Foreign Affairs Desk Roadmap

Anyone who wishes to contract with Anonymous Foreign Affairs Desk will need to first understand a few basic things, which we have laid out below.

The Foreign Affairs Desk is a multi-stage press enterprise. It is currently in Phase Two of operations:

Phase One operations (which concluded in the summer of 2024) involved the launch and promotion of the Brand, to push it into the public consciousness. This was no easy feat, as agents of the Fediverse and the State of California saw it as a threat to their hegemony over our hivemind. This was countered with a series of public relations stunts and undercover exposes, involving the targeting of several cults and high-profile informants.

During this phase, the Foreign Affairs Desk was able to establish an identity and attitude. It quickly amassed a devoted cult following and secured several critical partnerships, preparing the tabloid for the future.

Phase Two operations at the Foreign Affairs Desk began in late Summer 2024, with the transfer of many of its interns to the Anonymous Military Institute and other Operations. The remaining staff are currently overseeing a professional overhaul of the brand, allowing the tabloid to take on rival organizations such as YourAnonNews and the New York Times.

This involves a focus less on PR stunts and eye-catching shitposts, and more on the reporting of actual infosec news and community gossip. See the Content Policy for more details.

Theoretical Phase Three operations are already on the drawing board. While ironing out plans here hinge on the inevitable success of Phase Two, many potentialities are already being considered. These include:

• The build-up of a fleet of powerful sports cars, news trucks, boats and helicopters for our reporters.
• A censorship-immune digital presence, including an array of mirror websites, darkweb relays, and various pirate radio and amateur radio streams.
• The stationing of reporters in the parliaments, congress halls, presidential palaces, embassies, etc, of every sovereign nation on Earth.
• A print edition of the tabloid, which can be tied to heavy objects and thrown at pedestrians or through the windows of government officials.
• An in-house pharmaceutical R&D lab, to resume the valuable studies and human trials once conducted by the now-defunct 420chan.
• The acquisition of several private islands to function as the various regional headquarters of the tabloid.

Editors and freelance reporters for the Foreign Affairs Desk will need to work together to cover a myriad of subjects. These will fall into one of two categories: Daily Updates and Special Features.

Daily updates are the bread & butter of every news outlet, and this is no exception for the Foreign Affairs Desk. These will be posted to our primary two social media outlets on Twitter and Facebook, and eventually expand to other places as well.

We want to maintain a bare-minimum of 3-5 posts a day. This should not be hard, considering all we post are tiny blurbs attached to links or quoted retweets. However, once a our new core team is settled in, ideally we should be hitting a flow of a dozen posts a day on average… if not more. These posts should be evenly spaced, which priority given to US daylight hours until we pick up more overseas editors.

In order to differentiate ourselves from our competition, we will not be covering politics - at least not in the traditional sense. Other Anonymous blogs and news operations have this angle covered a thousand times over. However, in their blind focus to shill for major political parties & the military-industrial complex, they have left a major chasm in community coverage of other subjects. This gap is our new niche.

To get an idea of how we will fill this gap, please refer to the following table:

Again, we want to re-iterate, we are not here to repeat the usual political talking points that everyone else has covered a million times. Every single “Anonymous News” page already covers Russia, abortions and LGBT awareness out the wazoo, to the point that there is literally nothing new we can add to the table. On top of that, we hold a very tenuous middle-ground between the left-wing Anons and right-wing Anons, which is a constant balancing act that gives us a rare tactical insight into the whole community.

That aside, there are exceptions to these rules. These will be decided on a case-by-case basis. Some exceptions we DO WANT COVERED include:

• The Jim Stewartson vs Michael Flynn court case.
• The ongoing Palestinian Genocide and related war crimes.
• Data privacy & government surveillance.
• Instances of bribery, “pay for play” and other flagrant corruptions.
• Terrorist attacks on civilians and non-combatants.
• Anything negative about Wall Street, the IMF, World Bank, and other major financial institutions.
• Anything negative about the United States military-industrial complex & state-sponsored regime change operations, provided that it is well-sourced.
• Anything negative about California.

Bear in mind, this policy is just a general guideline, and not a legalistic doctrine. There are a lot of grey areas that are simply impossible to define in written word. This policy is more to prevent the kinds of “hostile takeovers” that have plagued other Anonymous news platforms for years. Exceptions are (and will continue to be) made frequently. When in doubt, consult the other editors. As new editors subconsciously “sync up” with the rest of the team, they will more often be able to make gut judgments on their own.

In between daily news updates we will be filling the gaps with memes. Since memetics is a powerful form of sorcery, we can leverage it to draw more fans and followers to our pages, where we can then keep them as a captive audience for our news coverage and special features.

Special features are where the brand identity of the Foreign Affairs Desk really has a chance to shine. These will be inserted into the schedule at opportune moments as they become available, and given the highest priority during promotions. These include, but will not be limited to:

• “Long read” articles, hosted on allied platforms
• In-house produced video content
• Deep undercover reports and exposes
• Interviews
• Equipment field-tests and reviews
• High-profile public relations stunts

All posts are written in ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME. We have experimented with a handful of formats, and the one we have found works best goes as follows:

A CLEVER HEADLINE: A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE STORY
(followed by off-site link, meme, or quoted retweet)

This is the trickiest part to hammer down, as these are usually the most playful parts of our posts. Things that work really well here include puns, paraphrases of famous quotes, and pop culture references.

The New York Post (crazy wingnut political leanings aside) is notoriously good at this - The infamous “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” cover is the kind of vibe we are going for here.

Sometimes the subject in question might be incredibly serious, or you just might not be able to think of something clever. That is OK, so please do not stress about it. Just try to come up with a relevant 2-6 word intro to lead the reader in and move on. We all have limited time to pour into this project. It is much preferable to spend an hour queuing up a dozen quick posts, than it is to spend an hour thinking of the perfect headline for a single post.

This is where we briefly elaborate on the headline. Try and fit as many details here as you can within the character limit, but not so many as to make the post obtuse & unreadable. Short declarative sentences work best. Only use acronyms & abbreviations if you can't fit the whole word otherwise, but please do not fill a post with a dozen acronyms that nobody can understand.

This is where people go to find out more about the news item. It will almost-always be an off-site link, or a quoted retweet.

Sometimes the attachment will be a meme. If it is a meme, a full headline & description is optional - you can also use a single line blurb, or no blurb at all if that is appropriate.

Keep hashtags to a minimum, but use them if they are relevant. If there is room at the end of the description, feel free to add a hashtag or two, as long as it is a hashtag that is actually being used by the general public (unless you are using a hashtag as part of a joke, or an epitaph that adds context to the description).

If the story concerns an active Operation, be sure to tag #AnonOps along with the relevant operation hashtag(s). If the operation has several active hashtags (such as the Million Mask March) you can skip the #AnonOps tag if you need to make more room for the description.

Sometimes it may be opportune to insert a hashtag mid-sentence in the description. Examples include #ANONYMOUS instead of ANONYMOUS, and #FREEPALESTINE instead of FREE PALESTINE. If you can build a sentence around a trending hashtag, go for it.

You can insert hashtags in the headline as well, so long as it is tasteful. For example, sometimes #EXPECTUS works really well as a headline for announcing upcoming operations. If you absolutely must fit a lot of data under the character limit, substituting a word in the headline for a relevant hashtag is allowed too, but it is not the preferred way of doing things if you can swing it a different way. Discretion is very much advised.

In regards to the finer details of style, reference the AP Style Guide for now. However, we are not strict about this, since it is not ideal for posts written with CAPS LOCK turned on. We will be developing our own internal style guide tailored to our particular digital format, which will be detailed on this page eventually.