Somebody produces the world's picture of itself, and somebody pays for it. The Information Operations Monitor exists to keep the receipts, in a form a journalist or a minister can actually use.

The visible layer of an information operation - a hostile broadcaster, a false story, a swarm of accounts - is the cheap end. The durable end is infrastructure: cadres of foreign journalists trained by a state broadcaster and then spending thirty years at other people's mastheads; content-sharing agreements that place state copy inside domestic newspapers under a local byline; university partnerships; news agencies with local staff, local credibility, and a foreign ministry behind them. A monitor that watches only for false stories will always be a year behind the people building the plant.

What the program does

  • The archive. A permanent, hashed record of the source material - the operations' own output, the research literature, the primary documents. Every capture is fixed and fingerprinted at the moment it is taken, which is what allows us to show that a page said what we say it said, on the day we say it did, after it has been quietly edited or deleted.
  • The report. A periodical for journalists and decision-makers: the month's developments, one documented case examined in full with its method stated, one actor profile, an explicit account of what we could not establish, and our corrections.
  • The public index. The archive's index is published - identifier, source, publisher, date and cryptographic hash for every document we hold - so that anyone can fetch the original, check it against our fingerprint, and audit the record rather than trust it.

What is in scope, and what is not

The program documents conduct, not opinions. What it examines is activity that is state-directed, state-funded, covertly sponsored, coordinated and inauthentic, or systematically fabricated. A political position - however wrong, however popular, however objectionable - is never a subject. The sponsor and the method are the subjects.

That distinction does the real work, so it is worth stating without hedging. Sincere advocacy is not an information operation, in any cause. What falls in scope is a state or a proxy operating inside an advocacy space, established case by case, with the sponsor named and the evidence published; where the sponsor cannot be evidenced, we publish nothing. The same test is applied to operations run by democracies, by their contractors, and by the commercial disinformation-for-hire industry. The asymmetry in scale between actors is real and our reports will say so - but the day this program is seen to have a protected side is the day its findings stop travelling.

Equally, this is not a fact-checking service, a rebuttal desk, a threat feed, or a list of outlets anyone should be prevented from reading. We do not tell platforms what to remove. We record who is doing what, at what confidence, and we show our working.

How a claim is graded

Every attribution carries a grade, and the grade travels with the sentence: documented in a primary record; stated by the actor itself; corroborated by independent researchers on a stated method; assessed by us from behaviour and written as inference; or alleged by others without disclosed method, which is recorded but never load-bearing. A report may not state an attribution more strongly than the weakest evidence behind it. Where the finding is that something is missing - no independent reporting in a language, no functioning press in a region - it is measured against a stated benchmark, or it is not published.

Where we stand

The archive is open and taking documents. The first report has not been published, and we will not describe this as monitoring until it is. Libera Mondo accepts no funding tied to editorial control, and each issue will name who funds this program on the page - the first thing a hostile response will reach for should already be printed above the attack.

A voice for the forgotten.