence found that sellers of fake engagement advertise on ordinary websites, take payments openly, and buy search-engine ads to attract customers.

Consequences, when they come, are uneven. London firm Bell Pottinger was expelled from the Public Relations and Communications Association in 2017 over a racially divisive campaign in South Africa.

In 2023, reporters exposed “Team Jorge,” Israeli contractors whose software could control some 30,000 fake social media profiles. The chapter notes that the exposé triggered no follow-up national investigations and no new industry rules.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal followed a similar arc. Public anger went to Facebook for failing to protect user data. Far less went to the consultants, PR firms, and campaigns that worked together behind it.

The press did not help. Citing other scholars, Ong and Lanuza fault news outlets for celebrating the scandal’s whistleblowers as reformers without questioning stories that also sold their tell-all books.

The authors call the standard response “whack-a-mole.” Platforms take down accounts, fact-checkers correct posts, and the contract that produced them stays in force.

Their alternatives are modest, and they admit the flaws. Advertising watchdogs can pressure brands to stop funding disinformation sites. In Brazil, an outside analysis found that Sleeping Giants succeeded in more than 80% of its requests to companies during the 2022 elections.

Industry dialogue can produce rules. Ong’s work with the legal group LENTE helped update Commission on Elections (Comelec) regulations on social media campaigning. A later attempt to get PR firms to sign a code of ethics against disinformation produced nothing substantive.

Protecting digital workers can bring insiders forward. But a podcast Ong co-hosted with former campaign operators was accused at home of giving villains a platform.

Defunding gets branded as censorship; ethics codes stay voluntary, and the study does not hide any of this.

Its central point holds anyway. Asking whether a post is true remains necessary, but asking who paid for it tells us the rest.

That question belongs to the Comelec as much as to newsrooms. Candidates already file statements of contributions and expenditures.

How many of those statements name the agencies running their pages? Who checks payments to influencers against what actually appears online? Has any candidate ever been asked to produce a contract for “digital consultancy”?

We suspect the answers are short.

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