My Take | Pro-West covert campaigns are no surprise

Who would have guessed? In the past two months, Twitter and Meta have quietly removed an undisclosed number of accounts linked to influence operations pushing for pro-Western narratives and propaganda targeting countries such as China, Russia and Iran.

The massive covert operations date back at least five years and span the most popular social media platforms. They have been described as “the first major covert pro-US/Western influence operation” by Stanford University’s Internet Observatory and Graphika, a network analytics firm based in New York, with which Twitter and Meta had shared some of the account data for analysis.

“[An] interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms … used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia,” it said.

“We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western influence operations on social media to be reviewed and analysed by open-source researchers to date.”

The report finds that these influence campaigns “consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran … in particular … following [Russia’s] invasion of Ukraine”.