Report by Canadian internet watchdog links global fake news campaign to Iran
- A global multilingual campaign aimed at seeding anti-Saudi, anti-Israel and anti-US stories across the web has been operating for years, says Citizen Lab
- What the operation shows is that more parties are entering the disinformation game, and they are constantly getting better at it, the watchdog said
When an attractive young Middle Eastern woman contacted Saudi dissident Ali AlAhmed on Twitter last November, he was immediately suspicious.
Now, just two days before the report was set to go live, another young woman had reached out to him over the internet, attempting to entice him to read a news article and share it.
“They will never stop,” AlAhmed told the AP last November. “They think a hot girl can lure me.”
But Citizen Lab, a Canadian internet watchdog, quickly determined that the Twitter account – purportedly belonging to an Egyptian writer named Mona A.Rahman – was part of a separate operation.
In fact, the woman wasn’t even trying to hack AlAhmed – she was trying to enlist him in an ambitious global disinformation effort believed to be linked to Tehran.
GLOBAL DISINFORMATION EFFORT
In a report published on Tuesday, Citizen Lab said A.Rahman was but a small piece of a years-old, multilingual campaign aimed at seeding anti-Saudi, anti-Israel and anti-US stories across the web.
“What this shows is that more and more parties are entering the disinformation game, and they’re constantly learning,” said Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton.
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At the Iranian Embassy in London, a press secretary denied the government had anything to do with digital disinformation.
Mohammad Mohammadi said Iran was “the biggest victim” of such campaigns and had called for international regulations to curb them.
He referred further questions to the Iran’s Communications Ministry, whose deputy minister did not immediately return a message on Tuesday.
THE ‘ENDLESS MAYFLY’
Scott-Railton and his Citizen Lab colleagues ended up identifying 135 fake articles that were published as part of the campaign, which they dubbed “Endless Mayfly” because, like the short-lived insect, the bogus stories tended to disappear soon after they began to spread.
“Ivanka Trump says its unbelievable that women cannot drive in saudi arabia,” said one article posted to a site dressed up to look like the Foreign Policy magazine. “Saudi Arabia funds the US Mexico border Wall,” said another, hosted on a site imitating The Atlantic.
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The campaign seems to have been largely ineffectual – Scott-Railton noted that “most of their stories got almost no organic buzz” – but a couple did break through.
In March 2017, a fake Belgian newspaper report claiming that then-French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign was being one-third funded by Saudi money was widely shared in French ultranationalist circles – including by Marion Marechal, the granddaughter of French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
A few months later, another site mimicking a Swiss publication tricked news agencies and media outlets into publishing a false report that Saudi Arabia had written a letter to Fifa, the football governing body, demanding that arch-rival Qatar be barred from hosting the 2012 World Cup. The report was later withdrawn.
‘FAKE NEWS OPERATION’
Citizen Lab said it first got wind of the suspected Iranian disinformation campaign when a British web developer debunked one of the fake articles on Reddit two years ago.
The developer pointed out that the story – which suggested that UK Prime Minister Theresa May was “dancing to the tune” of Saudi Arabia – had been published on a website using the URL “indepnedent”, imitating the legitimate British news site, The Independent, and was linked to a network of other suspicious sites, including “bloomberq”, a clone of the news agency Bloomberg. A third site, “daylisabah”, was a fake version of the Turkish publication Daily Sabah.
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“Did we just get an insight into a fake news operation?” the developer asked at the time.
Citizen Lab confirmed his hunch, later connecting the sites to an incident in which another Twitter user, Bina Melamed, tried to persuade Israeli journalists to share the same fake Harvard article that AlAhmed received.
When one of the reporters privately confronted Melamed about why she was pushing nonsense, the answer was unusually straightforward.
“I like challenging and controversial stories,” Melamed said. “Sometimes they are fake and sometimes they are not.”
OPERATIONS ‘GET BETTER EACH DAY’
Outside experts who reviewed Citizen Lab’s report gave a qualified verdict.
Speaking generally, Zaidenberg said the apparent clumsiness of the online disinformation should not be a reason to dismiss it. “It gets better each day,” he said.
Most of the personas mentioned in Citizen Lab’s report – such as A.Rahman and Melamed – have been suspended.
Emails sent to half a dozen addresses used to register several bogus websites – including bloomberq, daylisabah, foriegnpolicy, theatlatnic and indepnedent – either weren’t returned or bounced back as undeliverable.
