DISARMframeworks/generated_pages/techniques/T0084.002.md

Technique T0084.002: Plagiarise Content

• Summary: An influence operation may take content from other sources without proper attribution. This content may be either misinformation content shared by others without malicious intent but now leveraged by the campaign as disinformation or disinformation content from other sources.

• Belongs to tactic stage: TA06

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	“Some Twitter accounts in the network [of inauthentic accounts attributed to Iran] impersonated Republican political candidates that ran for House of Representatives seats in the 2018 U.S. congressional midterms. These accounts appropriated the candidates’ photographs and, in some cases, plagiarized tweets from the real individuals’ accounts. Aside from impersonating real U.S. political candidates, the behavior and activity of these accounts resembled that of the others in the network. “For example, the account @livengood_marla impersonated Marla Livengood, a 2018 candidate for California’s 9th Congressional District, using a photograph of Livengood and a campaign banner for its profile and background pictures. The account began tweeting on Sept. 24, 2018, with its first tweet plagiarizing one from Livengood’s official account earlier that month” [...] “In another example, the account @ButlerJineea impersonated Jineea Butler, a 2018 candidate for New York’s 13th Congressional District, using a photograph of Butler for its profile picture and incorporating her campaign slogans into its background picture, as well as claiming in its Twitter bio to be a “US House candidate, NY-13” and linking to Butler’s website, jineeabutlerforcongress[.]com.” In this example actors impersonated existing political candidates (T0097.110: Member of Political Party Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona), strengthening the impersonation by copying legitimate accounts’ imagery (T0145.001: Copy Account Imagery), and copying its previous posts (T0084.002: Plagiarise Content).
I00079 Three thousand fake tanks	“The sixth [website to repost a confirmed false narrative investigated in this report] is an apparent think tank, the Center for Global Strategic Monitoring. This website describes itself, in English apparently written by a non-native speaker, as a “nonprofit and nonpartisan research and analysis institution dedicated to providing insights of the think tank community publications”. It does, indeed, publish think-tank reports on issues such as Turkey and US-China relations; however, the reports are the work of other think tanks, often unattributed (the two mentioned in this sentence were actually produced by the Brookings Institution, although the website makes no mention of the fact). It also fails to provide an address, or any other contact details other than an email, and its (long) list of experts includes entries apparently copied and pasted from other institutions. Thus, the “think tank” website which shared the fake story appears to be a fake itself.” In this example a website which amplified a false narrative presented itself as a think tank (T0097.204: Think Tank Persona). This is an entirely fabricated persona (T0143.002: Fabricated Persona); it republished content from other think tanks without attribution (T0084.002: Plagiarise Content) and fabricated experts (T0097.108: Expert Persona, T0143.002: Fabricated Persona) to make it more believable that they were a real think tank.

Counters	Response types

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