I’ve studied a lot of high-level smear, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns over the past five years — the kind that researchers in digital forensics, OSINT, and computational social science have been warning governments about since at least the early 2010s.
While these campaigns are often strictly political — the 2016 Russian election-interference operations to support Donald Trump being the most heavily documented example (and confirmed by the U.S. intelligence community, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, and the Mueller investigation) — many are deeply personal. They frequently target individuals, especially women, and often still carry political or ideological overtones.
You’re probably aware of some of the biggest, overtly personal smear campaigns: the coordinated harassment and mass-amplification ops that targeted Meghan Markle; the bot-driven and troll-driven influence networks that fueled hatred against Amber Heard during the Depp–Heard trial (which resea…
