BN repeatedly denied before the last election that it had brought in secret foreign election managers and PR advisors to manipulate the electorate, despite several reports and warnings by Sarawak Report.
Today more evidence emerged from an investigation by the Guardian newspaper substantiated what Sarawak Report has also learnt from independent sources, which is that the PR firm CFT partners, run by the right leaning ‘reputation manager’ and election manager Lynton Crosby, was active in KL on behalf of Najib in the run up to GE14.
A senior director of CTF Sam Lyon was sent to Malaysia to set up an office there, the Guardian confirms. Lyon was previously the manager of the new UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s earlier mayoral campaigns, which in turn were bankrolled by a Tory party donor and former treasurer who is familiar to Malaysians as being an ally of Najib’s, Lord Marland.
As Sarawak Report has detailed, Marland’s own company SCL (he is one of the shareholders) was also hired to advise BN both in the 2016 Sarawak election and for GE14. SCL later gained global notoriety as the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, which abused Facebook data to seek to influence the US election and Brexit referendum in 2016.
Sam Lyon, the head of CTF Partners’ London office who previously worked as Johnson’s director of communications, was a member of the team who worked with the party of Malaysia’s then prime minister, Najib Razak. The Asian politician was later toppled amid ongoing accusations of involvement in a multi-billion dollar corruption scandal. [Guardian 2nd August]
After the Malaysian election defeat for the CTF client Lyon returned to run the London office for CTF, which is believed to have been quietly working on Johnson’s leadership bid from the moment he resigned as foreign secretary last year. That connection was only acknowledged just days before the party polls and it has now emerged that CTF provided their candidate with a loan to cover some of the costs of that campaign.
Sam Lyon is now being tipped by jubilant CTF office staff as the likely pick to be the new prime minister’s communications man, according to insiders information made available to Sarawak Report. Others have expressed concern about the dangers of undue influence over the new prime minister by a company that has numerous clients in big business and handles the reputations of some of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
Dirty Tricks
Today’s series of articles in the Guardian expose a series of apparently unethical and deceptive practices by the PR company, which hides its clients and operates anonymously in their favour by setting up social media and Facebook campaigns promoting their interests whilst pretending to represent the views of ordinary, unpaid members of the public.
Key clients for whom CTF have run covert fake media operations include the government of Saudi Arabia, for whom it ran sites promoting the country’s attacks on Yemen and the major coal mining concern Glencore, for which it created climate denying sites. Likewise, in the run up to the conservative leadership vote, CTF staff set up what are believed to have been highly influential Facebook pages (they were pushed to millions of readers) promoting the once fringe concept of a No Deal Brexit and aggressively attacking political figures who oppose the idea.
These paid operators are accused of setting up the sites under their personal email addresses rather than CTF’s office address to disguise the fact that these were commissioned operations rather than an expression of genuine public opinion.
CTF is secretive about its client lists, to the extent of keeping its own staff in the dark about which clients their colleagues are working with – operating on a ‘need to know’ basis and fearsome non-disclosure clauses. So, as yet it is unclear what the sources of income have been to fund the operation and what the agenda is.
However, Lord Marland is certainly understood to continue to be part of the inner circle and remains a regular visitor to Malaysia, apparently promoting trade and the development of closer bilateral ties as the UK looks set to lose much of its trading links with Europe.
– Sarawak Report
The lobbying firm run by Boris Johnson’s close ally Sir Lynton Crosby has secretly built a network of unbranded “news” pages on Facebook for dozens of clients ranging from the Saudi government to major polluters, a Guardian investigation has found.
In the most complete account yet of CTF Partners’ outlook and strategy, current and former employees of the campaign consultancy have painted a picture of a business that appears to have professionalised online disinformation, taken on a series of controversial clients and faced incidents of misogynistic bullying in its headquarters.
They said that such was the culture of secrecy within the firm that staff working on online disinformation campaigns, which selectively promoted their clients’ viewpoints on anonymised Facebook pages that followed a common formula, used initials rather than full names on internal systems and often relied on personal email accounts to avoid their work being traced back to CTF and its clients.
The disclosures will raise pressure on the prime minister to distance himself from CTF, with former staff members warning that the company might wield substantial influence in the new administration. CTF gave Johnson an interest-free loan to cover office and staffing costs earlier this year, while Crosby’s partners in the business are Mark Textor and Mark Fullbrook, with Fullbrook taking a leave of absence to run Johnson’s campaign for the Tory party leadership along with David Canzini.
The news follows the Guardian’s April report that Crosby’s company was behind a series of hugely influential pro-Brexit Facebook groups, which spent as much as £1m seeding the idea of a no-deal exit from the EU in the minds of the British public.
But the latest revelations reveal that the company has pursued that approach more broadly, in the service of previously unreported corporate interests and foreign governments.
And they expose a major flaw in Facebook’s political transparency tools, which make it possible for Crosby’s company – which boasts on its website that it deploys “the latest tools in digital engagement” – to use the social network to run professional-looking “news” pages reaching tens of millions of people on highly contentious topics, without apparently disclosing that they are being overseen by CTF Partners on behalf of paying clients.
Based on discussions with the current and former employees and examination of a large number of internal documents, the Guardian can reveal the extent of the astroturfing campaign:
- How the company took millions of pounds from the Saudi Arabian government in 2018 to burnish the reputation of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has subsequently been implicated in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
- How the company worked with the party of former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who has since been implicated in one of the world’s biggest-ever corruption scandals, in the run-up to the country’s last general election. Razak has denied any wrongdoing.
- CTF’s role in political campaigns in countries criticised for their human rights records, ranging from Zimbabwe to Sri Lanka to war-torn Yemen.
- How CTF specialises in fighting regulation by seeking to influence key politicians, with campaigns in support of coal power, tobacco, and against cyclists.
CTF declined to comment on their methods or clients but said they operated within the law and accused the Guardian of relying on “false or distorted facts”. They dismissed the idea that the company or Crosby could exercise any influence on the prime minister.
The company’s approach is a sophisticated application of the well worn communications technique of astroturfing, where political campaigners attempt to create the perception of an upswell of grassroots support for a cause.
One former employee described how Crosby’s business created Facebook pages on specific topics to spread disinformation to interested members of the public in the UK and abroad. “It would all be anonymised and made to look as though they are a news aggregator with a specialist angle,” the employee said. “For instance, if we were working to promote the use of coal, it would be an anti-environmental page. You might make a page designed to attract pro-Trump types and get them revved up about green subsidies.”
Staff members said that they created websites and Facebook pages which appeared to be independent online news sources with names such as Why Electricity Matters, Reporting Yemen and Londoners for Transport, but instead could be used to distribute highly selective information which reached tens of millions of readers.
Multiple supposedly independent pages on behalf of different clients could then be managed by Crosby employees through a single high-level “business manager” account, which sidesteps Facebook’s transparency tools. The connection between the pages is not visible to normal Facebook users.
Secrecy was a paramount consideration in the communications strategy, the staffers said, leading to instances of the careful use of initials instead of full names on Facebook’s internal systems and the occasional reliance on non-corporate email accounts. Some resorted to using ProtonMail, an encrypted email service, to avoid being traced.
The Guardian understands that CTF Partners earned millions of pounds representing the Saudi Arabian government, with the account headed by longtime Crosby associate Mark Domitrak – a former lobbying boss at British American Tobacco. The company helped coordinate press coverage around the arrival of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the UK for his state visit in early 2018, prior to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
Sam Lyon, the head of CTF Partners’ London office who previously workedas Johnson’s director of communications, was a member of the team who worked with the party of Malaysia’s then prime minister, Najib Razak. The Asian politician was later toppled amid ongoing accusations of involvement in a multi-billion dollar corruption scandal. He has always denied any wrongdoing.
The supposed news sources, which were liked by millions of users and reached tens of millions through the use of paid Facebook adverts, were grown using the social network’s promotional tools, with assistance from Facebook sales teams who encouraged the purchase of more promotions. Once CTF employees found a tactic that provoked a strong reaction, they would double down, according to one of the ex-employees: “If you’re after the Maga [make America great again] crowd you just target people like this. Then once you’ve got an audience you just target people like that.”
One such news page – entitled GreenWatch – published repeated attacks against subsidies for “wasteful onshore wind farms” using the slogan “keeping the green lobby honest”, without any sign it was overseen by Crosby’s company, which had a contract with major coal miner Glencore. Other Facebook campaigns promoted the construction of coal power stations in India using pages with names such as Bright Bangla.
Pages purporting to be independent news pages on the war in Yemen with names such as Middle East Diplomat and Iran in Focus did not disclose that CTF worked on behalf of the Saudi government, which is heavily involved in the war. The disinformation network uncovered by the Guardian also included political pages in African nations with titles such as Inside Mauritania and Free & Fair Election Zimbabwe, which purported to provide fact-based information on what was going on in the two countries, without disclosing the source of funding or work on behalf of political campaigns.
Many of the Facebook pages were deleted after the Guardian began making enquiries. After being presented with the Guardian’s findings about the scale of the company’s online disinformation campaign, Facebook said it did not want to start regulating what constituted a legitimate news source.
It also said the network of pages pretending to be news sources on behalf of corporate and state clients did not break their rules on “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, a term used to shut down disinformation networks overseen by foreign governments in Russia and Iran. This is because Crosby’s employees used their real names on internal Facebook administration tools – information that is not available to the general public. The Guardian has seen documents that suggest Facebook has been aware of the issue involving the network of CTF pages since late last year.
The company said: “Our review to-date suggests the majority of these pages to be operated by real people and do not currently violate our coordinated inauthentic behaviour policy. However, we take seriously the information shared by the Guardian and are continuing to review the activity of the pages mentioned.”
Existing Facebook rules on political transparency only require an individual to be put up as the public face of a campaign, without disclosing who is ultimately paying for it or overseeing the account, a tactic used in Crosby’s pro-Brexit campaigns. The company said it was looking to add additional disclosures but suggested that government regulation was needed: “These examples could highlight the case for new rules since internet platforms are not currently required to find out who is paying page admins or managers.”
CTF through their lawyers said any suggestion the company produced “fake news” or that Facebook has taken action against them or their clients was false and defamatory.
Johnson has a longstanding personal relationship with Crosby, who has played a key role in every Conservative election campaign since 2005. Last weekend the Sunday Times quoted a “source close to Crosby” claiming that Johnson had talked to him “frequently” since being elected.
Crosby’s lawyer said that any suggestion CTF or Crosby could exert influence “on account of their ‘relationship’ with Mr Johnson ignores the reality of the decision-making and policy process in Westminster and Whitehall”.
Although CTF declined to comment on their methods and which clients they had worked for, citing commercial confidentiality rules, they said employees always operated within the law and accused the Guardian’s journalists of relying “on false or distorted facts and improperly leaked documents as part of a political agenda”.
“That is not public-interest journalism: it is agenda-driven and irresponsible journalism,” they added.
– https://www.theguardian.com
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