Long before “election interference” became a global buzzword, a little-known Israeli operative working under the alias “Jorge” was already selling it as a service. In early 2015, weeks before Nigerians went to the polls in one of Africa’s most consequential democratic contests, this operative and his team were quietly working alongside the now-disgraced British consultancy Cambridge Analytica to tilt the outcome in favour of then-president Goodluck Jonathan. The full scale of that operation remained hidden for nearly eight years, surfacing only in 2023 through a sprawling international investigation that named the man behind “Jorge” and exposed the machinery of a private disinformation industry operating largely beyond any legal oversight.
A Covert Operation Built on Stolen Data and Fake Personas
The operative was later identified as Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces member who built a business selling covert influence operations to governments, corporations and political campaigns willing to pay for them. His outfit, which came to be known publicly as Team Jorge, worked in parallel with Cambridge Analytica during Nigeria’s 2015 election, with each firm assigned a distinct role under the same client’s direction.
Cambridge Analytica’s job, according to leaked emails later obtained by journalists, was to secure favourable international media coverage for Jonathan while damaging the reputation of his chief rival, Muhammadu Buhari. Team Jorge’s role was described as opposition research, effectively hunting for material that could be weaponised against Buhari’s campaign.
That material allegedly included private medical and financial records apparently obtained from Buhari’s email accounts. Cambridge Analytica staff who worked on the Nigerian account later told journalists they were handed a USB drive containing what they believed were hacked emails and were instructed to search them for damaging information, an instruction some employees refused to follow because they suspected the material had been obtained illegally.
The Software Behind the Manipulation
What made Team Jorge distinct from a conventional political consultancy was a proprietary tool called Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or AIMS, capable of generating and operating thousands of fake social media personas at once. By the time investigators caught up with Hanan in 2022, the software reportedly controlled an army of roughly 30,000 avatars, each built with a fabricated backstory and interlinked accounts across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Telegram and Gmail, engineered to appear convincingly human to unsuspecting users.
Hanan told undercover reporters posing as clients that his team had been involved in thirty-three presidential-level election campaigns worldwide, claiming success in twenty-seven of them. Nigeria’s 2015 election was the only one the investigating journalists named outright, though the broader network of fake accounts was reportedly deployed in disinformation campaigns across roughly twenty countries, including India, Britain, Canada and Mexico.
The Nigeria operation ultimately failed in its immediate objective. Buhari went on to defeat Jonathan and was sworn in as president later that year, a result that stood as one of the earliest peaceful transfers of power between rival parties in Nigeria’s democratic history, despite the covert efforts aimed at preventing it.
Why the Story Still Matters a Decade Later
The Team Jorge revelations, published in 2023 by a consortium of roughly thirty news organisations coordinated by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories, forced a reckoning with a private market for election manipulation that had operated in the shadows for years. Unlike state-run influence campaigns, which intelligence agencies and platforms have grown more adept at detecting, contractor-run operations like Hanan’s blurred the line between commercial consultancy and covert warfare, making accountability far harder to pin down.
For Indian readers, the case carries a direct relevance beyond its Nigerian setting. Investigators found that AIMS-linked disinformation campaigns had touched India among the roughly twenty countries where the software was deployed, a detail that underscores how easily borderless digital tools built for one election can be repurposed for another. As global elections increasingly run on the same social media infrastructure, the Team Jorge case remains a cautionary marker of how easily a fabricated online consensus can be manufactured, and how long it can take the public to learn that it was fake at all.
