How to slay a Trojan Horse

"A source tipped us off to something strange: a campaign called KICLEI was flooding city councillor inboxes across Canada with slick, professional-sounding messages urging municipalities to abandon their climate commitments. It posed as environmental wisdom, but it was a Trojan Horse designed to undermine municipal climate policy. Before, we would have investigated one city and written one story. But we had access to something new: a search engine we'd built in-house covering 617 municipalities and 24,318 council meetings."

"A councillor who'd infiltrated a KICLEI meeting reported back after we published: the group announced it would begin operating "under the radar" because of our coverage. We'd put them on the radar. Every instinct told me to keep the search engine proprietary. I've fought for every dollar for 18 years to support our journalism - giving away a competitive edge didn't come naturally. But my team convinced me: this should be public infrastructure. So we launched Civic Searchlight and gave it away."

"Within a month, more than 700 journalists, researchers, and civil society organizations had signed up. A journalist in Toronto could suddenly see what was happening in council chambers in Lethbridge. An advisor to a major city's mayor called it indispensable. Academics, city officials, journalists from nearly every major organization in Canada were using it. When someone launches an AI-driven disinformation campaign targeting local climate policy across a country, they're counting on media fragmentation as cover."

A campaign called KICLEI flooded city councillor inboxes across Canada with slick, professional messages urging municipalities to abandon climate commitments, posing as environmental wisdom while functioning as a Trojan Horse to undermine municipal climate policy. A search engine covering 617 municipalities and 24,318 council meetings revealed the campaign's presence across many councils. An infiltrating councillor reported that the group decided to operate "under the radar" after public exposure. Civic Searchlight was launched as public infrastructure, attracting over 700 journalists, researchers, and organizations and enabling national-scale visibility of municipal meetings. Calls urge building more shared municipal search infrastructure in 2026.

Read at Nieman Lab