Social media giants remove Iran-linked misinformation campaign

Facebook and Twitter said Tuesday that they are working to kneecap an escalating Iran-linked online campaign that was spreading misinformation in the U.S. since months before the 2018 midterms.

In a blog post, Facebook said it removed 51 Facebook accounts, 36 Pages, seven Groups and three Instagram accounts that originated in Iran and have engaged in “coordinated” inauthentic behavior. The pages had amassed about 21,000 followers by the time they were taken down.

Facebook said the individuals behind the activity were pretending to be located in the U.S. and Europe, and at various points misrepresented themselves as journalists or news outlets in order to gain influence and amplify their messages bolstering Iran’s political agenda.

Twitter said it removed the network of 2,800 inauthentic accounts originating in Iran at the beginning of May.

“Our investigations into these accounts are ongoing,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Hill. “As we continue to investigate potential wider networks and actors, we typically avoid making any declarative public statements until we can be sure that we have reached the end of our analyses.”

Both of the company’s announcements came on the heels of a report from top cybersecurity firm FireEye, which on Wednesday published its report on an Iran-linked misinformation campaign it had identified on Facebook and Twitter.

FireEye has been investigating a network of English-language social media accounts working to promote messages supporting “Iranian political interests” – mostly anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian and anti-Saudi sentiments. FireEye found that some of the accounts were impersonating real Americans, including some Republican political candidates who ran for the House in 2018, while others represented themselves as journalists. Some of the accounts successfully had letters and articles published in top publications such as the Los Angeles Times and The New York Daily News.

According to FireEye, most of the accounts they’d been tracking over the past year were suspended around May 9.