A Pro-U.S. Disinfo Campaign Has Been Targeting Russia, China, and Iran on Facebook and Twitter, Researchers Say

We ’ve all acquire habitual to hear aboutforeign - seed disinformationcampaigns , but we seldom try about America ’s own covert influence operation . On Wednesday , however , social mass medium researchers divulge details about what appears to have been a long - run U.S. disinformation effort aimed at vane drug user in Russia , China , and Iran .

In July and August , Twitter and Meta announced that they had uncovered two overlapping sets of fraudulent accounts that were spread out inauthentic content on their platforms . The companies took the networks down but subsequently shared portion of the data with academic researchers . On Wednesday , the Stanford Internet Observatory and social media analytics firm Graphikapublisheda joint study on the data , uncover that the campaigns had all the marking of a U.S. influence web .

Shelby Grossman , a staffer at the Internet Observatory and a fellow member of the research team that published the paper , told Gizmodo that the study is one of the most intensive analyses yet of a “ covert , pro - U.S. influence operation . ” She also noted that the campaigns were very similar in form to the influence campaigns launched by America ’s foes .

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“ The wind cone puppet accounts were kind of funny to look at because we are so used to analyzing pro - Kremlin sock puppets , so it was unearthly to see accounts pushing the opposite narrative , ” she said . “ The tale [ in pro - Kremlin influence ops ] are often like ‘ the Americans are kill civilian in Syria ’ but here the narrative was ‘ Russia is belt down civilian in Syria . ’ It was the same narrative but just switching the right noun around . ”

The propaganda , which spread “ pro - U.S. ” narratives in online communities in Russia , China , and Iran , leveraged drove of phony profile and may have persist in its activities for the better part of a decade . Twitter says that some 299,566 tweet were sent by 146 fake accounts between March 2012 and February 2022 . Meanwhile , the Meta dataset portion out with researchers included “ 39 Facebook profiles , 16 pages , two radical , and 26 Instagram accounts fighting from 2017 to July 2022 , ” the report aver .

While specific ascription for the campaigns is n’t available ( we do n’t know the names of the the great unwashed or organization who localise up these fake accounts ) , Twitter has said that the activity ’s “ presumptive area of origin ” are the U.S. and Great Britain , and Meta claim that the “ state of origin ” is the U.S. , the account says .

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As for the contents of the campaigns , they ’re about what you ’d expect . The Stanford / Graphika report notes that :

Grossman also noted that there was nothing particularly unequalled about the methods that were used to distribute the propaganda . “ You ’d think , ‘ Oh , this influence cognitive process originated in the U.S. , surely it ’s going to be special , ’ but that really was n’t the case , ” she said . “ The operation used the same tactics that we see over and over and over again , like AI - bring forth profile photos , memes , political cartoon — there was not anything technically interesting about this connection . ”

you may scan the full report on the researchers ’ findings by headinghere .

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