US ran disinformation campaign against Iran, Russia and China, research reveals

Recent research has revealed details of what appears to have been long-running US disinformation campaigns aimed at Iran, Russia, and China on social media platforms, as well as the use of dozens of fake accounts to propagate pro-Western narratives.

According to a study carried out by researchers from the Stanford Internet Observatory and the research company Graphika, the pro-US covert influence operations ran for almost five years and used “deceptive tactics” to shape public opinion in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The accounts behind the operations often posed as news outlets or took on the personas of people who didn’t exist, posting content in at least seven languages, including Farsi, Russian, Arabic, and Urdu.

In some cases, the accounts shared news articles from Washington-funded media outlets, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and links to websites run by the US military.

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Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, said the “country of origin” of the accounts was the United States, while Twitter said the “presumptive countries of origin” for the accounts were the United States and Britain, according to the report.

The report added that Twitter and Meta removed dozens of fake accounts in July and August as they were pushing the deceptive pro-US influence campaign.

The other platforms that were used in the operations were Telegram, Google’s YouTube, and the Russian social media networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.

YouTube said it had terminated several channels posting in Arabic, Farsi, and Russian to promote US foreign affairs, including channels linked to a US consulting firm.

The researchers said the accounts tailored their language and messaging to different regions.

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A set of 21 Twitter accounts, six Instagram accounts, five Facebook profiles, and two Facebook pages targeted Iranian audiences between November 2020 and June 2022, according to the report.

It disclosed that some of the personas used profile pictures that were likely created using artificial intelligence.

Many tried to present themselves as real people by interspersing Iranian poetry and photos of Persian food between political messages.

On Facebook and Instagram, dozens of posts also negatively compared opportunities for Iranian women with those for women abroad.

Moreover, 12 Twitter accounts, 10 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook profiles, and 10 Instagram accounts were created between June 2020 and March 2022 to focus on Central Asia.

Those accounts then published posts in bitter criticism of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine and cheered on pro-Ukrainian protests in Central Asian countries.

Another group of accounts focused on the Middle East, applauding US activities in Iraq and pointing to interactions between American troops and Syrian children to justify Washington’s occupation of Syrian territories and the looting of the Arab country’s natural resources.

Media seizures proof of US concern over propaganda in West Asia: Analyst

Political commentator, Tim Anderson, says the US act of seizing dozens of news websites shows Washington is deeply concerned about its propaganda in West Asia.

According to the report, none of the propaganda campaigns reached a large audience.

Most of the posts and tweets received a “handful” of likes or retweets, researchers noted, and only 19 percent of the covert accounts that were identified had over 1,000 followers.

Shelby Grossman, a staffer at the Internet Observatory and a member of the research team that published the paper, said the study is one of the most intensive analyses yet of a “covert, pro-US influence operation.”

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