In a little-known report published last week, the cybersecurity firm FireEye found that Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to Iran impersonated U.S. journalists and Republican political candidates in order to push fake news.
“The accounts, most of which were created between April 2018 and March 2019, used profile pictures appropriated from various online sources, including, but not limited to, photographs of individuals on social media with the same first names as the personas,” the report said. “As with some of the accounts that we identified to be of Iranian origin last August, some of these new accounts self-described as activists, correspondents, or “free journalist[s]” in their user descriptions. Some accounts posing as journalists claimed to belong to specific news organizations, although we have been unable to identify individuals belonging to those news organizations with those names.”
The accounts expressed “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes,” and support for the Obama administration’s Iran Deal. These accounts also blasted the Trump administration for designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, the report said.
In addition to fake Facebook accounts, Twitter also faced the coordinated campaign – READ MORE