Iranians Busted On Facebook And Instagram, Hyping Up Mueller Investigation, Slamming Trump & Kavanaugh, While Posing As Americans
On Friday, Facebook identified and deleted 82 accounts, groups and pages after determining they were part of an online influence operation based in Iran.
The Iranians operated 33 individual accounts and three groups, 30 Facebook pages, as well as 16 accounts on Facebook-owned Instagram, Nathaniel Gleicher, head of Facebook’s cybersecurity policy said in a statement on Friday.
Combined, the pages had more than 25,000 members and over 1.02 million followers, Gleicher said. In addition, 28,000 followed at least one of the 16 Instagram accounts. The network also hosted seven separate events, purchasing two ads on Facebook, spending less than $100 to promote them.
“The Page administrators and account owners typically represented themselves as US citizens, or in a few cases UK citizens — and they posted about politically charged topics such as race relations, opposition to the President, and immigration. Despite attempts to hide their true identities, a manual review of these accounts linked their activity to Iran,” Gleicher said.
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Facebook gave several examples of the propaganda used by Iranians, which included promotion of former National Football League (NFL) quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s activism and the criticizing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and of course, President Donald Trump.
In an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation in August, it was discovered that Iranian nationals were impersonating Americans online in order to stoke fear over Indian immigrants, and was part of a lobbying campaign meant to defence changes in the United States green card policy.
In late August, Facebook identified 652 pages, groups and accounts that were actively engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” much like the ones Facebook removed on Friday.
Those accounts were busted heavily promoting Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders -who could very well be a 2020 presidential candidate – while disparaging Trump and the state of Israel.
Facebook identified “some overlap” between the pages the social media giant removed in August and the ones discovered during the purge on Friday, Gleicher said.
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