Disinformation campaigns and black propaganda are not new, but they are evolving. Recent attention has focused primarily on the social-media-first memetic propaganda operations of the variety encountered in the United States presidential election of 2016. This talk examines a collection of operations undertaken by three actors that have targeted regions across the globe for the better part of five years. It investigates a 'playbook' that is far more expansive (and evolving) than previously discussed, and assesses disinformation campaigns along several axes: narrative vs memetic, long-term vs discrete, and how they are deployed in conjunction with community infiltration and hack-and-leak campaigns.
