* **Summary**: A Chat Broadcast Group is a type of Chat Group in which only specific members can send content to the channel (typically administrators, or approved group members). Members of the channel may be able to react to content, or comment on it, but can’t directly push new content to the channel.<br><br>Examples include:<br>WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord: Chat Groups in which only admins are able to post new content.<br>X (prev. Twitter): Spaces (an audio discussion hosting feature) in which admins control who can speak at a given moment.
* **Belongs to tactic stage**: TA07
| Incident | Descriptions given for this incident |
| [I00113 Inside the Shadowy World of Disinformation for Hire in Kenya](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00113.md) | Researchers at Mozilla examined influence operations targeting Kenyan citizens on Twitter in 2021, providing “a grim window into the booming and shadowy industry of Twitter influencers for political hire here in Kenya”, and giving insight into operations’ operationalisation:<br><br><i>In our interviews with one of the influencers, they informed us of the agile tactics they use to organize and avoid detection. For example, when it’s time to carry out the campaign the influencers would be added to a Whatsapp group. Here, they received direction about what to post, the hashtags to use, which tweets to engage with and who to target. Synchronizing the tweets was also incredibly important for them. It’s what enables them to achieve their goal of trending on Twitter and gain amplification.<br><br>[...]<br><br>They revealed to us that those participating in the exercise are paid roughly between $10 and $15 to participate in three campaigns per day. Each campaign execution involves tweeting about the hashtags of the day until it appears on the trending section of Twitter. Additionally, some individuals have managed to reach retainer level and get paid about $250 per month. Their job is to make sure the campaigns are executed on a day-by-day basis with different hashtags.</i><br><br>An M-PESA account (T0148.002: Bank Account Asset, T0148.001: Online Banking Platform) was used to pay campaign participants.<br><br>Participants were organised in WhatsApp groups (T0129.005: Coordinate on Encrypted/Closed Networks, T0151.007: Chat Broadcast Group, T0151.004: Chat Platform), in which they planned how to get campaign content trending on Twitter (T0121: Manipulate Platform Algorithm, T0151.008: Microblogging Platform). |
