Every morning our newsroom receives another round of forwarded messages, screenshots, and suspicious links. We check them, we trace their origins, we write the facts, and we publish. We believe in this work. We stand by it, and we will keep doing it. But after years of matching false posts with corrections, we have learned to notice something uncomfortable: a fact-check rarely tells readers who paid for the lie. It tells you that a post is false. It tells you that a video was edited, a quote was invented, a statistic was twisted. But it usually does not tell you why the falsehood exists, who designed it, or whose money kept it alive. That silence is exactly what researchers Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jose Mari Hall Lanuza examine in a new chapter published in the “De Gruyter Handbook of Technology, Media, and Democracy” (2026, pp. 293–310). Their argument is simple but powerful: disinformation is better understood as an industry than as a pile of false posts. They call it “disinformation-for-hire.” The idea is plain. Someone pays. Someone designs the campaign. Someone else does the posting. This is not random chaos created by anonymous fools; it is work. It is contracted, budgeted, billed, and delivered. When we see a viral lie, we are seeing the final product of a supply chain. By asking only whether the product is true, we are treating the symptom. By asking who paid for it, we begin to see the whole machine.
That machine has a hierarchy. At the bottom are not the true believers we imagine. Ong’s earlier study of Philippine campaigns, written with Jason Cabañes, found young and precarious digital workers who treated trolling as one more gig. They were not ideologues. They worked shifts alongside data annotation and content moderation. They produced outrage for a wage, then went home. Above them sit the strategists, many drawn from advertising and public relations. Their industry jargon gives the work what the authors call a “cloak of respectability.” They speak of “content strategy,” “audience engagement,” “digital reputation management,” and in doing so they transform manipulation into professionalism. Above the strategists sit the clients. These are the people whose names should be in headlines. But the chapter makes an uncomfortable observation about our own trade: the identities of the chief architects are an industry “open secret,” yet journalists seldom expose them. Why? Because some of those architects are executives who influence newspaper advertising revenue. Because others enjoy the protection of politicians they helped elect. Because provincial newsrooms are especially vulnerable, and so are provincial reporters who depend on access. We must not pretend that this only happens somewhere else. It happens in the newsrooms we know, in the small offices where the publisher’s friend is also the mayor’s partner. The chapter forces us to ask whether we have been silent partners. It forces us to ask whether we have confused comfort with safety, and access with independence.
None of this happens strictly in the dark. A 2019 study for the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence found that sellers of fake engagement advertise on ordinary websites, take payments openly, and buy search-engine ads to attract customers. They are not hiding; we are simply not looking. The consequences, when they come, are uneven. The London firm Bell Pottinger was expelled from the Public Relations and Communications Association in 2017 over a racially divisive campaign in South Africa. That punishment mattered, but it was an exception. In 2023, reporters exposed “Team Jorge,” Israeli contractors whose software could control some thirty thousand fake social media profiles. The exposé triggered no follow-up national investigations and no new industry rules. The Cambridge Analytica scandal followed a similar arc. Public anger went to Facebook for failing to protect user data. Far less went to the consultants, PR firms, and campaigns that worked together behind it. The press did not help. Citing other scholars, Ong and Lanuza fault news outlets for celebrating the scandal’s whistleblowers as reformers without questioning stories that also sold their tell-all books. This is a pattern we recognize. We punish the visible platform, forgive the invisible architects, and then move on to the next scandal. We play what the authors call “whack-a-mole.” Platforms take down accounts. Fact-checkers correct posts. And the contract that produced them stays in force. The mole disappears, but the money never does.
The authors do not pretend there are easy answers. Their alternatives are modest, and they admit the flaws. Advertising watchdogs can pressure brands to stop funding disinformation sites. In Brazil, an outside analysis found that Sleeping Giants succeeded in more than eighty percent of its requests to companies during the 2022 elections. That is a meaningful result. Yet defunding is easily branded as censorship, and many brands prefer to stay quiet. Industry dialogue can produce rules. Ong’s work with the legal group LENTE helped update Commission on Elections regulations on social media campaigning. That was a real step forward. But a later attempt to get PR firms to sign a code of ethics against disinformation produced nothing substantive. Codes stay voluntary. They are paper shields against paper darts. Protecting digital workers can bring insiders forward. But a podcast Ong co-hosted with former campaign operators was accused at home of giving villains a platform. The vulnerabilities of workers remain mostly unaddressed, and the people who know the industry best are often too afraid to speak. In all of this, the chapter remains honest. It does not offer false hope. It does not claim that any single intervention will dismantle the industry. But it insists that interventions matter, and that we must stop pretending that deleting posts is enough.
Its central point holds anyway. Asking whether a post is true remains necessary. We cannot abandon that. But asking who paid for it tells us the rest. This question belongs to the Comelec as much as to newsrooms. Candidates already file statements of contributions and expenditures. The forms exist. The law exists. But how many of those statements name the agencies running their pages? Who checks payments to influencers against what actually appears online? Has any candidate ever been asked to produce a contract for “digital consultancy”? We suspect the answers are short. The campaign finance regime is built for an age of posters, rallies, and billboards, not for an age of troll farms, engagement bots, and dark-pattern advertising. If we want to truly understand disinformation, we must audit political money. The invoice is a more revealing document than the post. The contract is more important than the comment. The bank transfer is more powerful than the hashtag. We need to teach ourselves to follow the odor of money, not just the trail of pixels. This is not a suggestion to abandon fact-checking. It is a call to deepen it, to make it uncomfortable, to make it structural.
So we return to a simple question in Hiligaynon: Sin-o gid bala ang nagabayad? Who really pays? This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the question that links fact-checking to justice. We can keep correcting posts. It is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The industry will adapt. New accounts will open. New fakes will circulate. But if we expose the money, the industry loses its ability to stay hidden. The press, the regulator, and the public can demand contracts, invoices, and bank statements. We can ask candidates to explain their digital expenditures. We can hold agencies accountable for the work they do in the shadows. We can protect whistleblowers instead of silencing them. We can refuse to treat PR language as a cloak of respectability. This is not about censorship, and it is not about giving villains a platform. It is about transparency. It is about asking the questions that make democracy possible. Daily Guardian will keep fact-checking. But we commit to asking the more uncomfortable question, and we commit to waiting for an answer. Not a vague answer. Not a denial. Not an excuse. We want to know who paid, how much, and why. Because in the end, truth may set us free, but it is the money that tells us who is holding the keys.