Iran’s state broadcaster experimented with using fake social media accounts to influence the outcome of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and other Western elections, a Facebook report said on Tuesday.
The Iranian network, one of eight to be suspended for so-called “coordinated inauthentic behavior” by the social media giant last month, points to efforts by state-linked groups to try to use Facebook to influence foreign democratic contests years before Russia’s alleged involvement in the 2016 US presidential election.
The network was linked to Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting Corp and involved more than 500 accounts that claimed to be independent, but amplified narratives favorable to Tehran, said Graphika, a social network analysis company that was allowed to independently verify Facebook’s findings.
The pages and accounts involved dated back to 2011 and targeted audiences in Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. Some had thousands of followers and operated for years, while others were quickly deleted without drawing much engagement.
The network’s targets briefly included the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, about which a handful of accounts posted pro-leave content including several cartoons portraying then-British prime minister David Cameron as “the embodiment of English oppression,” the Graphika report said.
The network also promoted the 2012 US presidential bid by former US representative Ron Paul, a libertarian, and the anti-capitalist Occupy movement, but the efforts in all three cases were brief and had little effect.
“The focus on Western democratic exercises appears to have been a short-lived experiment conducted with a relatively small number of accounts: It did not have the scale, the sophistication or the duration of the later Russian efforts,” it said.
Its more sustained campaigns were in Arabic. It published memes and linked to articles that were critical of Iran’s geopolitical foes, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia.
More recent content mentioned COVID-19, framing the pandemic as an attack on Iran by a foreign enemy, and a reason to lift sanctions on Iran and Syria.
The influence network was notable less for its success than for its start date, Graphika said, showing that state attempts to meddle in democratic elections were under way years before they became prominent with the efforts of Russian-linked groups to sow division and promote Donald Trump as president of the US.
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