Paper Terrorism is a harassment tactic in which people coordinate in order to hit a target with lots of illegitimate lawsuits at the same time, threatening to use them to take away targets’ money or freedom unless they acquiesce to a set of demands.
Tag Archives: Tactic
Impersonating an existing news organisation
Threat actors can exploit peoples’ existing trust for a news organisation by pretending to be them when disseminating falsehoods. This also wastes resource of the targeted organisation.
Impersonating a Fact Checker
Impersonating a Fact Checker to spread fake fact checks makes people think it’s hard to get accurate information about the topic. It also exploits peoples’ existing faith in Fact Checkers to increase the probability that people believe posted content.
Influencers being paid to amplify inauthentic messages to their audience
Building an audience that will reliably read the content you post is difficult, so threat actors can pay others who have already built an audience to share what they’ve produced. This has the added benefit of appearing more authentic.
Using Whataboutism to avoid addressing accusations
To avoid addressing an accusation, the accused can return fire with a whataboutism; “You’re criticising my actions? But what about the bad actions you’ve taken?”, moving conversational focus on to the accuser’s imperfections.
Using AI Generated profile pictures in inauthentic Social Media accounts to appear more legitimate
People have made computer programs that can create realistic-looking pictures of people that don’t physically exist. Threat actors use these to make inauthentic social media accounts appear more legitimate.
Double checking an image’s source by Reverse Image Searching
One way you can double check the narrative being presented alongside an image is to use one of many free online tools to see if the same image can be found elsewhere on the internet.
Presenting legitimate media with false context to support a desired narrative
It can be hard to falsify a convincing piece of media, so one strategy used is to take real content and create a false context which matches the desired narrative.
Manufacturing a Tactical Infodemic to make true information harder to find
Let’s say there is someone who wants to find out about a topic, but you don’t want them to succeed. One way you could make it harder for them is to intentionally flood the pool of information surrounding said topic with false data.
Inauthentically Boosting Content to Trending Sections of Social Media Sites
Aggressors who want to engineer discussion around a topic can use inauthentic methods to get them trending. This helps expose more victims to narratives, and makes those narratives appear more popular than they are.