By Staff Writer
The concept of fake news, brought into the spotlight by U.S. President Donald Trump, is now being applied to Iran. Facebook announced that it has removed more than 600 accounts, groups and pages that are linked to a propaganda operation in Iran.
It has been said that the main aim of the disinformation campaign is to circulate fake news against Israel and Saudi Arabia. The campaign was aimed towards numerous countries including The United States, the United Kingdom and several countries in the Middle East and Latin America.
Social media group Twitter also said that it had pinpointed a number of fake accounts coming from Iran. Almost 300 Twitter accounts have been suspended “for engaging in coordinated manipulation”.
Campaigns like this can be very persuasive and it has been claimed that the result of the U.S. election was affected by such campaigns.
Iran, from its position of weakness, is trying to shape political discourse abroad through the generation of fake new articles, fabricated and deceiving videos, inaccurate portrayals of events, and so on. It is deliberately attempting to mislead users. The sole purpose is to advance the Iranian regime’s own interests.
The Iranian regime is no stranger to misinformation campaigns and it comes as no surprise that it has evolved to social media. It is arguably the most influential of all platforms and it certainly guarantees a large audience. According to Facebook, Iran’s campaign had gathered more than a million followers.
CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, said that it removed hundreds of pages because of “networks of accounts that were misleading people about who they were and what they were doing”. He added: “We ban this kind of behavior because authenticity matters. People need to be able to trust the connections they make on Facebook.”
Iran’s tactics are evolving and the threat posed by such misinformation campaigns is real.
Expert in the field, Dr. Johannes Ullrich from the SANS Institute, said that very little action can be taken with regards to preventing “nation-state actors from attempting influence operations”, but added that the sooner their intentions are discovered, the easier it is to limit the influence and damage.
However, since the scandal regarding the U.S. elections, social media firms have been subject to much criticism and it is their best interests to scrutinise the information that is being placed on their platforms. Zuckerberg confirmed that it has taken increased measures to “improve safety, security and privacy” and in particular to “defend against these coordinated and inauthentic campaigns”.
The Iranian opposition has traditionally been a target of misinformation campaigns, which is continuing to date, since A top priority of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) is the demonization of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)to undercut its domestic and international support.
To discredit the resistance organization, the MOIS publishes materials that falsely portray the organization’s history, aspirations, and achievements. It operates attack websites that daily spew negative propaganda. And the Intelligence Ministry recruits former MEK activists through bribery and coercive measures and then uses them as witnesses to disseminate disinformation about the PMOI to government officials, NGO’s, and the media.
Iran’s mullahs often claim the MEK has limited support within Iran. But the enormous energy and resources expended by the Intelligence Ministry to undermine the legitimacy of the resistance group belies this assertion.
The U.S. administration is working to curb Iran’s influence and there is a consensus among Iranian society that regime change is the only solution.