Influence operations as brokerage: Political-economic infrastructures of manipulation in the 2022 Philippine elections

Summary

This paper reconceptualizes influence operations (IOs) in electoral contexts as a contemporary form of political brokerage, arguing that covert campaign enterprises function as intermediaries connecting political clients, digital platforms, and voting publics. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork during the 2022 Philippine General Elections — including 22 in-depth interviews with IO leads and staff — Gaw and colleagues show that manipulation is not merely a matter of bad actors or false content, but is sustained by durable political-economic infrastructures. By extending classical brokerage theory into the digital electoral domain, the paper shifts the analytic lens from disinformation-as-content to the organizational scaffolding that makes manipulation routine and profitable.

Key Contributions

• Introduces a brokerage framework for theorizing influence operations in elections, bridging political sociology and disinformation studies.
• Provides rare insider empirical documentation of IO practices via interviews with operatives in the 2022 Philippine elections.
• Refocuses scholarly attention from content-level disinformation toward the political-economic infrastructures that enable and sustain it.
• Contributes to Global South and Philippine political communication scholarship by treating IOs as organized enterprises rather than ad hoc propaganda.

Methods

Qualitative field research grounded in the 2022 Philippine General Elections, comprising 22 semi-structured in-depth interviews with leads and staff inside influence operations. The empirical material is analyzed through a conceptual lens that adapts classical brokerage theory to covert digital campaigning.

Findings

• IOs display distinctive broker attributes — relational positioning, discretion, and translation capacity — that let them mediate between elite clients and online publics.
• Brokerage processes translate diffuse political demands into operational covert campaign activities (e.g., narrative seeding, account networks, paid amplification).
• The viability of IOs depends on political-economic infrastructures: client pipelines, platform monetization, freelance labor markets, and norms of plausible deniability.
• Manipulation is therefore best understood as institutionalized intermediation, not isolated campaigns.

Connections

This paper sits in productive tension with the more computational tradition of CIB detection, offering a sociological account of why the networks those studies surface exist in the first place. It connects most directly to Pante2025-pq, which also engages Philippine information disorder, and complements platform- and network-level analyses such as Graham2025-gp, Luceri2025-tr, and Kansaon2025-id by supplying the organizational backstory behind coordinated activity. It also resonates with work foregrounding the labor and political economy of influence, including Kuznetsova2025-nu and Gerard2025-br.