
by Navid Felker
Facebook recently announced the removal of a significant number of pages, groups, and accounts engaged in what they called “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Most of the activity seemed to come from fake accounts linked to Iran, whose propaganda was related to Syria, Yemen, and Palestine. According to Facebook, networks linked to Iran were responsible for “513 pages, groups, and accounts,” operating in “Egypt, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Kashmir, Kazakhstan [and] broadly across the Middle East and North Africa.”
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity said in a blog post on Twitter, “the pages routinely amplified Iranian state narratives, targeting Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia, especially for their roles in the Middle East, and focusing on the Yemen and Palestine conflicts… The pages often shared articles from websites which reproduced, verbatim, content from Iranian state or state-allied outlets, such as Press TV.”