The construction of Moroccan state authorship in the Pegasus controversy (2021–2026): Disinformation and propaganda in Forbidden Stories’ investigative-journalistic order of discourse

Abstract

Disinformation can pose a threat to national security when accusations against state security institutions are presented as established investigative findings without sufficient verification, potentially undermining institutional legitimacy, public trust and interstate relations. The Pegasus controversy raises this problem through the attribution of surveillance operations to Moroccan security institutions. This study examines Forbidden Stories’ investigative-journalistic order of discourse in relation to Citizen Lab’s scientific research and Amnesty International’s forensic and human-rights discourse, following the subsequent circulation of the accusations into journalistic and Algerian diplomatic discourse. A longitudinal investigation of publications from 2018 to 2026 traces the historical emergence and development of a hybrid discursive formation, from Citizen Lab’s initial geographical inferences and Amnesty International’s subsequent accusations to the coordinated July 2021 Pegasus Project and Forbidden Stories’ renewed investigation in July 2026. The findings identify disinformation by design where categorical assertions of Moroccan institutional authorship exceed what the published investigative procedures establish concerning suspected geographical activity, telephone-number selection, confirmed Pegasus infections and NSO customer identity. Disinformation by omission concerns the exclusion of relevant speech acts, judicial circumstances and investigative limitations. Forensic findings are presented alongside journalists’ symbolic biographies, accounts of persecution and negative moral evaluations. The relationship between conceptual and affective meaning, reinforced by the symbolic capital of participating institutions, contributes to the accusation’s persuasive coherence. The coordinated July 2021 publications, subsequent journalistic reaffirmation and later use of the accusation in Algerian diplomatic discourse demonstrate how disinformation as process enters the organized persuasive communication examined as propaganda. The additional testimony and technical findings published in July 2026 do not retrospectively establish that the investigations published in 2021 had demonstrated Moroccan institutional authorship. Drawing on Critical Discourse Studies, Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres and discourse-immanent critique, the study examines these developments through intertextuality, interdiscursivity, symbolic capital, sedimentation and naturalization. It contributes to Critical Discourse Studies by developing interdiscursive generativity to explain how relations among different orders of discourse produce further representations and practices. Through discourse-immanent critique, the paper also identifies genre distortion in the discrepancy between Forbidden Stories’ designation of its publications as ‘investigative journalism’ and the investigative practices described in those publications when assessed against the methodological guidelines, professional standards and ethical requirements governing that journalistic genre.