They can be incredibly effective in shaping fake narratives on events which can start wars, start riots, topple governments, or tip elections. Charles Burris remembers one of the best-organized, the “Hack-and-Dump Working Group:”

"Michael Shellenberger reported in a #TwitterFiles thread that the Aspen Institute hosted an exercise in the summer of 2020 titled, “Burisma Leak,” which predicted with uncanny accuracy an upcoming derogatory story in the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s lost laptop.

"The documents Shellenberger published showed how at least five media figures, including David Sanger and David McCraw of the New York Times, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, then-Daily Beast and future Rolling Stone editor Noah Schactman, and Rick Baker of CNN worked alongside Twitter and Facebook’s chief moderation officers, Yoel Roth and Nathaniel Gleicher, to plan a response to a hypothetical damaging exposé about Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The “Burisma Leak” exercise predicted many elements of the real response to the New York Post’s coming Hunter Biden story, including complaints from influential Democratic congressman Adam Schiff about its “source and veracity,” and public statements from “former senior intelligence officials” falsely raising the specter of a “Russian operation.”

Top Biden campaign official Tony Blinken (now Secretary of State) then worked with the Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell to implement this scenario before the 2020 presidential election."