1/ My colleagues @ISDglobal have just released an amazing, intricate, detailed and painstaking study into a very weird world: a sprawling online empire of health disinformation and conspiracy theories called 'Natural News'.

A few thoughts below

https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200620-ISDG-NaturalNews-Briefing-V4.pdf

2/ The whole operation relies on industrialised domain registration. They've knocked up almost 500 since 1996 - with most happening in 2015. It's a cloud of new, old, defunct and lively sites that has constantly been changing.

3/ What are they doing?

The network itself is a grab-bag: health disinformation, prepper ideology, hyper-hyper partisan stuff, and (obviously) conspiracy theories galore. One 'exposes', for instance, a government conspiracy to kidnap children for medical experiments.

4/ How are they getting eyeballs?

Social media.

- FB banned them in 2019 and 2020, but they've used hundreds upon hundreds of affiliates to chicane around enforcement. Posts linking them them have gathered together 327k shares, 100k likes over Jan to March this year.

5/ Overall, I think it shows two things.

First, that big money and coherent networks can sit behind the apparently fractious and unrelated parts of online society that themselves promise liberation from shadowy interests.

6/ Second, this is a difficult enforcement prospect for the tech giants. New domains constantly springing up that need to be identified, subject to a policy process and then banned or blocked.

7/ The tech giants alone can also do very little more than ban something from their platform. This kind of enforcement, really, probably represents little more than an irritation to the people on the other side, and I'm sure has long been priced into Natural News' operations.