Social media is an influential tool that can be exploited by those with funding and a willingness to walk a moral tight rope. I uncovered clear evidence that American hunting organizations conducted information warfare on social media to influence politics and conservation practices in North America and Africa.
Who is Running the Show?
The organization carrying out the operations was Inclusive Conservation Group (ICG). The bulk of the ICG’s funding came from two hunting organizations, Safari Club International Foundation (SCIF) and Shikar-Safari Club International Foundation (Shikar-SCIF). All three organizations are registered as tax-exempt nonprofits in the United States.
SCIF is the sister organization of Safari Club International, one the world’s leading hunting organizations and is dedicated to protecting the “freedom to hunt.” While Safari Club International emphasizes they are also a wildlife conservation organization, this perception is not widely regarded due to their promotion of the motto “First for Hunters.”
There is very little information available for Shikar-SCIF other than their tax documents and a handful of media pieces where their members present awards to wildlife conservation officers. But even less information is available for ICG due to the covert nature of their work.
However, tax records indicate Shikar-SCIF and ICG are related entities and share related personnel. ICG’s president, John Thodos, served as Shikar-SCIF’s president before transitioning into a CFO role after ICG was created in 2016.
Show Me the Money
While it is unfortunate the organizations involved are tax-exempt, there is a benefit in that their tax documents were easily accessible to the public. According to ICG’s tax documents, the organization brought in over $2 million for the operations.
SCIF provided more than $600,000 to ICG. SCIF contributed more money to ICG than it did to any other group since 2017. SCIF listed the reasons for their donations as communication, social media quick response, and social media response capability.
Shikar-SCIF, meanwhile, contributed a little more than $1.3 million. The only organization that received more funding from Shikar-SCIF was the NRA Foundation, which received $3.06 million in 2018 and $1.1 million in 2015 (making Shikar-SCIF one the NRA’s largest donors in recent history).
Weatherby Foundation International, another American trophy hunting group, donated $100,000. There were also contributions made by private parties including Christopher Kinsey, John Wilson, Mary Mark Barrett, John Kelsey and T G Steele.
The Inclusive Conservation Group’s Sales Pitch
As previously stated, there is hardly any information pertaining to ICG readily available other than what is in tax documents. The only way to truly understand how ICG is operating is to see how they sell their services to potential clients.
Luckily, groups submit grant requests every year to organizations like SCIF asking for project funding and ICG is no different. In 2019, ICG submitted a grant request to SCIF’s Hunter Legacy 100 Fund asking for $264,000 to help fund their Non-branded educational Social Media Capability project.
ICG’s request noted SCIF previously contributed over half a million dollars in 2017 and 2018 that helped create a “first of its kind, non-attributional social media platform, capable of communicating to millions of people” that has been “critical in shaping a positive global narrative around hunting and sustainable use.” Sustainable use being a catchall term for trophy hunting, game breeding, and wildlife trade. They also used rhetoric to combat “the leftist, anti-guns, anti-hunting, vegan fanatics.”
The cunning in ICG’s use of social media to further their agendas came in how they purposefully deceive nonhunters into believing the messages they post and promote came from unbiased accounts. ICG noted messages from hunting groups are frequently ineffective because nonhunters worry pro-hunting messages could be biased or misleading. To solve this problem, ICG went as far as taking “the exact words and facts from the SCI web pages and simply present it through an African’s voice.”
References to educating nonhunters using facts were peppered throughout the grant request but ICG made it clear what they did was intentionally deceptive. The deception was not only obvious in the way they project Safari Club International’s voice on to that of the native African but also plainly spelled out in unambiguous terms. ICG used the tagline “shape, inform, manipulate, mislead, expose, diminish, promote, deceive, coerce, deter, mobilize, convince.”
They also stated, “Under the banner of irregular warfare Inclusive Conservation Group has been conducting information operations.” Information operations are “about hacking the people on the network by driving ideas viral through a mix of likes, shares, comments.” ICG was not simply educating by disseminating facts, nor are they acting in good faith.
ICG moderated, engaged, and developed content for posting on multiple social media pages — the two most popular being Proud American Hunter and Let Africa Live. Proud American Hunter reached over 122,000,000 people and had a “rabid following of 25-54-year-old United States males who are passionate about hunting, guns and patriotism and very willing to defend our sport against anti-hunting extremist.” Let Africa Live reached almost 18,000,000 people in the prior 12 months and “has a huge international following and speaks to the value of sustainable wildlife conservation in Africa through a native voice.”
They detailed the effectiveness of their narrative-changing campaigns when discussing their response to the backlash trophy hunter Britt Longoria received after a photo of her posing with a dead leopard was posted on social media. Ricardo Longoria, Britt’s husband and influential Weatherby Foundation president, contacted ICG Vice President Rick Steiner to ask for help with the negative media attention.
After being contacted, ICG “immediately went on the offensive.” Proud American Hunter rallied their core base of “hunters, 2A, MAGA and Let Africa Live.” ICG’s references to 2nd amendment right and Make America Great Again supporters further demonstrate the political nature of their operation. Let Africa Live then “initiated a social media attack directed at the source of the original Facebook Post.”
In only hours, the slogan “An Attack on One Hunter is an Attack on All Hunters” reached hundreds of thousands of “rabid pro hunting social media warriors” willing to defend on Britt Longoria. The slogan was effective in garnering support from the hunting community and was even used to compare the situation to the persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.
ICG displayed the influence of their social media operations on an international and political level by showcasing their work fighting to reverse a 2014 elephant hunting ban in Botswana. ICG stated they reached millions of Botswana’s citizens beginning in January 2019 and “deployed a dual track communications strategy to educate Botswanans, NGO, hunting and grassroots communities with a top down bottom up narrative designed to educate the elites and decision makers, while simultaneously reinforcing that education with an organic grassroots echo.”
It is not surprising Botswana’s President, Mokgweetsi Masisi, lifted the elephant hunting moratorium in May 2019 and was subsequently invited to accept the International Legislator of the Year Award at the 2020 Safari Club International Convention in Reno, Nevada.
Proud American Hunter aka The Pro-Hunting, Anti-Leftist Propaganda Machine
Proud American Hunter was a social media profile committed to promoting pro-hunting and anti-liberal ideologies. This profile was particularly popular with about 120,000 followers between a Facebook page and an Instagram account. Proud American Hunter also had its own website where followers could buy merchandise and have a portion of their sales “donated to a non-profit which focuses on educating the non-hunting public through unbranded, clear, accurate, and persuasive pro-hunting and sustainable-use conservation content.” What nonprofit could that possibly be?
One post summarized the political propaganda on Proud American Hunter best. The image included a snarling wolf, meatless burger, person with “vegan” spelled out on their hat, liberal politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, climate change action and anti-violence protesters, and what appears to be a migrant climbing a border wall. The text reads “THE REAL INVASIVE SPECIES.” The caption stated these “invasive species” were “hurting us and the future of our land and wildlife.” This political propaganda was a far cry from the wildlife conservation education services the hunting industry wants the public to think they are funding.
Along with appearing to be anti-leftist, anti-climate change, anti-immigration, and anti-vegan, Proud American Hunter seemed to be anti-abortion. One post featured an image of a young girl in hunting gear with the text “VIRGINIA: ILLEGAL TO HUNT WITHOUT PARENT SUPERVISION” next to an image of another young girl with the text “VIRGINIA: LEGAL TO ABORT A BABY WITHOUT EVER TELLING A PARENT.” The caption noted Virginia is more concerned about animal lives than human lives. Who knew wildlife conservation and abortion were so intertwined?
Let Africa Live aka Let American Elites Pillage Africa’s Wildlife
Let Africa Live was a social media profile dedicated to promoting sustainable use policies in African conservation. The profile had about 40,000 followers across a fairly successful Facebook page, growing Instagram account, and abandoned Twitter account. Let Africa Live described itself as “a movement committed to ending the oppression of the African people by governments, NGO’s and corporations in Western Europe and America.” How ironic.
Let Africa Live’s standard procedure was to post images of African wildlife or people overlaid with text describing the importance of hunting and sustainable use. The profile typically added captions that, in some form or another, stated global elites and animal rights extremists were forcing African people to live in poverty while their wildlife wasted away.
Take, for example, one post depicting a mother and child overlaid with a family of elephants and text asking “WHY ARE AFRICAN COUNTRIES THAT SUCCESSFULLY MANAGE WILDLIFE BEING PUNISHED BY CITES?” The post’s caption added CITES had been taken hostage by nonprofits pushing their own agendas and wondered when the world will finally open its eyes to the corruption.
Interestingly, Let Africa Live did make it clear they were trying to align conservation practices in Africa with those in the United States. Images of a deer and an impala were placed side by side with the text “ARFICA WANTS THE SAME REGULATION AS AMERICA.” The idea Africa wants the same regulation as the United States is purely an opinion put out by ICG to expand the hunting industry’s reach across the globe.
Presenting opinions as facts was key to Let Africa Live’s effectiveness. A post of a lion overlaid with a quote from Amy Dickman, Director of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, made unsuspecting people question not allowing wealthy foreigners to hunt lions. The quote stated “People here don’t care if they never see a lion again – they are worried about where their next meal is coming from; lions are just another threat.” While Dickman is a scientist, the quote represented an opinion, not a fact.
Indeed, Dickman was even listed on a study showing many community members in Kenya, where trophy hunting is banned, had an overwhelmingly positive view of lions and even wanted their numbers to increase.
The most egregious example of ICG’s use of the native African voice to deceive nonhunters came from a post showing a group of rural Africans with the text “THIS IS WHERE I LIVE. I’VE BEEN TOLD NOT TO MANAGE OUR NATION’S RESOURCES” above a photo of Westerners in a cityscape with the text “BY PEOPLE WHO LIVE HERE.” The caption asked how someone who lives thousands of miles away can know what is best for Africa’s wildlife and people. That was a great question to ask. How could a wealthy orthodontist in Florida know what is best for rural Africans? The caption finished by stating it was time to put an end to the colonialist nonprofits that wish to control Africa and its resources. Colonialist nonprofits are a problem — they just happen to be the pro-hunting organizations in this case.
Spam Accounts Manipulating Social Media
In order to increase the effectiveness of social media posts, more than well-designed images and powerful quotes are needed. Organizations conducting information warfare utilize fake social media accounts to amplify messages and exponentially grow their reach by catering to many platforms’ algorithms for trending topics. The more people commenting and liking a post, the bigger the audience becomes on social media. ICG knew this — which is why they described their operation as “driving ideas viral through a mix of likes, shares, comments.”
Research of Proud American Hunter and Let Africa Live comment sections revealed there were more than 80 fake social media accounts across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram appearing to spam pro-hunting and anti-leftist comments. The accounts rarely did more than comment on Proud American Hunter and Let Africa Live posts on Facebook and Instagram. On Twitter, where Proud American Hunter and Let Africa Live lacked a substantial presence, the accounts supplied pro-hunting comments on high profile tweets regarding wildlife conservation topics.
The accounts were seemingly devoid of original posts and ideas, and most had very few followers. Many profile and background photos associated with the accounts were generic and nondescript pictures. Additionally, the accounts were created after ICG was formed in 2016.
Social media profiles like “Joel Masterson” (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) exhibited the typical suspicious behavior. All that could be deduced from their social media accounts was that they were a University of Alabama fan and rabid hunting supporter. While they did not have many digital followers or friends, their comments were surrounded by other suspicious accounts sharing similar messages.
But these accounts did not just stick to promoting hunting. They joined right in with the political rhetoric, commenting on Proud American Hunter’s anti-abortion post — calling animal rights extremists hypocrites and describing abortion as murder and genocide.
It is wishful thinking to hope social media users would see through or ignore the accounts, but they would not exist if they did not work. For example, Kruger National Park’s official Twitter account retweeted three sets of comments by fake accounts applauding South Africa’s pro-hunting conservation practices in this thread.
Twitter users scrolling through Kruger National Park’s account would normally see pictures of the park’s wildlife and stories from visitors. These retweeted comments were abnormal for Kruger National Park, and it is concerning they could reach a large unsuspecting audience. ICG admitted to targeting Botswana’s elites and decision makers, it would be extremely worrying if they also targeted South Africa’s national parks.
What We Learned After My Investigation
I first reported on American nonprofits conducting pro-trophy hunting disinformation to influence social media users and conservation policies in June 2020. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter shut down the campaign after a Washington Post journalist picked up my story.
Facebook’s press release on the takedown can be found here. The official report from the Stanford Internet Observatory can be found here.
Here are some of the findings:
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Rally Forge, LLC was a social media consultant working for Inclusive Conservation Group and Turning Point Action.
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Turning Point Action is a subsidiary of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump extremist group that has been accused of promoting white supremacy and pushing climate change denial.
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Facebook banned Rally Forge and removed ICG’s pages and profiles.
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The disinformation primarily targeted the United States as well as Botswana and Kenya (the two African countries were hotspots for trophy hunting bans).
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Fake accounts tied to politics were repurposed for pro-hunting astroturfing when political conversations died down.
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Proud American Hunter and Let Africa Live both purchased political ads on Facebook to promote their disinformation to wider audiences.
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Proud American Hunter’s most engaging posts were anti-vegan, pro-gun, and anti-Joe Biden.
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Let Africa Live’s most engaging posts were all anti-China and claimed COVID-19 was a global conspiracy intended to limit wildlife consumption and hurt rural African communities.
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