Social media giant Facebook, on Tuesday 28 May removed 51 accounts, 36 pages, seven groups and three Instagram accounts, which were found involved in coordinated inauthentic behaviour, traced back to Iran.
In a blog post, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gliecher said that the people behind these pages and accounts misled people on who they are and what they do.
According to Gliecher, the individuals behind these pages represented themselves as journalists and tried to contact policy makers, academics, reporters, Iranian dissidents and other public figures. They also tried to contact authentic Instagram users, some of which actually fell into using content associated with this activity.
The pages and accounts generally posted in English or Arabic, with a focus on a specific country.
The content was usually on public figures and politics in UK, US, US Secessionist movements, Islam, Arab minorities and the influence of Saudi in the Middle East.
Following are some samples, as provided by Facebook:
Facebook found out about the coordinated behaviour after a tip from a Cybersecurity firm FishEye.
About 21,000 accounts followed one or more of these pages, about 1,900 accounts joined one or more of these Groups and around 2,600 people followed one or more of these Instagram accounts.