The persistence of informational manipulation and the appropriation of emerging events
Summary
This paper argues that coordinated informational manipulation campaigns are not bounded, episodic operations but persistent, adaptive phenomena that sustain themselves by appropriating emerging events. By latching onto breaking news, crises, and topical shifts, manipulation operations renew their relevance and maintain influence well beyond their original triggering context. The work reframes such campaigns as dynamic and opportunistic rather than discrete, with implications for how researchers and platforms conceptualise the temporal arc of information operations.
Key Contributions
- Reconceptualises informational manipulation as a longitudinal, adaptive process rather than a one-off campaign.
- Identifies event appropriation as a core mechanism by which manipulation campaigns extend their lifespan and influence.
- Provides a framing useful for tracking how operations migrate across topics and news cycles.
Methods
Not specified in the available abstract.
Findings
- Manipulation campaigns persist over extended timeframes rather than dissipating quickly.
- Persistence is achieved in part by opportunistically appropriating emerging events to remain topically relevant.
Connections
This work fits alongside longitudinal and infrastructural studies of coordinated inauthentic behavior such as Luceri2025-tr and Graham2025-gp, which similarly track how operations endure and reconfigure across time. The event-appropriation framing also resonates with research on how disinformation actors exploit crises and breaking news, e.g. Starbird2025-jj and Kuznetsova2025-nu, and complements work on detection of evolving coordinated networks like Minici2024-tf.
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