Iran-linked Twitter accounts in Arabic used to spread anti-Saudi sentiments, push Tehran’s political narrative, says study

In August last year, Twitter announced that it had suspended hundreds of accounts that appeared to be linked to Iran. The reason? Twitter said the accounts had engaged in “coordinated manipulation”.

Then, in October, Twitter made tweets from 770 accounts “potentially originating in Iran” publicly available.

And when researchers at the Oxford internet Institute analysed the languages those accounts tweeted in, they discovered a trend that may shed light on how Iran seeks to wield influence online: most the tweets published by the Iran-linked accounts were written in French, English and Arabic, with only 8 per cent written in Iran’s official language, Farsi.

In an intensive study of the Arabic-language tweets the Oxford internet Institute released on Wednesday, researchers determined that “the most widely shared websites included in Arabic tweets push an Iranian political narrative, including criticism of Saudi Arabia and support of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad”.

While researchers cannot definitively say who was behind the accounts, Mona Elswah, a researcher at Oxford who worked on the study, said they “would seem to be coming from the Iranian government because they fed the Iranian government narrative”.