Facebook, Twitter Purge ‘Hundreds’ of Iranian Bots

Facebook and Twitter reportedly purged hundreds of fake accounts linked to the Iranian regime from their respective platforms.

Nathan Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, announced in a January 31 statement that the social media giant has “removed 783 Pages, groups and accounts for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior tied to Iran” from Facebook and Instagram in myriad countries.

“The Page administrators and account owners typically represented themselves as locals, often using fake accounts, and posted news stories on current events,” Gleicher said. “This included commentary that repurposed Iranian state media’s reporting on topics like Israel-Palestine relations and the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, including the role of the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Some of the activity dates back to 2010.”

Gleicher added that Iran spent less than $30,000 on advertising on Facebook and Instagram and hosted eight event pages on Facebook, although it is not clear if those events were actually hosted. Around 2 million people followed Iran’s pages, according to Gleicher.

Additionally, the UK Guardian reports that Twitter purged thousands of fake accounts that were “potentially” connected to Iran, Russia and Venezuela that were aiming to influence the 2018 midterm elections.

Vocativ, a United States tech firm, concluded that the Iranian bots on Facebook were attempting to manipulate Israeli voters in the upcoming elections in April.

“The discourse the bots are trying to create tries to magnify the fractures in Israeli society and weaken unity,” Mati Kochavi, the founder of Vocative, told the Times of Israel. “It looks like they know that our strength lies in our unity.”

The Likud Party is saying that the Iranian bots were aiming “to topple Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, who blocked its nuclear program, thwarted its efforts at military entrenchment in Syria, pulverized its economy and sent the Mossad to steal from under its nose the secret nuclear archives.”

In October, Facebook announced that it removed 82 accounts, groups and pages that were connected to Iran that had attempted to influence the 2018 midterm elections.