Commercial influence for hire in official takedown reports

What the reports mean by a commercial actor

Each reporting body uses its own wording. Meta names a firm when its investigation found links to that firm. It described STOIC as "a political marketing and business intelligence firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel" and said it banned STOIC from its platform and sent it a cease and desist letter ¹.

OpenAI separates the operation from the company. It called its May 2024 case Zero Zeno and said it disrupted the activity, not the company STOIC ⁴. Google often describes an actor by type only, such as "a Russian consulting firm", without giving a name ⁷.

A platform attribution is the reporting body's own assessment of what it saw on its own services. It is not a court finding. Meta says the mere sharing of an operation's links by online users is not enough to attribute accounts to a campaign without corroborating evidence ¹.

Firms named by Meta

The table lists firms Meta named in its 2024 quarterly reports, with the location and targets as Meta gives them. Each network was removed for coordinated inauthentic behaviour ^1,23.

Ad spend and size as reported

Meta gives approximate ad spend for each network. It reported about $1.2 million for the LT Media network, paid mostly in Vietnamese dong, and about $77,000 for the IMA Digital network ². It reported about $10,200 for the DigitSol network and about $1,300 for the Digited Consulting network ³.

The STOIC network had 510 Facebook accounts, 11 Pages, 1 Group and 32 Instagram accounts, per Meta ¹. The DigitSol network had 42 Facebook accounts, 1 Page and 33 Instagram accounts, with about 880,000 accounts following the Instagram accounts. Meta said most of those followers were outside Ghana, which suggests fake engagement ³.

Firms named by OpenAI and Google

OpenAI said its June 2025 case High Five involved Philippines-origin accounts generating bulk comments about domestic politics. It named Comm&Sense Inc as a commercial marketing company and reported five TikTok channels with 6,000 to 12,000 followers each ⁵.

In October 2025 OpenAI said its Russia-origin case Stop News was consistent with "a commercial company running covert influence operations for hire". It did not name the company ⁶.

Google's TAG Bulletin for Q3 2024 listed terminations of 7,319, 4,253 and 4,164 YouTube channels in July, August and September 2024 linked to a Russian consulting firm ⁷. It blocked 498 domains linked to Shanghai Haixun Technology Co., Ltd, which it called a Chinese PR firm, from Google News and Discover eligibility ⁷.

Research and EU findings on the industry

The Oxford Internet Institute's 2020 global inventory found organised social media manipulation in 81 countries, up from 70 the year before ⁸. Its summary reports 48 instances of private firms deploying computational propaganda on behalf of political actors in the last year ⁸. It counted more than 317,000 accounts and pages removed by Facebook and Twitter between January 2019 and December 2020 ⁸.

The 4th EEAS report, published in March 2026 and covering 2025, describes "FIMI-as-a-service", a layered model in which operations are planned, financed and subcontracted ⁹. It says intermediaries, contractors and commercial providers give plausible deniability. It reports that one network on X amplified content for both Operation Overload and Spamouflage ⁹.