UNHEARD VOICE
Evaluating five years of pro-Western
covert influence operations

August 24, 2022

Contents

Contents
1 Executive Summary

2

2 Methodology & Overview
2.1 Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.2 Major Groupings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.3 Posting Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3
4
5
7

3 Central Asia
3.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.2 TTPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.3 Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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10
11
20

4 Iran4.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.2 TTPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.3 Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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27
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5 Afghanistan
5.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.2 TTPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.3 Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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39
40

6 Middle East
6.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.2 TTPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.3 Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1

1

Executive Summary

In July and August 2022, Twitter and Meta removed two overlapping sets ofaccounts for violating their platforms’ terms of service. Twitter said the accounts
fell foul of its policies on “platform manipulation and spam,” while Meta said theassets on its platforms engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Aftertaking down the assets, both platforms provided portions of the activity toGraphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) for further analysis.
Our joint investigation found an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that used deceptive
tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The platforms’ datasets appear to cover a series of covert campaigns over a
period of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation.
These campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of
the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China,
and Iran. The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths ofinnocent civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit of the
Kremlin’s “imperial ambitions” following its invasion of Ukraine in February thisyear. To promote this and other narratives, the accounts sometimes shared news
articles from U.S. government-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America
and Radio Free Europe, and links to websites sponsored by the U.S. military. A
portion of the activity also promoted anti-extremism messaging.
As with previous disclosures, Twitter and Meta did not share the technical detailsof their investigations. Additionally, neither company has publicly attributed theactivity to any entity or organization: Twitter listed the activity’s “presumptive
countries of origin” as the U.S. and Great Britain, while Meta said the “country oforigin” was the U.S. The findings in this report are based on our own open-source
investigation and analysis of the two datasets shared by the platforms.
The Twitter dataset provided to Graphika and SIO covered 299,566 tweets
by 146 accounts between March 2012 and February 2022. 1 These accounts
divide into two behaviorally distinct activity sets. The first was linked to an overt
U.S. government messaging campaign called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative,
which has been extensively documented in academic studies, media reports, andfederal contracting records. The second comprises a series of covert campaigns of
unclear origin. These covert campaigns were also represented in the Meta datasetof 39 Facebook profiles, 16 pages, two groups, and 26 Instagram accounts activefrom 2017 to July 2022.
For this report, we focused our analysis on the exclusively covert activity to better
understand how different actors use inauthentic practices to conduct online
influence operations (IO). We did note, however, some low-level open-source
connections between the overt and covert activity in the combined Twitter and1

On Aug. 23, shortly before the publication of this report, Twitter increased the size of its dataset
to include an additional 24 accounts and 103,385 tweets. The updated disclosure statement
said the activity took place between March 2012 and August 2022.

2

Meta data. These consisted of limited cases of content sharing and one Twitter
account that posed as an individual in Iraq but has previously claimed to operate
on behalf of the U.S. military. Without supporting technical indicators, we areunable to assess further the nature of the relationship between the two activity
sets.
We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western
IO on social media to be reviewed and analyzed by open-source researchers todate. With few exceptions, the study of modern IO has overwhelmingly focusedon activity linked to authoritarian regimes in countries such as Russia, China, andIran, with recent growth in research on the integral role played by private entities.
This report illustrates the wider range of actors engaged in active operations to
influence online audiences.
At the same time, Twitter and Meta’s data reveals the limited range of tactics IO
actors employ; the covert campaigns detailed in this report are notable for how
similar they are to previous operations we have studied. The assets identified
by Twitter and Meta created fake personas with GAN-generated faces, posed as
independent media outlets, leveraged memes and short-form videos, attempted
to start hashtag campaigns, and launched online petitions: all tactics observedin past operations by other actors.
Importantly, the data also shows the limitations of using inauthentic tactics togenerate engagement and build influence online. The vast majority of posts andtweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, andonly 19% of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers. The
average tweet received 0.49 likes and 0.02 retweets. Tellingly, the two mostfollowed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly
declared a connection to the U.S. military.
This report is non-exhaustive and benefited from previous studies by theacademic and open-source research communities. We hope our findings cancontribute to a better-informed understanding of online influence operations, thetypes of actors that conduct them, and the limitations of relying on inauthentic
tactics.

2

Methodology & Overview

The decision to focus on the exclusively covert activity represented in two
datasets drawn from separate takedowns by Twitter and Meta posed certain
methodological challenges. Accordingly, we employed the following practices tobuild a subset of assets for further analysis.
• Firstly, we conducted a qualitative review of content samples, metadata,
and the profile information associated with each account to determine if
an asset should be classified as overt or covert. We conducted additional
open-source investigation to determine asset classifications when required.
• We then built a social media network map of the covert Twitter accounts’

3

2.1

Audience

followers. This helped us understand the collective audience these assets
built and each asset’s relative influence and community. The resulting
network map revealed three major groups reflecting specific regions andnations, including Iran, Arabic-speaking Middle East, and Afghanistan.
• We used these network groupings as a foundation to review further thecovert Twitter and Meta assets and assign labels corresponding to theiraudience. This included a qualitative review of asset behavior, such as thefake personas they employed online, and a quantitative content analysis of
the assets’ most-used hashtags, key terms, and web domains.
• This second review resulted in four labeled asset groups, each of whichappeared to encompass a contained campaign targeting audiences in one
country or geographic region. The activity sets related to Central Asia, Iran,and Afghanistan were each distinct enough to merit their own labels. We
combined four less distinct Arabic-language clusters related to Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, and Yemen as one group labeled “Middle East.”• Finally, we analyzed the assets in each group individually and collectively
to identify the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) they employed
to conduct their campaigns and the narratives they promoted.

2.1

Audience

The below network map (Figure 1 on the following page) shows the communities
in which these covert Twitter assets achieved a degree of influence, thus providing
a picture of the international audiences that engaged with the campaigns. The
major groupings in the map reflect three nations and regions: Iran, Afghanistan,
and an Arabic-speaking Middle East group comprising Iraqi and Saudi subgroups,
some of which contain a few accounts associated with Syria, Kuwait, and Yemen.
In addition to these major groupings, there were smaller community clusters in
the network containing mixed international accounts focused loosely on a variety
of international figures and organizations. We also encountered an unclustered
set of accounts with insufficient data for categorization.
Although we identified a Central Asia-focused campaign based on a review of
the assets’ activity, the map lacks a Central Asia community. The community’s
absence is likely due to the reportedly limited use of Twitter in Central Asian
countries, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, where
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram are considerably more popular.
Accordingly, Twitter assets in the Central Asia group generated significantly lessengagement than their counterparts on Facebook and Instagram.
For each of the covert Twitter accounts we identified, we calculated its “follower
footprint” in each community cluster, defined as the proportion of accounts in thecommunity cluster that followed it. There was a typical long-tail distribution in
the follower footprints, with a few influential accounts followed by a descending
list of accounts with progressively fewer followers. The distribution also featured
a large set of assets (about 20% of all the suspended covert Twitter assets) with

4

2.2

Major Groupings

no followers evident among the map’s communities. Accounts with a significant
follower footprint showed a clear association with a specific national or regionalgroup in the map.

2.2

Major Groupings

Figure 1: Community network map of covert Twitter asset followers. Color
represents major community groupings. Distance reflects network proximity,with accounts appearing close to those they follow and that follow them.

The method used to construct the network map is designed to reveal thecommunities in which the covert assets were embedded. We found 60,798
active Twitter accounts that followed at least one of the covert takedown assets
on Twitter, and collected follower and following data for each of these. We used
an iterative method to find the accounts among these best connected to eachother in strong communities, yielding a map of 13,946 densely interconnectedaccounts. These were clustered based on network relationships into 49 individual
community clusters, then further categorized into seven map groupings basedon the strength of their relationships with each other and an analyst review oflanguage, interests, and behavioral characteristics. Five of these map groupings
combine further into two analytic parts: Iran (with three groupings) and Middle
East Arabic (with two groupings).
The major parts of the network include:

5

2.2

Major Groupings

Table 1: Breakdown of the Twitter-based Network Map by Group

Group NameCount

Proportion

Iran
IRN PRO-REGIMEIRN ANTI-REGIMEIRN OTHER
M-EAST | Arabic
IRQ
SAU
Afghanistan
INT
Unclustered
Total

6335
2429
2415
1491
2867
2155
712
1482
401
2861
13946

45.4%
17.4%
17.3%
10.7%
20.6%
15.5%
5.1%
10.6%
2.9%
20.5%

• Iran: Three of the groupings, together comprising nearly half of the map(45.4%), are centered on Iran. The largest of these groups contains twelve
clusters of politically focused accounts strongly supportive of the Iranian
government. Another group of roughly equal size contains nine clusters ofpolitically focused accounts strongly opposed to the government. A thirdgroup contains seven clusters comprising mostly personal accounts with
nondescript characteristics but also accounts focused on writing and othercultural topics. This third group is generally critical of the Iranian regime tothe extent that the accounts discuss politics.
• Arabic-speaking Middle East: Two of the groupings, comprising 20.6%of the map, each contain Arabic-language communities associated with a
specific country: Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The Iraq group (15.5% of the map)
contains ten clusters of accounts variously focused on personal life, social
activism, government, and opposition politics. The Saudi group (5.1% of
the map) contains four clusters of accounts. These clusters focused mainlyon personal life and entertainment media, but one also followed politicaland government leaders.
• Afghanistan: This grouping (10.6% of the map) contains six clusters, fiveof which centered on Afghanistan and focused on personal life, government,
and researchers/scholars. One of the clusters centered on Pakistan andfocused on Pashtun politics.
• International: This grouping (2.9% of the map) contains two clusters. The
first is made up of loosely connected, mainly personal accounts from acrossthe MENA region. Accounts in this cluster follow a number of accounts
that are now suspended or no longer exist. The second cluster comprises
better-connected accounts that follow a range of international media andsocial influencers and are associated with a range of international locations.
• Unclustered: A set of accounts (20.5% of the map) that could not be

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2.3

Posting Patterns

clustered because of insufficient data.

2.3

Posting Patterns

After assigning each of the covert assets a label, we were able to visualize activity
and posting patterns for each group. This provided an overview of each campaign
and the set as a whole.
Figure 2 is based on data provided by Twitter and Meta and shows posting volumes
for each group over time. Tweets are represented in light blue, Facebook page
posts in dark blue, and Instagram posts in purple. The scale of the y-axis varies
by group. There are three key takeaways visible in the data:• The small Afghanistan group was the longest-running campaign represented in the data. While most accounts in this group became active in
2019, one account began tweeting in October 2017. The most recent
Facebook and Instagram activity ran until July this year.
• Activity in the Afghanistan group peaked during periods of strategic
importance for the U.S., including the months prior to and following thesigning of the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan (U.S.–Taliban
Deal) in February 2020 and the months leading up to the completed U.S.
departure from Afghanistan in August 2021.
• The Central Asia group was the most active campaign, with posting/tweetingvolumes peaking at almost 200 a day in the months leading up to andimmediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February this year.

Figure 2: Posting volume by group. Tweets are represented in light blue,
Facebook page posts in dark blue, and Instagram posts in purple.

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2.3

Posting Patterns

The following graphics show daily posting times for each group, based on the data
provided by Twitter and Meta. Interestingly, the assets in each group typicallypeaked in activity during the same period in any given 24 hours, usually between
1200 and 1800 GMT.

Figure 3: Posting times for assets in Afghanistan group (top left), Central Asiagroup (top right), Iran group (bottom left), and Middle East group (bottom right).
All times are shown in GMT.

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2.3

Posting Patterns

Three of the groups also showed clear signs of automated or highly coordinatedposting activity. According to data provided by Twitter and Meta, assets in the
Afghanistan and Central Asia groups typically posted at roughly 15-minute or
30-minute intervals in any given hour. Furthermore, accounts in the Afghanistan,
Central Asia, and Middle East groups almost exclusively posted in the first secondof any given minute.

Figure 4: Radar charts showing posts by minute in any given hour for assets in
the Afghanistan group (left) and Central Asia group (right).

Figure 5: Radar charts showing posts by second in any given minute for assets
in the Central Asia group (left) and Middle East group (right).

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3

Central Asia

3.1

Overview

The Central Asia group consisted of 12 Twitter accounts, 10 Facebook pages,
15 Facebook profiles, and 10 Instagram accounts. We also found connected
activity on Telegram, YouTube, and Russian social media platforms VKontakte(VK) and Odnoklassniki. All the accounts were created between June 2020
and March 2022. As with other groups we analyzed, the assets have beensuspended on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and largely suspended on
YouTube. However, accounts in the Central Asia group remain active on Telegram,
VK, and Odnoklassniki. Ten assets in the group posed as media outlets focusedon Central Asia. The operation’s segment on Odnoklassniki involved using almost
certainly inauthentic personas to spread content to Central Asian Odnoklassnikigroups.

Figure 6: The Faktograf [Фактограф] page on Odnoklassniki

The operation targeted Russian-speaking Central Asian audiences and focusedon praising American aid to Central Asia and criticizing Russia, particularly its
foreign policy. Two assets concentrated on China and the treatment of Chinese
Muslim minorities, particularly the Uighurs in Xinjiang province. The assets alsofrequently shared content about growing cooperation between Central Asian
countries. Content was almost exclusively in Russian, except for a small numberof tweets written in Central Asian languages, such as Kazakh and Kyrgyz.
The Central Asia group gained little traction on social media. Facebook posts
often had fewer than 10 likes, and only 10 posts gained more than 1,000 reactions.
However, two of the sham media outlets in the group produced two viral videos
that received hundreds of thousands of views on Facebook (Figure 7 on thefollowing page). The first video was about Kyrgyzstan’s reported ban on Russian
war symbols, and the second was a non-political TV news excerpt about an Uzbek
farmer growing fruits in the desert.

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3.2

TTPs

Figure 7: The Central Asia group posted to Facebook two videos that went viral.
One discussed a man forced to take down from his car in Kyrgyzstan a sign insupport of the Russian armed forces (left) and the other was about an Uzbek
farmer growing apricots and watermelons in the desert (right).

3.2

TTPs

3.2.1

Fake News, Fake Faces, Fake Followers

The Central Asia-focused campaign first created assets on Instagram, Telegram,
Twitter, and Odnoklassniki in 2020, before later setting up accounts on Facebook
and VK in 2021. According to domain registration records, a website for the shammedia outlet Intergazeta was created in March 2021.
Assets still active on Odnoklassniki and VK provide insights into how this crossplatform campaign operated. Fake personas created by the actors were typicallylinked to one of 10 sham media outlets, which posed as independent news entities
covering events in Central Asia. These fake personas posed as individuals living
in Europe and Central Asia, were listed as administrators for the sham media
outlets, and posted content from the campaign to different social media groups.
On Odnoklassniki, for example, the personas regularly posted to groups includingFighters of Kyrgyzstan [БОЙЦЫ КЫРГЫЗСТАНА] and Central Asia News [Новости
Central Asia].
On Facebook, a page for the sham media outlet Vostochnaya Pravda claimed
to focus on debunking myths and sharing “absolute facts” about Central Asia
(Figure 8 on the next page). Vostochnaya Pravda and other assets in the campaign
typically posted long text blocks about local news events and geopolitics
alongside an illustrative picture. Like all posts by the covert Central Asia assets,
this content received close to zero engagement. Facebook transparency dataalso showed the location for the administrators of four of the pages to be France,
despite Meta saying the network originated in the U.S.
Some of the “news” pages, such as Stengazeta, used engagement-building

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3.2

TTPs

Figure 8: Vostochnaya Pravda’s profile on Odnoklassniki shows that the pageregistered itself as an “internet media” outlet on the platform (top). On
Facebook, Vostochnaya Pravda claimed to be a page debunking misinformationand sharing “absolute” facts about Central and West Asia (bottom).

techniques, including openly calling for interactions from their readers on what
they had just read. We witnessed similar behavior from the only active Facebook
profile posting original content. Attempts to grow a follower base were evident on
Twitter, where the assets repeatedly tweeted at real users, including pro-Ukraine
and pro-Russia accounts, such as the self-proclaimed Ministry of Foreign Affairsof the Donetsk People’s Republic (@MID_DNR).
We believe the Facebook pages in the group likely acquired followers
inauthentically in an attempt to look like real and organic entities, possibly bypurchasing fake followers. According to CrowdTangle data, the pages quickly
gained up to several thousand followers in their first few weeks. Subsequently,
the pages experienced net losses in followers between June and August 2021,
possibly as Facebook deleted the accounts of their fake followers (Figure 9 on
the following page). The pages’ likes experienced the same phenomenon.
At least one of the group’s personas featured a doctored profile picture using aphoto of Puerto Rican actor Valeria Menendez (Figure 10 on the next page). We
suspect that at least two other fake users in the group used similar techniques, but
we could not identify the original photos. Additionally, at least one cross-platform
persona used a picture stolen from a dating website, and others often displayed
pictures of Paris and its monuments, echoing the pages’ listed administrator
locations. At least one asset on Odnoklassniki also had its location set to Paris.

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3.2

Figure 9: Total number of followers over time for the Central Asia group’s
Facebook pages from 2021-2022. Data from CrowdTangle, a public insights
tool owned and operated by Meta.

Figure 10: One persona in the Central Asia campaign used a doctored picture(left) of actor Valeria Menendez (right) as its profile picture. The asset that used
this image was listed as the contact for Intergazeta’s VK page.

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TTPs

3.2
3.2.2

TTPs

Lost in Translation

The sham media outlet Intergazeta repeatedly copied news material with andwithout credit from reputable Western and pro-Western sources in Russian, suchas Meduza.io and the BBC Russian Service. The sham outlet often made minorchanges to the copied texts in a likely effort to pass them off as original content.
Intergazeta also produced articles in Russian compiled from sections of different
English-language sources. Typically, these sections were literal “word-to-word”
translations into Russian, as opposed to more-advanced semantic translations,
resulting in non-native sounding language. In one case, the outlet posted a
Russian-language article about Russian disinformation in China that was almost
certainly translated from the English-language version of a Ukrainian article
published nine days earlier.
Intergazeta was not the only asset to translate content from English sources.
Facebook pages in the group sometimes posted Russian translations of press
releases from the websites of the U.S. embassies in Central Asia. These posts
focused on U.S. financial and material support to Central Asian countries. The
posts also copied or translated content from U.S.-funded entities, such asRadio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the independent Kazakh news outlet
informburo.kz.

Figure 11: Left: an (archived) English translation of a Ukrainian-language article
from Texty.org.ua. Highlighted in yellow: segments rephrased by Intergazeta.
In red: segments removed by Intergazeta. Right: the translation into Russian
by Intergazeta. Highlighted in green: additions from Intergazeta.

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3.2
3.2.3

TTPs

Coordination and Copycat Content

Assets in the Central Asia group showed clear and repeated signs of coordinatedbehavior: they posted simultaneously, used the same images, and recycledcontent over time across accounts.
At times, accounts in the group appear to have made an effort to mask thiscoordination. For example, when sharing identical content, assets would leave
periods of hours or days between posts. The same images were also shared withslightly modified captions or headlines (Figure 12). At least half of the assetsinterspersed their posts with content promoting the cultures and natural beautyof Central Asia, possibly in an attempt to appear authentic and obscure theirpolitically motivated activity.

Figure 12: Three assets in the group coordinated posting over three days in
December 2021.

However, the coordination was especially clear when assets in the group posted
about U.S.-related news or used translated content from official American
sources, such as U.S. embassies in Central Asia. In one example, the Vostochnaya
Pravda Facebook page posted a word-for-word Russian translation of an Englishlanguage news bulletin from the U.S. embassy in Tajikistan (Figure 13 on the nextpage). The post included a link to a Radio Liberty article on the topic, an excerptof which was then shared by multiple other assets in the group.
The assets also sourced content from media outlets linked to the U.S. military,
particularly Caravanserai (central.asia-news[.]com). This outlet is one of threethat previously operated as Central News Online (centralasiaonline[.]com), which
named the U.S. Central Command as its sponsor and, before 2016, was part of
the U.S. government’s Trans-Regional Web Initiative mentioned at the beginningof this report.
Multiple Facebook pages in the campaign shared screenshots from central.asia-

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3.2

TTPs

news[.]com, and the Linktree of sham media outlet Stengazeta directed visitors
exclusively to the website, except for one link to an Avaaz petition demanding the
Kazakh government ban Russian TV channels (Figure 14 on the following page).

Figure 13: Left: Vostochnaya Pravda posted a Russian translation of an Englishlanguage press release from the U.S. embassy in Tajikistan to its Facebook
page, alongside a link to a Radio Liberty article. Right: Other assets in the groupsubsequently shared the same excerpt of the article to Facebook and otherplatforms.

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3.2

Figure 14: The Linktree of Stengazeta led exclusively to central.asianews[.]com URLs, except for one petition that demanded Kazakhstan ban
Russian TV channels.

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TTPs

3.2
3.2.4

TTPs

#Batches_of_Hashtags

Around half of the assets posing as media entities, such as Stengazeta and Fakt
Tobe, used batches of hashtags under their posts, likely in an attempt to reachbroader audiences. The hashtags often corresponded to the names of Central
Asian countries in Russian and other languages, such as #казахстан [Kazakhstan
in Russian], #қазақстан [Kazakhstan in Kazakh], and #qazaqstan [romanizedversion of қазақстан]. Assets repeatedly used hashtags related to the topicsof their social media posts but also generic Russian-language hashtags such as#интересно [interesting]. Occasionally, the promoted hashtags were unrelated
to the topic of the post. This was especially true for cultural content, whichsometimes featured unrelated hashtags about the war in Ukraine.
Table 2: The below table lists the top hashtags from the Central Asia group’s
Twitter accounts. While many referred to regional geopolitics, some, like “Old
pictures,” promoted Central Asian culture.

HashtagTranslationCountцентральнаяазия
centralasiaузбекистан
Кыргызстан
нетвойне
кыргызстан
казахстан
путешествия
сириястраны
ukrainawarстарыефото
россия
Узбекистан
китай

Central Asia

118
101
91
61
60
59
52
46
45
44
43
42
39
37
37

Uzbekistan
Kyrgyzstan
No to war
Kyrgyzstan
Kazakhstan
TravelSyria
Countries
Old Pictures
RussiaUzbekistan
China

At least four of the sham media outlets also made apparent attempts tolaunch hashtag campaigns related to the war in Ukraine. For example,
posts about the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Puls Vostoka featured
the hashtag #ЦАзаУкраину [Central Asia for Ukraine], Stengazeta promoted#СегодняУкраинаЗавтраЦA [Today Ukraine tomorrow Central Asia], andShestigrannik promoted #украинаЦАстобой [Ukraine, Central Asia is with you]
(Figure 15 on the next page). Audience analysis suggests none of these hashtag
campaigns gained significant traction with authentic users.
3.2.5

Petitions

The assets pushed at least four petitions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
One called for Kazakhstan to leave the Collective Security Treaty Organization

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3.2

TTPs

Figure 15: Posts from Facebook pages Puls Vostoka (left) and Stengazeta(right) used the hashtags #ЦАзаУкраину [Central Asia for Ukraine] and#СегодняУкраинаЗавтраЦA [Today Ukraine Tomorrow Central Asia].

(CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). A second demanded that
Kyrgyzstan curb Chinese influence in the country. The last two called on the
Kazakh government to ban Russian TV channels. Three of these petitions werelaunched on the U.S. non-profit petition platform Avaaz, and one was posted on
the Kazakh website Alash. Four separate articles from Radio Liberty’s Kazakh
website, Azzatyq, shared one of the petitions. While we could not determine
whether the operation created the petitions, CrowdTangle data shows that assets
were often the first to share the links on Facebook (Figure 16).

Figure 16: CrowdTangle shows the assets were the first to share petitions
calling for the Kazakh government to ban Russian TV channels.

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3.3

3.3

Narratives

Narratives

The Central Asia group focused on a range of topics: U.S. diplomatic andhumanitarian efforts in the region, Russia’s alleged malign influence, Russian
military interventions in the Middle East and Africa, and Chinese “imperialism”
and treatment of Muslim minorities. Starting in February this year, assets that
previously posted about Russian military activities in the Middle East and Africa
pivoted towards the war in Ukraine, presenting the conflict as a threat to people
in Central Asia.
3.3.1

America, Our Best Ally

Assets in the group heavily promoted narratives supportive of the U.S. on
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram. These posts primarily
focused on U.S. support for Central Asian countries and their people, presenting
Washington as a reliable economic partner that would curb the region’s
dependence on Russia. Other posts argued that the U.S. was the main guarantorof Central Asia’s sovereignty against Russia, frequently citing the war in Ukraine
as evidence of the Kremlin’s “imperial” ambitions. Interestingly, the assets also
promoted U.S. humanitarian efforts, mentioning the United States Agency forInternational Development 94 times on Twitter and 384 times on Facebook in
the respective datasets.

Figure 17: Posts about the U.S. helping Tajikistan secure its border with
Afghanistan (left) and presenting the U.S. as the main guarantor of Central
Asia’s stability and sovereignty (right).

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3.3
3.3.2

Narratives

Russia Looms Large

Assets in the group consistently portrayed Russia as a threat to Central Asian
countries. A recurring narrative claimed that Russia is abusing Russian-Central
Asian partnerships, namely the CSTO and, to a lesser extent, the Commonwealthof Independent States (CIS), to extract one-sided benefits (Figure 18). Posts
frequently described the CSTO as a hazardous tool that Russia could use tocircumvent Western sanctions and drag Central Asian countries into its war
against Ukraine. The assets also said Central Asian countries must leave theseorganizations if they wish to retake their full sovereignty from Russia.
As an alternative, the assets advocated for creating exclusively Central Asianpartnerships. Accounts in the group celebrated steps taken by Central Asian
governments to move away from Russia, such as Kazakh President KassymJomart Tokayev’s decision to withdraw from the CIS agreement on the Interstate
Monetary Committee or efforts to reinforce local languages and cultural identities.

Figure 18: Left: A post about Russia’s imperialism in Central Asia. Right: A
post about Russia possibly calling CSTO troops to Russian-occupied regions in
Ukraine under the premise of peacekeeping.

Other posts criticized Russia’s use of propaganda to spread anti-West and proRussia narratives in Central Asia, depicting Russia as a nefarious actor working
to undermine independent democracies. In January 2022, for example, theaccounts covered mass protests that followed a sudden increase in fuel prices
in Kazakhstan, but mainly through the lens of debunking Russian allegationsof “foreign interference.” Some of the group’s media outlets also claimed that
Russia sent Wagner Group mercenaries to seize Almaty airport and that Russia
was using claims of foreign interference as a pretext to send Russian troops as
CSTO peacekeepers to occupy Kazakhstan.

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3.3

Narratives

The assets also highlighted the repression and abuse of Central Asian migrants
in Russia. Several posts covered the pressured, sometimes forced enrollment ofCentral Asian migrants into the Russian army in exchange for promises of Russian
citizenship. This narrative overlapped with posts about the high casualty rate for
ethnic minorities fighting for Russia in Ukraine.

Figure 19: Posts about Russia using ethnic minorities to fight in Ukraine (left)
and the conscription of Central Asian migrants into the Russian military (right).

3.3.3

Imperial Russia — Wars & Alliances

Anti-Russia narratives advanced by the campaign frequently cited Russia’s“imperialist wars” in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa. The most recent focusof the group was on Ukraine, but assets previously posted about the activities of
military contractors working for Russia’s Wagner Group in Africa and Moscow’s
military intervention in Syria.
Ukraine War
The assets posted about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through the lens of what
it would mean for people in Central Asia. These posts often warned of Russia’s
imperialist ambitions toward the former Soviet states and said the invasionof Ukraine showed what the Kremlin was capable of doing to its neighboring
countries. Other posts outlined the direct impact of the war on Central Asian
countries, such as food shortages, and said all Central Asian nations should
reconsider their relations with Russia in light of its illegal invasion (Figure 20 on
the following page).
More broadly, assets in the group uniformly supported Ukraine, which they said

22

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Narratives

was a country trying to free itself from Russia’s influence. Shortly after theinvasion began in February, accounts promoted pro-Ukrainian protests in Central
Asian countries. Later posts reported on evidence of atrocities committed by
Russian troops and Russia’s block on Ukrainian grain exports.

Figure 20: Posts warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had triggered a foodcrisis in Central Asia (left) and presented its war in Ukraine as an unwillingness
to give up its Soviet-era dominion over its neighbors (right)

Russia in Africa and the Middle East
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, assets in the group frequently discussed Russian
actions in Africa and the Middle East. The pages criticized Russian businessman
Yevgeny Prigozhin, in particular, for his role in orchestrating state-backed covert
influence operations and deploying Russian military contractors to countries
including Syria, Mali, and the Central African Republic (Figure 21 on the nextpage). Notably, the Central Asia group mentioned “Вагнер” [Wagner] 193 times
on Twitter and 312 times on Facebook.
The Central Asia group also criticized Russia’s relationship with the Taliban
after the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan in 2021. For example, theShestigrannik Facebook page repeatedly accused Russia and China of ignoring
the Taliban’s ethnic cleansing of Afghan minorities and mistreatment of women(Figure 22 on the following page). Many of the group’s sham media outlets
attacked Russia for disregarding the threat that the Taliban and Islamist terrorism
represent to Central Asia, especially Tajikistan. According to several assets,
Russia did not criticize the Taliban in the hope of gaining access to Afghanistan’snatural resources and has encouraged violence in the region by increasing thesale of weapons to Central Asia.

23

3.3

Narratives

Figure 21: The group posted content about murders linked to the WagnerGroup in the Central African Republic (left) and Wagner Group losses in Ukraine(right).

Figure 22: Posts about the threat the Taliban poses to Tajikistan (left) and the
Taliban’s treatment of women (right).

24

3.3

Narratives

Syria and the Syrian war
Before the war in Ukraine, many pages focused on Russia’s military actions in
Syria. Assets denounced the Russian government’s support of Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad and Russian airstrikes that have killed and injured thousands ofcivilians in Syria since 2015 (Figure 23). Facebook and Instagram accounts also
noted that Russia impeded humanitarian aid deliveries to Syrians by blocking
decisions at the U.N., and promoted the work of U.S. humanitarian aid and support
programs for Syrian refugees. The topic was one of the most covered across thegroup, as assets mentioned “Сирия” (Syria) over 600 times on Twitter and over
1,500 times on Facebook.
Lastly, the assets posted about Russian propaganda related to the war in Syria andanalyzed the techniques used by Russian media to “twist narratives” around thewar. At the same time, the group shared content celebrating U.S. successes in its
fight against the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda in the Middle East, especiallyin Syria.

Figure 23: Posts praising the international coalition in Syria in its fight against
the Islamic State (left) and covering Russia’s bombing of civilians in Syria (right).

3.3.4

Caution: China!

A small cluster of assets within the Central Asia group focused almost exclusively
on China. These accounts—a fake persona and sham media outlet—mainly
focused on the genocide of Uighurs and Muslim minorities in “re-education”
camps in Xinjiang. Posts described alleged organ trafficking, forced labor, sexual
crimes against Muslim women, and suspicious disappearances of ethnic Muslims
in Xinjiang. The assets also posted about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)25

poor treatment of women in the country and often framed these stories aroundnews about domestic violence.
Other assets in the group also posted about China but asserted that Chinese
authoritarianism and financial imperialism threatened Central Asia and otherregions of the world. The assets frequently referred to China’s cooperation with
Russia, especially on military issues, and said Beijing should be held responsible
for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because the CCP had secretly supplied the Kremlinwith weapons. The group rebuked China for buying stolen Ukrainian grain from
Russia and predicted that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine would precipitate a
Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Figure 24: Posts about alleged organ harvesting of Muslims in Xinjiang (left)
and blaming China for being the main sponsor of Russia’s war against Ukraine(right)

4

Iran

4.1

Overview

This section discusses the 21 Twitter accounts, two Facebook pages, five
Facebook profiles, and six Instagram accounts that formed the covert campaign
focused on Iranian audiences. These assets had names in Persian, and thosethat posted content mainly did so in Persian and about Iran. The Twitter accounts
posted primarily from November 2020 through March 2022, and the Facebook
pages and Instagram accounts posted primarily from May 2021 through June
2022. There were no visible posts for the Facebook profiles.
Several of the Twitter accounts were tied to the Facebook and Instagram accounts.

26

4.2

TTPs

For example, they shared similar usernames. However, the Twitter accounts
exhibited a wider range of activity and narratives that did not appear in thedata shared by Meta, including content promoting hardliner narratives that
advocated for anti-reformist and hawkish policies in Iran. We additionally foundlinked activity on YouTube, Balatarin, and Telegram. The accounts in this cluster
frequently claimed to be Iranians and often Iranian women. Accounts listed
professions such as “teacher” and “political analyst.” There were also two front
media outlets that claimed to provide independent news.

4.2

TTPs

Accounts in the Iran group employed many of the same IO tactics we saw fromthe other groups, though with a few innovations. These assets included accounts
claiming to be independent media outlets, shared U.S.-funded Persian-language
media, had a low-engagement cross-platform presence, and showed low-effort
spammy follow-back activity.
4.2.1

Mock Media, Multiple Platforms

Several suspended accounts were linked to two sham media outlets operating in
Persian: Fahim News (tagline: “Accurate news and information”) and the moredeveloped Dariche News, which claimed to be an independent media outlet.
The about page of Dariche News’ website says it is “an independent website
and unaffiliated with any group or organization.” It goes on to claim to have acommitment to providing “uncensored and unbiased news.”
While some Dariche News content appeared to be original to the outlet, manyof their articles were explicit reposts from U.S.-funded Persian-language media,
including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Radio Farda and VOA Farsi (Figure 25
on the following page). The Fahim News accounts similarly shared content fromthese outlets, along with content from Iran International, a media outlet basedin the U.K. that allegedly has financial links to Saudi Arabia. Many of the fakepersonas in the network also shared Iran International content.
The suspended media outlet accounts showed links to other social media
accounts on Telegram, YouTube, and Balatarin. The Telegram and YouTube
channels had few followers. Like other parts of this group, the sham media
outlets’ YouTube channels created many short-form videos. Profiles on Balatarin,a Persian link-sharing platform, frequently linked to stories from Persian-language
U.S.-funded media. While these sham media outlets had few followers, we foundan interesting instance of Russian state media outlet Sputnik embedding an
Instagram post from Dariche News into one of their articles.
Dariche News and Fahim News were not unique in having Telegram channels
with very few subscribers. We identified four additional Telegram channels linked
to the Iran cluster that had 1, 4, 48, and 57 subscribers.

27

4.2

Figure 25: Top: An article on Dariche News suggested that Iran was behind an
August 2022 drone attack near a U.S.-led coalition base in Syria. The article
was reposted from Radio Farda. Bottom: The end of the article says “mainarticle” and links to the original Radio Farda article.

28

TTPs

4.2

Figure 26: The now-suspended YouTube channels for Dariche News and Fahim
News (top left and top right), and the Telegram channels for Dariche News andFahim News (bottom left and bottom right).

Figure 27: An Aug. 18, 2022 Fahim News post on Balatarin said that social
media is the only way Iranians can access the free world and is the main enemyof the Iranian regime’s propaganda: “Therefore, the regime uses all of its efforts
to censor and filter the internet.” Assets in the Central Asia group similarly
criticized Russian information control.

29

TTPs

4.2

Figure 28: Screenshot of the Dariche News website.

30

TTPs

4.2
4.2.2

TTPs

Camouflage and SpamWhile the accounts in this group primarily posted political content, they exhibitedsome spammy characteristics likely geared towards building a large online
audience. Several accounts had follow-back language in their profiles, such as
the phrase “follow = follow back.” Many accounts also posted non-political filler
content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Persian food, in a likely attempt
to build an audience and present themselves as authentic users (Figure 29). The
Iran group tried to engage with real Iranians on Twitter, often by joking with users
about non-political internet memes. Accounts often replied to tweets with theface with tears of joy emoji.

Figure 29: Left: An image shared by a Twitter asset, saying merry Sizdah Be-dar.
Sizdah Be-dar is an Iranian festival celebrated with a picnic. Right: An asset
retweeted this photo of cats.

4.2.3

Voice of America?

We observed multiple instances of accounts in the Iran group sharing content
from sources linked to the U.S. military. For example, in 2020 and 2021, a Twitter
account that presented itself as an Iranian individual living in “Cambridge” posted
links to almashareq[.]com and diyaruna[.]com 25 and 26 times, respectively. Bothwebsites say they are sponsored by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) andpost pro-Western articles in Persian and Arabic. This Twitter account was createdon June 16, 2019, and its Twitter bio linked to a Telegram account with the same
name and just three subscribers. The Twitter account was critical of the Iranian
government and often used a sarcastic tone to mock Iranian state media andother parts of the state apparatus. It also tweeted about how Iranian meddlingabroad only hurt Iranians at home.
Based on an analysis of shared technical infrastructure, domain registration
records, and social media activity, we assess with high confidence that almashareq[.]com is the latest rebranding of al-shorfa[.]com, while diyaruna[.]com
is the latest rebranding of mawtani[.]com and mawtani.al-shorfa[.]com. Prior to
2016, al-shorfa[.]com and mawtani[.]com were part of the U.S. government’s
Trans-Regional Web Initiative mentioned at the beginning of this report.

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4.3

Narratives

Figure 30: Two images tweeted by the account that shared U.S. military-linked
domains. Left: This image was tweeted on Aug. 11, 2021, and the tweet text
said that Qais al-Khazali—who heads an Iranian-backed paramilitary group in
Iraq—dances like a puppet of the Iranian regime. Right: This image was tweetedon Feb. 24, 2022, and says, “freedom of speech in Iran.” Text accompanying
the tweet used two Persian hashtags, one protesting an internet control bill
and the other saying “no to the Islamic Republic.”

Additionally, Dariche News frequently quoted CENTCOM officials and discussed
U.S. military activities in the region. We counted at least 50 Dariche News articles
that mentioned CENTCOM. For example, a September 2021 article discussed
how Bahraini leaders pledged to work with U.S. Naval Forces Central Command
to adopt new technologies. A December 2021 article quoted a former CENTCOM
commander saying that the Iranian government was starving people to build
missiles.
The network amplified programs to people wanted by the U.S. government tojustice. For example, on Aug. 10, 2022, a Telegram channel linked to a suspended
Twitter account shared an FBI wanted pamphlet for Shahram Poursafi, an Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) member accused of plotting to assassinate
former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton. Dariche News, like some othercovert accounts we reviewed, shared content from the U.S. State Department’s
Rewards for Justice Program seeking information about Iranians who may haveinterfered in U.S. elections (Figure 31 on the following page).

4.3

Narratives

The Twitter accounts in this group can be divided into those that criticized the
Iranian government and a smaller number of accounts that shared hardliner
views. The suspended Facebook and Instagram accounts either criticized the
Iranian government or did not contain any publicly visible posts.

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4.3

Narratives

Figure 31: A Dariche News article highlighting the U.S. Department of State’s
Rewards for Justice program. The article says there is a reward of up to$10 million for information about Iranians who attempted to interfere in U.S.
elections.

4.3.1

Needling Iran

Anti-government accounts criticized Iran’s domestic and international policies
and highlighted how the government’s costly international interventions
undermined its ability to care for its citizens. Posts claimed the government
took food from Iranians to give to Hezbollah. One Instagram post said that bysupporting Hamas and Hezbollah, the late Qasem Soleimani had brought poverty
and misery to Iran. Soleimani was the former head of the Quds Force, a branchof Iran’s IRGC. Some tweets highlighted embarrassing events for Iran, such as areported power outage that caused the Iranian chess team to lose an international
online tournament.
Human and civil rights were another common theme from the group. Some
tweets with higher engagement levels criticized the government, particularly
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for killing protesters in 2021. Tweets
also highlighted a teacher protest in January 2022.
Across platforms, the group promoted Amnesty International content. One
tweet from May 2021 highlighted an Amnesty International report about how thegovernment executed four imprisoned Ahwazi activists in 2021 (see Figure 32).

33

4.3

Narratives

The Ahwazi are an Arab ethnic minority group in Iran. An April 2022 Instagram
post shared an Amnesty International image drawing attention to the unjust
imprisonment of human rights activist Behnam Mousivand. A July 2021
Instagram post highlighted, in poetic terms, the unjust imprisonment of an Iranianpoet who has since died in prison.

Figure 32: A May 19, 2021 tweet on the extrajudicial killing of four Ahwazi
activists. The image text says, “Amnesty International: Iranian authorities
have hidden the bodies of four executed Ahwazi Arab activists.”

The group also focused on women’s rights, though most prominently on Facebook
and Instagram. Dozens of posts compared Iranian women’s opportunities abroadwith those in Iran. Posts also noted that little has changed for women in Iran overtime. Many posts highlighted domestic protests against hijab dress requirements.
Many tweets linked government corruption to domestic hardships. For example,
one post said that “corruption and mafia relations in the IRGC, [...] judges and thefamilies of the heads of Islamic Republic… [are the] main reason for Iran’s poverty
and misery.” Tweets likewise blamed the government for the country’s risingcost of living, claiming that prices for food and medicine increased at the sametime that hardliner Ebrahim Raisi became the country’s president in 2021. These
tweets also noted that the IRGC controls the country’s domestic production ofthese goods.
Criticism of the IRGC was a particularly prominent theme in the group. DaricheNews explicitly said its main focus was “to inform about the destructive role of

34

4.3

Narratives

Figure 33: A post on the Facebook page Iran Land [‫ ]ایران زمین‬on June 10, 2022.
The post compares the experience of Iranian women abroad, such as working
as astronauts (left), with an Iranian woman in Iran seemingly being beaten(right).

Figure 34: A post from Feb. 7, 2022, on the Iran Land Facebook page. Top left:
Before the Taliban. Top right: Before the Islamic Revolution. Bottom left: Afterthe Taliban. Bottom right: After the Islamic Revolution. This post received
1,336 likes, despite the page having just 642 followers.

35

4.3

Narratives

the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in all the affairs and issues of Iran andthe region.”
Multiple assets also claimed to be “Justice for the victims of #Flight752”
accounts, referring to the Ukraine International Airlines flight that the IRGC
shot down in January 2020. In addition to blaming the IRGC for this incident,
tweets also placed responsibility directly on Khamenei. At the time of the incident,
accounts discussed how it was playing out internationally. For example, accounts
shared news articles about a Canadian court ruling the incident an act of terrorism.
The Twitter accounts in this group used hashtags related to this flight (e.g.,#PS752 and #ps752justice) hundreds of times.
Like other groups in the broader covert set, the Iranian group criticized Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine, often using it to frame local narratives. The group’s posts used
Persian versions of the Russian opposition hashtags #no_to_Putin and #no_to_war. Accounts noted that Khamenei verbally supported Putin and accused Iran of
supplying drones to Russia, which Russia then used to kill civilians. In addition toclaiming that Iran’s support for Russia was morally wrong, the group also pushed
the narrative that Iran’s support would incur negative economic repercussions
and made unflattering comparisons between Khamenei and Ukraine’s President
Volodymyr Zelensky. One “has sold Iran to Russia [...] and ordered [their peoples’]murder,” an account tweeted. “The other is wearing a combat uniform alongside
his people and has stopped the colonization of Ukraine by Russia with all his
might.”

Figure 35: An Aug. 7, 2022 post from a Telegram channel linked to a suspended
Twitter account. The post says that Russia has started using Iranian drones in
Ukraine and that Iran’s military support for Russia “is not in Iran’s favor andwill cause many diplomatic and political problems for Iran in the future.”

Accounts also criticized the Quds Force’s activities abroad and particularly its
former leader Soleimani, calling him a murderer and saying that his values were

36

4.3

Narratives

inconsistent with Islam. The tweet in Figure 36 is from just after the Taliban
seized control of Afghanistan in 2021. It says that Quds Force personnel werepretending to be journalists and going to Afghanistan to squash the country’s
opposition.

Figure 36: A Sept.19, 2021 tweet saying that Quds Force personnel were in
Afghanistan to squash the country’s anti-Taliban opposition.

Figure 37: A cartoon from an article on darichenews.com. The cartoon isbranded with the Dariche News name in the top left corner. The text says:“IRGC: Greatest threat to the Middle East.” The image shows Khamenei as anoctopus spreading his tentacles around the Middle East with missiles, policebatons, and nooses. Notably, the article accompanying this cartoon includes aquote from a former CENTCOM commander.

37

4.3.2A Handful of Hardliners

Four Twitter accounts in the group promoted hardliner narratives that advocatedfor anti-reformist and hawkish policies in Iran. Some of these narratives took
aim at Iranian state officials for being too moderate, but any negative content
about the Iranian government was infrequent. The hardliner accounts tweeted
during the same period as the anti-regime assets and used similar tactics, but
their purpose is unclear. These assets did not share anti-U.S. content, as one
would expect from nationalistic voices in Iran.
Most of the hardliner tweets came from just one account, a self-declared “politicalscience expert” whose account had 3,769 followers and was created on Nov. 25,
2020. This account mostly posted on Twitter and a related Telegram channel
about the progress of Shi’a Islam over time. For example, in one tweet, theaccount asserted that Shiites were now able to exert influence in the Middle
East after previously playing a more submissive role. This tweet received 84
likes. A Facebook and Instagram account linked to this Twitter account are also
suspended, though they were not included in the dataset shared by Meta.
Other hardliner accounts praised Soleimani, tweeting that he should rest in peace,calling him a martyr, and saying that he is more dangerous to Iran’s enemies
dead than alive. One account suggested that former President Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, the office of the presidency, and Iran’s Expediency Council were toomoderate. This same account also tweeted that former President Hassan Rohani
and former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif were traitors. Other posts promoted theuse of the hijab and shared provocative images like those shown in Figure 38.

Figure 38: An image shared by a hardliner account. The image at left says
“without veil,” and the image at right says “veil.”

5

Afghanistan

5.1

Overview

A small group of assets in the Twitter and Meta takedown sets posted primarily
about issues in Afghanistan but emphasized narratives critical of Iran, the IslamicState group, and the Taliban. This group comprised six Twitter accounts, one

38

5.2

TTPs

Facebook profile, and one Instagram account. The accounts posted mainly inPashto but also occasionally in Persian, Urdu, and Arabic. The assets wereprimarily active from September 2019 to July 2022, but one account beganposting in 2017. We also identified one affiliated YouTube account that was
created in October 2020.

5.2

TTPs

Despite this group’s small number of assets, its campaign leveraged clear TTPs
that we also observed in the broader set of covert accounts. All these accounts
used fake personas, including one account claiming to be an Afghan man. Someof the personas attempted to present as real people by using profile pictures thatwere likely created using artificial intelligence techniques, such as generative
adversarial networks (GAN). Like assets in the Central Asia group, the Afghanistan
accounts typically included hashtag blocks at the end of their posts, often
including #IRGCEXPOSED.
They also shared content from sources linked to the U.S. military, particularly
afghanistan.asia-news[.]com, which names the U.S. Central Command as its
sponsor. Based on an analysis of shared technical infrastructure, domain
registration records, and social media activity, we assess with high confidence
that afghanistan.asia-news[.]com (Salaam Times) is one-third of the latest
rebranding of centralasiaonline[.]com, the other two being pakistan.asianews[.]com (Pakistan Forward) and central.asia-news[.]com (Caravanserai).
Before 2016, centralasiaonline[.]com was part of the U.S. government’s TransRegional Web Initiative mentioned at the beginning of this report.

Figure 39: Left: A fake persona in the Afghanistan group likely used artificial
intelligence techniques, such as GAN, to create its profile photo. Right: We
have superimposed the same profile picture over two sample GAN-generated
images from outside the network. The alignment of the eyes in multiple
different images strongly suggests the profile picture was created using artificial
intelligence techniques.

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5.3

Narratives

Figure 40: Screenshot of an archived Instagram post by the same fake persona
who used a likely GAN-generated profile image. The post includes a video fromthe U.S. military-linked website afghanistan.asia-news[.]com and claims thatimports of low-quality Iranian honey are damaging Afghanistan’s beekeeping
industry.

5.3

Narratives

5.3.1

Iran, Again

Accounts in the Afghanistan group consistently advanced narratives critical of
Iran and its actions, often within a framework of issues and events relevant to
Afghan audiences. Sometimes, these narratives included inflammatory claims
accompanied by articles from the U.S. military-linked website afghanistan.asianews[.]com. One example was a tweet from March 11, 2022, which claimed that
relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from
Iran with missing organs. The post linked to an afghanistan.asia-news[.]com
video, which was posted to YouTube and also shared in a Feb. 14, 2022 article bypakistan.asia-news[.]com. The article includes interviews with an Afghan official
and Afghan nurse making the same unverified claims.
Another anti-Iranian narrative claimed in late 2021 and early 2022 that the IRGC
was forcing Afghan refugees to join militias fighting in Syria and Yemen and thatthose who refused were being deported. Like accounts in the Middle East group,
many posts focused on the actions of Iranian-backed militias in Syria, accusing

40

5.3

Narratives

Figure 41: An article on a U.S. military-linked domain alleged that Afghan
refugees were having their organs harvested in Iran.

fighters of committing human rights abuses and Tehran of sponsoring terrorism.
Since February this year, the Afghanistan accounts began to weave in narratives
related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, comparing the actions of Russian soldiers
to those of IRGC-backed militias in Syria.

Figure 42: An April 2022 tweet compared Russia’s “illegal” invasion of Ukraine
to the IRGC sending militia forces to Syria.

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5.3

Narratives

Accounts in the group also posted general criticism of Iranian policies that did not
directly relate to Afghanistan. For example, the YouTube account we identified
posted multiple Shorts showing Iranians protesting and looting supermarkets due
to food shortages. The Shorts were captioned in Pashto, English, and Urdu andcommented that “There is no difference between IRGC and ISIS” and “Peoplelooting shops in Iran, but the Iranian government is still interfering in othercountries.”

Figure 43: A YouTube Short shared by an account linked to the suspended
Twitter and Meta assets compared the IRGC to the Islamic State group. The
account profile photo is likely GAN-generated.

5.3.2

No Taliban, No ISIS

Multiple accounts in this group shared posts and tweets that resembled Afghan
military press releases. From 2019 to 2021, these posts highlighted successful
Afghan military operations against the Taliban, Islamic State group, and otherextremist organizations, such as a March 2020 post applauding police inAfghanistan’s Nimroz Province for seizing opium used to finance al-Qaeda. Posts
also typically praised former President Ashraf Ghani.
After Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August 2021, accounts in the groupbegan sharing advice for people trying to flee the country. Initially, this included
warnings not to gather around Kabul airport without the necessary foreign travel
documents as the scene devolved into chaotic evacuations by retreating U.S.
forces. In the following weeks, posts highlighted women’s protests against

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5.3

Narratives

Taliban authorities and criticized Afghanistan’s new government for its treatmentof women and journalists.
Lastly, many posts attempted to undermine support for the Islamic State group’s
affiliate in Afghanistan, claiming to reveal “the true fact” that the group isanti-Islam. A May 2022 tweet said in Pashto that the Islamic State group’s
actions contradicted Islamic teachings and that the group “exists as the mostdangerous terrorist group in the region and threatens all nations with weaponsof ignorance.” Though often used without context, #NotMyIslam (in English)
appeared frequently.

Figure 44: An image shared by an asset on Aug. 19, 2021. The accompanying
tweet said, in Persian, that the U.S. Department of Defense was working toincrease airport security and the number of flights evacuating people from
Kabul.

Figure 45: An image shared with a tweet on Aug. 25, 2021. The accompanying
text said in Persian that more than 20,000 Afghans had been evacuated in thepast 24 hours as the U.S. and allies worked to complete evacuations by Aug.
31.

43

6

Middle East

6.1

Overview

The Middle East group of covert assets discussed in this section focused broadly
on issues related to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. While not as distinct asother groups in the takedown sets, we identified multiple technical, behavioral,
and content links between these accounts, which exclusively posted in Arabic
about the same topics and themes.
The group comprised 30 Twitter accounts, six Instagram accounts, six Facebook
pages, eight Facebook profiles, and one Facebook group. The earliest activity inthe data provided by Twitter and Meta dates from early 2018. Activity levels weregenerally low across the group. For example, sixteen of the Twitter accounts
posted fewer than 100 tweets, and six of the Facebook profiles had no publicly
visible activity.
Our investigation identified clear signs of coordination and inauthentic behavior.
TTPs employed by the accounts included sharing identical content acrossplatforms, coordinated posting times, using GAN-generated faces, and creating
fake profile pictures. One Facebook page in the group also posed as a person living
in Iraq. This page shared the same name and picture as a Twitter account that
previously claimed to operate on behalf of the United States Central Command(CENTCOM).
The group chiefly promoted narratives seeking to undermine Iran’s influence inthe region but also took aim at Russia and Yemen’s Houthi rebels. For example,
accounts on Twitter posed as Iraqi activists in order to accuse Iran of threatening
Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth. Other assets
highlighted Houthi-planted landmines killing civilians and promoted allegations
that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would lead to a global food crisis.

6.2

TTPs

6.2.1

Fake Faces Lead to Florida

One of the Facebook pages in the group showed links to a Twitter account thathas previously claimed to operate on behalf of CENTCOM. Created on Nov. 1,
2021, the page used the Arabic word for “discoverer” [‫ ]مكتشف‬as its name andpresented itself as an Iraqi man posting predominantly about the misdeeds of the
Iranian government and its influence in Iraq. Notably, Discoverer used a profile
picture likely generated using artificial intelligence techniques, such as GANs.
An Instagram account and a Facebook profile in the Middle East group used thesame image as well.
An account in the Twitter dataset also used the Arabic word for “discoverer” as
its name and the same fake face as the three Meta assets. The Discoverer Twitter
account was created in November 2016 and claimed in its bio to be “always inthe service of Iraqis and Arabs.”

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6.2

TTPs

Figure 46: The profile picture used by the Facebook page Discoverer and twoother assets in the Middle East group. Issues with the left ear and the centralalignment of the eyes suggest it was generated using artificial intelligence
techniques.

However, archived versions of the Discoverer Twitter account show that prior to
May 2021, it used a different picture, listed its location as “Florida, USA,” andpublicly identified as an “account belonging to the U.S. Central Command” that“aims to uncover issues related to regional security and stability.” At that time,
the account promoted similar anti-Iran narratives related to Iraq and Syria but
also posted statements presented as coming from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Figure 47: Left: Archived version of the Discoverer Twitter account with an
Arabic-language bio claiming an affiliation with CENTCOM. Right: The sameaccount shortly before it was suspended by Twitter.

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6.2

TTPs

Figure 48: An archived tweet by the Discoverer Twitter account from
September 2018 criticized the actions of Iranian proxies in Iraq and promoted
humanitarian efforts by the U.S. government.

6.2.2

Cut Out and Collage

Accounts in the Middle East group frequently used fake profile pictures toconstruct online personas. This is a common tactic in online IO, and weincreasingly see actors leverage GAN-generated faces such as those shown in
Figure 49. While at first presenting as photorealistic human faces, GAN-generated
images are typically easy to identify due to their consistent central eye alignment,
blurred backgrounds, and telltale glitches around the teeth, eyes, and ears.

Figure 49: GAN-generated profile pictures used by accounts from the Middle
East group on Twitter.

But we also identified assets in this group using fake profile pictures that appeared
to be collages of different images available online. This is a relatively novel
technique, and though it is easy to spot images that have been edited in thismanner, it could complicate strategies to detect inauthentic personas.

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6.3

Narratives

For example, an Instagram and Twitter account in the Middle East group used thesame picture of a man in a suit holding a water bottle. Reverse image searches
revealed that the man’s torso was identical to a photo from a 2012 fashion blog,
which had then been edited to add a new face and background. We also saw
accounts in the Central Asia group employ this TTP.

Figure 50: Left: Original photo from a 2012 fashion blog. Right: Collaged photoused by assets in the group.

6.2.3

Coordinated Posting and Content Sharing

We identified multiple instances of assets in the Middle East group sharing content
and exhibiting coordinated posting patterns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Typically, this activity involved supposedly independent accounts posting thesame images or identical text content within hours, or even minutes, of eachother.
For example, on Sept. 23, 2021, a Facebook profile using a likely fake persona
and the Facebook page Here Is Yemen [‫ ]هنا اليمن‬posted the same video withidentical captions about alleged mass executions planned by Houthi rebel leadersin Yemen. The two Facebook assets made these posts just two minutes apart.

6.3

Narratives

6.3.1

The “Disease” of Iranian Influence in Iraq

Accounts in the Middle East group consistently shared content that supported
the U.S.-recognised Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) while criticizing the actions of
Iran and Iraqi militias backed by Tehran. These accounts repeatedly asserted
that Iraqi militias supported by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)
were loyal to Tehran over the Iraqi government and were fighting to implement
Iran’s imperialist project in the Middle East. Some accounts also accused Iranian-

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6.3

Narratives

Figure 51: A Facebook profile and Facebook page made identical posts about
Houthi rebel leaders planning mass executions just two minutes apart.

Figure 52: The Facebook pages Class Watcher [‫ ]مراقب الصف‬and Watching Eyes[‫ ]عيون راصدة‬posted the same picture with a partially matching caption just six
days apart in late 2021.

backed militias of causing civilian casualties through rocket strikes on Baghdad’s
Green Zone.
In particular, accounts in the group promoted content critical of Qais al-Khazali,
the leader of the influential Shiite paramilitary organization Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. The
U.S. designated Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq as a foreign terrorist organization in January
2020 after its members were accused of killing demonstrators at anti-government
protests in Iraq in 2019.
Other posts from the Middle East group accused Tehran of engineering a droughtin the country by jeopardizing the water supply of cross-border rivers, smuggling
weapons and fuel through Iraq to Iranian fighters in Syria, and fuelling Iraq’s
crystal meth epidemic.

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6.3

Narratives

Figure 53: Assets in the group shared a tweet (left) and Instagram post (right)
with the same cartoon accusing Iraqi militias of taking orders from Iran

Figure 54: An asset shared on Facebook an image showing Qais al-Khazali inan IRGC uniform with Islamic State group militants on either shoulder.

49

6.3

Narratives

Figure 55: An asset in the group shared on Twitter a cartoon depicting Iranian
influence as a disease destroying Iraq.

50

6.3
6.3.2

Narratives

A Russian Plot to Engineer Global Famine

Although the Middle East group predominantly focused on Iran, a small clusterof accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter promoted content critical of
Russia, particularly its interventions in Libya and Syria. Beginning in February thisyear, these accounts tailored content to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and designed
anti-Russian messaging to appeal to Arabic-speaking audiences in the Middle
East. In addition to reports of Russian soldiers killing civilians, the accounts
amplified the narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned to induce
a global food crisis that would hit less economically developed countries thehardest. The accounts reported on Russian bombings of Ukrainian grain silos andTurkey’s detention of a Russian-flagged ship carrying “stolen” Ukrainian grain
to bolster this narrative. These anti-Russian narratives overlapped thematicallywith content from some accounts in the Central Asia group.
At the same time, the accounts applauded ongoing efforts by the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID) in Iraq and posted about positive
interactions between American troops and children in Syria (Figure 57 on thefollowing page).

Figure 56: An account in the group made a post on Instagram accusing Russia
of deliberately causing global food shortages by invading Ukraine.

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6.3

Narratives

Figure 57: A Facebook post from an asset in the group showed U.S. soldiers
meeting children in Syria.

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6.3
6.3.3

Narratives

Yemen, Houthis, and Landmines

A second cluster of accounts in the Middle East group focused on issues in Yemen.
These accounts, also present on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, primarily
shared content critical of Iranian and Houthi rebel activity in Yemen. Posts
accused Houthi rebel leaders of blocking humanitarian aid deliveries, acting as
proxies for Iran and Hezbollah, and closing bookstores, radio stations, and othercultural institutions in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a.
Recently, the cluster amplified a narrative highlighting Houthi forces’ widespreaduse of landmines, which human rights groups say have caused thousands ofcivilian casualties since the beginning of the conflict. These posts typically
included the number of civilian casualties and highlighted the alleged Iranianorigins of the landmines.

Figure 58: A Tweet from one asset claimed Houthi forces take orders frompowers in Iran.

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6.3

Narratives

Figure 59: A post by the Facebook page Here Is Yemen claimed that Houthiplanted landmines have killed 2,812 civilians and injured 3,655 more between
April 2014 and March 2022.

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Graphika is an intelligence company that maps the world’s online communities
and conversations. Graphika helps partners worldwide, including Fortune 500
companies, Silicon Valley, human rights organizations, and universities, discover
how communities form online and understand the flow of information and influence
within large-scale social networks. Customers rely on Graphika for a unique,network-first approach to the global online landscape.

The Stanford Internet Observatory is a cross-disciplinary program of research,teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information
technologies, with a focus on social media. The Stanford Internet Observatory was
founded in 2019 to research the misuse of the internet to cause harm, formulatetechnical and policy responses, and teach the next generation how to avoid themistakes of the past.