# Technique T0097.102: Journalist Persona * **Summary**: A person with a journalist persona presents themselves as a reporter or journalist delivering news, conducting interviews, investigations etc.

While presenting as a journalist is not an indication of inauthentic behaviour, an influence operation may have its narratives amplified by people presenting as journalists. Threat actors can fabricate journalists to give the appearance of legitimacy, justifying the actor’s requests for interviews, etc (T0143.002: Fabricated Persona, T0097.102: Journalist Persona).

People who have legitimately developed a persona as a journalist (T0143.001: Authentic Persona, T0097.102: Journalist Persona) can use it for malicious purposes, or be exploited by threat actors. For example, someone could take money for using their position as a trusted journalist to provide legitimacy to a false narrative or be tricked into doing so without the journalist’s knowledge.

Associated Techniques and Sub-techniques
T0097.202: News Organisation Persona: People with a journalist persona may present as being part of a news organisation.
T0097.101: Local Persona: People with a journalist persona may present themselves as local reporters. * **Belongs to tactic stage**: TA16 | Incident | Descriptions given for this incident | | -------- | -------------------- | | [I00076 Network of Social Media Accounts Impersonates U.S. Political Candidates, Leverages U.S. and Israeli Media in Support of Iranian Interests](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00076.md) | “Accounts in the network [of inauthentic accounts attributed to Iran], under the guise of journalist personas, also solicited various individuals over Twitter for interviews and chats, including real journalists and politicians. The personas appear to have successfully conducted remote video and audio interviews with U.S. and UK-based individuals, including a prominent activist, a radio talk show host, and a former U.S. Government official, and subsequently posted the interviews on social media, showing only the individual being interviewed and not the interviewer. The interviewees expressed views that Iran would likely find favorable, discussing topics such as the February 2019 Warsaw summit, an attack on a military parade in the Iranian city of Ahvaz, and the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.

“The provenance of these interviews appear to have been misrepresented on at least one occasion, with one persona appearing to have falsely claimed to be operating on behalf of a mainstream news outlet; a remote video interview with a US-based activist about the Jamal Khashoggi killing was posted by an account adopting the persona of a journalist from the outlet Newsday, with the Newsday logo also appearing in the video. We did not identify any Newsday interview with the activist in question on this topic. In another instance, a persona posing as a journalist directed tweets containing audio of an interview conducted with a former U.S. Government official at real media personalities, calling on them to post about the interview.”

In this example actors fabricated journalists (T0097.102: Journalist Persona, T0143.002: Fabricated Persona) who worked at existing news outlets (T0097.202: News Outlet Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona) in order to conduct interviews with targeted individuals. | | [I00080 Hundreds Of Propaganda Accounts Targeting Iran And Qatar Have Been Removed From Facebook](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00080.md) | “One example of a fake reporter account targeting Americans is “Jenny Powell,” a self-described Washington-based journalist, volunteer, and environmental activist. At first glance, Powell’s Twitter timeline looks like it belongs to a young and eager reporter amplifying her interests. But her profile photo is a stock image, and many of her links go to the propaganda sites.

“Powell, who joined the platform just last month, shares links to stories from major US news media outlets, retweets local news about Washington, DC, and regularly promotes content from The Foreign Code and The Economy Club. Other fake journalist accounts behaved similarly to Powell and had generic descriptions. One of the accounts, for a fake Bruce Lopez in Louisiana, has a bio that describes him as a “Correspondent Traveler noun|linking verb|noun/verb/adjective|,” which appears to reveal the formula used to write Twitter bios for the accounts.”

The Jenny Powel account used in this influence operation presents as both a journalist and an activist (T0097.102: Journalist Persona, T0097.103: Activist Persona, T0143.002: Fabricated Persona). This example shows how threat actors can easily follow a template to present a fabricated persona to their target audience (T0144.002: Persona Template). | | [I00082 Meta’s November 2021 Adversarial Threat Report ](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00082.md) | “[Meta] removed 41 Facebook accounts, five Groups, and four Instagram accounts for violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. This activity originated in Belarus and primarily targeted audiences in the Middle East and Europe.

“The core of this activity began in October 2021, with some accounts created as recently as mid-November. The people behind it used newly-created fake accounts — many of which were detected and disabled by our automated systems soon after creation — to pose as journalists and activists from the European Union, particularly Poland and Lithuania. Some of the accounts used profile photos likely generated using artificial intelligence techniques like generative adversarial networks (GAN). These fictitious personas posted criticism of Poland in English, Polish, and Kurdish, including pictures and videos about Polish border guards allegedly violating migrants’ rights, and compared Poland’s treatment of migrants against other countries’. They also posted to Groups focused on the welfare of migrants in Europe. A few accounts posted in Russian about relations between Belarus and the Baltic States.”

This example shows how accounts identified as participating in coordinated inauthentic behaviour were presenting themselves as journalists and activists while spreading operation narratives (T0097.102: Journalist Persona, T0097.103: Activist Persona).

Additionally, analysts at Meta identified accounts which were participating in coordinated inauthentic behaviour that had likely used AI-Generated images as their profile pictures (T0145.002: AI-Generated Account Imagery). | | Counters | Response types | | -------- | -------------- | DO NOT EDIT ABOVE THIS LINE - PLEASE ADD NOTES BELOW