STORY KILLERS | All the articles

The Project

1 journalist was murdered.
100 journalists from 30 media outlets came together to pursue her work.

For the past six months, Forbidden Stories and its partners have worked together in complete secrecy on the “Story Killers” project, a global investigation into the opaque world of disinformation mercenaries that we’re releasing this Tuesday.

Forbidden Stories’s mission is to continue the investigations of threatened, imprisoned or assassinated journalists. For Story Killers, we gathered more than 100 journalists from 30 media outlets to pursue the work of Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh.

Lankesh wrote about disinformation for her eponymous south Indian weekly, Gauri Lankesh Patrike. In September 2017, she was planning to publish an editorial titled “In the Age of False News,” denouncing India’s “lie-factories,” when she was killed by members of an unnamed criminal syndicate believed to be linked to fringe religious groups.

Pursuing Lankesh’s intuition that fake news could be used as a “weapon,” our consortium tracked the companies selling services to influence opinions, manipulate elections, destroy reputations and bury the truth.

Manipulation factories, cyber mercenaries, hack-and-leak operations, weaponized information: the "Story Killers" investigation will reveal the systemic, global nature of this industry and the companies offering disinformation services to the highest bidder–be it a dictator, a crooked politician or a drug trafficker.