Including a page called “Here is Yemen.” How did the Pentagon use fake accounts to influence Arabs?

Washington

- The news that the US Department of Defense "Pentagon" conducted a comprehensive scrutiny of how it conducted the war of classified information came as a surprise in the human rights and political circles in the American capital, and this came after the major social media companies identified fake accounts suspected of being run by the US military, which represents a violation for the rules of those platforms.

For most Americans, these practices are linked to the behavior of countries they describe as tyrannical and undemocratic - such as China and Russia - that do not hesitate to exploit social media to serve their political goals and interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.

While Twitter said the United States and the United Kingdom are the "supposed countries of origin for these accounts," the analyzes attributed a number of these accounts to Florida, where the headquarters of the Central Command, which focuses its activities on the Middle East, is located.

Officials indicated to the American newspaper "The Washington Post" that the Central Command is among the entities subject to scrutiny, before the Secretary of Defense ordered a comprehensive review of how his department conducts the war of classified information, which supported the credibility of the Pentagon's involvement in these operations.

The beginning of the harbingers of the scandal

In July and August 2022, Twitter and Facebook-owned Meta removed two overlapping sets of accounts for violating their platforms' terms of service.

Twitter said that the accounts violated its policies on “platform manipulation and spam,” while Facebook said that accounts on its platforms engaged in “coordinated untrue behavior.” After removing content and deleting accounts, both platforms provided these accounts and their content to Graphica. Graphika) and Stanford University Internet Observatory for further scrutiny and investigation.

The company and the university together conducted an investigation into the nature of these accounts, and the deception tactics used in them to promote pro-Pentagon narratives, and indicated in a 57-page report - obtained by Al Jazeera Net - that these secret operations continued for nearly 5 years, before stopping weeks ago.

The deception and misinformation campaigns aimed to reinforce the official US version of the important political events and developments to serve Washington's interests.

These accounts and what they publish aimed to oppose the narrative of Washington's main enemies such as Russia, China and Iran, and these accounts also promoted anti-extremism messages.

Focus on the issues of Iraq, Syria and Yemen

The Pentagon's efforts related to the Middle East within the scope of the fake and fake accounts focused on issues related to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and the report was able to identify similar technical and behavioral links in terms of content, and these accounts were exclusively using the Arabic language.

The report identified 30 Twitter accounts, 6 Instagram accounts, 6 Facebook pages, 8 Facebook profiles, and 1 Facebook group.

The first activity of these accounts dates back to early 2018, and the start was slow, as 16 fake accounts on the Twitter platform posted less than 100 tweets, and 6 of the Facebook profiles had no visible activity to the public.

The admins of these fake programs attached fake profile pictures to the accounts, and in some cases a Facebook page pretended to be someone living in Iraq.

The report linked some of these fake accounts with links to accounts whose owners claimed to be working on behalf of the US Central Command "CENTCOM", which is headquartered in Tampa, Florida.

Among the most important accounts that were monitored is the account of a page created on November 1, 2021, which he called “Discoverer”, as he presented himself as an Iraqi man who mostly publishes the mistakes of the Iranian government and its influence in Iraq, and claimed in his biography that he is “always in the service of Iraqis and Arabs.” The Finder account used a profile picture created using artificial intelligence techniques.

Some accounts promoted tweets criticizing Qais Khazali, the leader of the pro-Iranian Shiite militia Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, which Washington designated a foreign terrorist organization in January 2020 after its members were accused of killing protesters in anti-government protests in Iraq in 2019.

Other fake accounts accused Tehran of engineering drought in Iraq by endangering the water supplies of transnational rivers, smuggling weapons and fuel through Iraq to Iranian fighters in Syria, and causing an epidemic of crystal meth addiction in Iraq.

Multiple accounts share content

The report identified multiple cases of content-sharing accounts displaying coordinated posting patterns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, for example, on September 23, 2021, posting a Facebook profile using a fake character and a page on the site called “Here Is Yemen.” The same video with Identical comments about alleged mass executions planned by Houthi rebel leaders in Yemen, shared from other fake accounts in just two minutes.

Targeting China and Russia as well

The target of the fake accounts in Arabic was not limited to Washington's regional enemies, as these accounts promoted what it considered a Russian plot to engineer global famine, and content critical of Russia, especially its interventions in Libya and Syria, was promoted.

With the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine last February, these accounts designed anti-Russian messages, in an attempt to change Arab public opinion towards the Russian move.

The content became focused on reports that Russian soldiers were killing civilians, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned to cause a global food crisis that would hit less economically developed countries even more.

On the other hand, the “Washington Post” newspaper indicated that Facebook disabled a fake account created by the Central Military Command two years ago to counter the false information published by China, and it assumes that the Corona virus that causes “Covid-19” was invented by a US Army laboratory in Fort Detrick, California. Maryland.