by Eric Ahlberg and his pet AI.
Look I really care about this issue, and AI did my research and wrote it up. Kinda like having a brilliant grad school intern to do your work, isn’t that a good outcome. Go ahead be suspicious, stay suspicious, because they hope to fool ya.
It’s a massive, shadowy industry, and the numbers are honestly quite staggering. The commercialization of influence operations—essentially “disinformation-for-hire”—has turned narrative control into a global, multi-billion-dollar business. It’s less about a few lone actors in a basement and more about sophisticated PR firms, marketing agencies, and private contractors treating public perception as just another commodity.
Here is a breakdown of the statistics, who is involved, and what the financial landscape looks like for commercial influence operations.
The Scale and Market Size
The overall economic impact and market size of disinformation and information manipulation are enormous.
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Overall Economic Impact: A 2026 study by Sopra Steria estimated the global economic impact of disinformation to be $417 billion in 2024 alone. To put that in perspective, that is comparable to the annual revenues of some of the world’s largest tech companies or the GDP of mid-sized nations.
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Direct Financial Manipulation: Of that $417 billion, an estimated $393 billion involved financial flows directly diverted through information manipulation. This includes massive sums influenced by fake online reviews ($227 billion) and costs linked to deepfakes and AI-enabled fraud.
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The Disinformation Security Market: Because the problem is so vast, there is also a booming industry designed to combat it. The global “Disinformation Security Market” is projected to reach $7.8 billion by 2026 and is expected to grow to $26.5 billion by 2035. This involves companies selling AI-based threat intelligence, deepfake detection, and narrative mapping systems.
Who is Paying and How Much Does it Cost?
The clients for these services range from governments and political figures to corporations and wealthy individuals. They are looking to shape public discourse, damage competitors, or run covert propaganda.
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Political Spending: A 2020 report from Oxford’s DemTech tracked the industry and found that at least $60 million had been spent on hiring private firms for computational propaganda services since 2009. Furthermore, almost $10 million was spent specifically on political advertisements by cyber troops operating globally. Researchers widely acknowledge that these figures are likely just the tip of the iceberg, as many of these contracts are highly secretive.
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The Menu of Services: The cost of these operations is highly customizable, ranging from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands. Research by Recorded Future into underground forums found threat actors offering specific price lists for disinformation:
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Social Media Assets: Around $150 for Facebook packages and $200 for LinkedIn accounts and content.
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Content Creation: Roughly $45 for a short article and $100 to seed 10 fake comments on a news story.
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Placement in Media: Operators charge varying rates to get articles published, depending on the perceived legitimacy of the site. Prices can range from $180 for low-profile spam sites, up to several thousand dollars to place content on more reputable or top-level domains (e.g., thousands of dollars for placements on known tech or news aggregate sites).
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Who is Doing the Work and What Are They Selling?
The work is increasingly outsourced to private sector marketing, PR, and communications firms. Since 2018, over 65 private companies across 48 countries have been identified as offering these “disinformation-for-hire” services.
What they are selling includes:
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Network Creation: Using AI and cheap labor to spin up vast networks of fake personas, bots, and websites.
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Inauthentic Credentials: Creating fake “experts,” think tanks, or journalistic outfits to lend credibility to a narrative.
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Narrative Amplification (or Suppression): Flooding the zone with specific talking points or orchestrating targeted online harassment to silence critics or independent journalists.
While state actors (like those from Russia, China, or Iran) are often discussed in the news, the reality is that the tools they use have been fully commercialized. Anyone with enough money can now buy a bespoke influence operation to push their narrative, whether it’s regarding a political conflict like Israel-Palestine, a corporate rivalry, or a domestic election.
(The tempo slows to a heavy, menacing, minor-key dirge. Imagine the booming, thunderous brass and sweeping cellos of a Stephen Sondheim climax. Our baritone stands looking over the New York skyline from a penthouse balcony, a freshly signed Presidential pardon in his pocket.)
Poisoning People in the Dark (The Operatic Reprise)
(To a slow, thunderous waltz)
(Low, rumbling baritone, dripping with contempt)
The pardon is signed, a-puh-ardon is signed!
The bars of the prison are left far behind.
I think the most lucrative time of the year
Is a crisis. I do, don’t you? (Guttural chuckle) Course you do.
But there’s one thing that makes my return oh-so-sweet to me,
As the sycophants grovel right here at my feet for me:
(The orchestra swells; the waltz becomes grand and sweeping)
All the world seems in tune, howling straight at the moon,
When we’re poisoning people in the dark.
With a trillion to spend, I betray every friend,
As we poison the people in the dark.
(Staccato, aggressive strings)
When the billionaires call,
To their knees they will fall,
With a blank check to ruin a life!
Oh, the targets will bleed,
But I’m driven by greed,
For I overcharge them to twist in the knife!
The skyline is bright,
But the city is mine tonight,
When we’re poisoning people in the dark.
(Tempo quickens, the singer’s voice rising to a booming, theatrical crescendo)
We’ve gained notoriety,
Crushed all society,
Feigned such piety
With our games!
They fund the extortion,
I steal my proportion,
With total distortion
I ruin their names!
For it’s never against the consultant’s decree
To bleed the same cowards who just set me free!
(Full orchestra, thunderous timpani, absolute grandiosity)
So if midnight you’re free,
Bring a trillion to me!
And we’ll poison the people in the dark!
And maybe we’ll fleece
A dictator or piece
Of the state while we’re leaving our mark!
(Fierce, unhinged vibrato)
We will bankrupt them all, amid maniacal glee!
And bill them a premium just for the fee!
My bankroll is quickenin’,
With each plot we’re thickenin’,
We feed to the timeline,
(It just takes a dime line!)
To poison the people… in the…
DAAAAAAARK!
(A final, crashing, dissonant orchestral chord echoes into silence as he sips his espresso.)
It is practically begging for a slightly out-of-tune piano or a jaunty accordion backing it up. If you ever decide to pull this out at a jam session, counting it off in a brisk three-quarter time is absolutely mandatory for full theatrical effect.
Malachi Vane, CEO of Omnia Synthetics
He doesn’t have a secret volcano lair. He operates out of an enormous brutalist factory, an endless sea of concrete and glass where thousands of workers sit trapped in a massive gridlock of data feeds and glowing monitors. Under the glare of flashing red warning lights, his operation functions as a bureaucratic dystopian nightmare—a churning, highly detailed engine of narrative control.
He sits in his soundproofed, cinematic office above it all, a bespoke suit draped over a frame built on billion-dollar retainer fees, sipping espresso while he brokers reality. He doesn’t conquer countries; he simply repaints the monsters who do, transforming dictators into “misunderstood reformers” and corporate pillagers into “visionary disruptors.”
In the center of his desk sits a sleek, obsidian display case. Inside are seven physical tokens—a shattered hard drive, a tarnished medal, a shredded newspaper, and so on—each representing one of his absolute masterpieces.
He calls them The Seven Virtues of Deception:
1. The Synthetic Savior
He didn’t just suppress a revolution; he preempted it. When a corrupt autocrat client faced an organic uprising, Vane didn’t fight the rebels—he created a better rebel. Using deepfakes, bot armies, and untraceable shell companies, he engineered a charismatic, entirely fictional opposition leader. Millions rallied behind this digital phantom, pouring their funds and fury into a movement that Vane controlled, leading them straight into a harmless, heavily surveilled dead end.
2. The Miracle of the Vanishing Massacre
A brutal regime crossed a line, and the raw footage hit the servers. Vane didn’t deny it; he polluted the timeline. Within forty-eight hours, his servers unleashed a localized digital tsunami. By flooding the zone with hyper-targeted, contradictory deepfakes, conflicting “expert” testimonies, and algorithmic noise, he shattered the public consensus. People didn’t believe the regime; they just stopped believing their own eyes.
3. The Greenwashed Leviathan
His highest-paying corporate client was a petrochemical conglomerate literally poisoning the water table of a sovereign nation. Vane rebranded them as the vanguard of the eco-revolution. He astroturfed a dozen “grassroots” environmental groups, funded sham documentaries, and manipulated search engine optimization until the CEO who ordered the dumping was nominated for a global humanitarian award.
4. The Manufactured Martyr
To justify his client’s invasion of a neighboring territory, Vane needed a spark. He orchestrated an elaborate, multi-platform false flag, creating a digital trail of a “terrorist attack” that never actually happened. He fabricated the victims, generated the outraged obituaries, and seeded the “leaked” intelligence reports. Wars used to be started by bullets; Vane started this one with a well-timed data dump.
5. The Echo Chamber Epidemic
His most lucrative long-term play. He didn’t just sell a lie; he sold the infrastructure of lying. Vane engineered an open-source algorithm designed to maximize human outrage and paranoia, quietly seeding it into the backends of three emerging social networks. It fractured the populace so thoroughly that reality became a partisan issue, ensuring a permanent market for his “narrative stabilization” services.
6. The Erased Identity
A brilliant investigative journalist possessed the documents to bring down Vane’s entire operation. Vane didn’t have her killed; he un-personed her. He flooded the web with fabricated criminal records, manufactured evidence of extreme financial fraud, and AI-generated audio of her confessing to treason. In two weeks, her publisher dropped her, her sources fled, and her name became synonymous with scandal. He left her alive, just so she could watch the world forget the truth.
7. The Illusion of Agency
His crowning achievement, and the one that makes him smile in the dark. It is the underlying hum of his entire empire: the carefully constructed, billion-dollar fiction that the masses are making up their own minds. He celebrates the ultimate lie—that the timeline is an organic reflection of human thought, rather than a curated, monetized cage built to keep the pigeons happily eating the poison.
Categories: Advertising, AI, Art, Culture, Eric Ahlberg, Human Rights/Constitution, Humor, The Digital Age
