Legal experts say US journalists who were paid by sanctioned Iranian media entities could be in legal jeopardy.
Recently unearthed documents reveal that leaders of an online news site aimed at western audiences have received money from both Russian and Iranian government media outlets, showing how widening geopolitical alliances are making it harder to identify and trace foreign influence operations.
The payments to Reed documented in the hacked Press TV documents came before last year, when the Iranian outlet was singled out for US sanctions that went beyond the general ban on imports from and exports to Iran that was set by presidential executive order in 1995. Working for Sputnik theoretically might be covered by the Foreign Agent Registration Act , which generally requires anyone working as the “agent” of a “foreign principal” to register with the Justice Department if they intend to influence officials or “the American public regarding US domestic or foreign policy or the political or public interests of a foreign government or foreign political party.
Russia has in the past paid freelancers who did not know where their salary was coming from. It is increasingly common for social media influencers to boost government-backed themes and content, as well as being boosted themselves for doing so. “Many foreign governments collectively view the West, and the US in particular, as a shared adversary,” said Darren Linvill, a misinformation scholar at Clemson University. “They share not only goals, but also tactics with one another. Parallel agendas shared by some non-Western governments makes attribution of responsibility for some disinformation more difficult than it would otherwise be.”does not disclose its financial backing.
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