Digital Influence Mercenaries: Profits and Power Through Information Warfare

Forest's book addresses a dimension of the influence operations landscape that most academic and policy literature systematically underweights: the commercial market for information warfare services. Digital influence mercenaries — the firms, entrepreneurs, and freelancers who offer disinformation, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, bot deployment, and narrative manipulation as paid services — constitute a growing industry operating at the intersection of online marketing and information warfare. Forest maps this industry systematically: its supply chain, its client base (state governments, corporations, political parties, non-state actors), its business models, and the tactics its practitioners deploy.

The commercial framing is the book's most important analytical contribution. Much of the counter-FIMI literature treats state-sponsored influence operations as if they were produced by government agencies using government resources. Forest demonstrates that much of the actual operational work is outsourced to a loosely regulated commercial sector that will work for anyone who can pay — states, opposition movements, corporations protecting reputations, or political parties seeking to manipulate electoral outcomes. This means that the threat actor landscape is significantly broader than state-attribution frameworks suggest, and that counter-measures targeting specific state actors will be systematically incomplete if they ignore the commercial intermediaries.

Forest draws on case studies across Brazil, China, Iran, Macedonia, Russia, and Zimbabwe — demonstrating that this is a genuinely global industry not confined to any particular geopolitical alignment. His treatment of how mercenaries exploit platform advertising algorithms for profit alongside their paid influence work is particularly useful for understanding the economic incentives that sustain the ecosystem. For practitioners designing threat assessment frameworks and for policymakers working on platform accountability and the regulation of political advertising, this book provides the essential account of the commercial infrastructure that state-attributed operations routinely rely on.