The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia promised Trump to help crack protests against police brutality. The United Arab Emirates has made secret, illegal campaign contributions to the Trump campaign. American chicken McNuggets will give you COVID.
These are just a few of the articles that three “journalists” – Shadia Ben Yousef, Rumaisa Hanaoui and Ahlam al-Shumayli – have published in dozens of articles since May 2019. But it’s not just the stories that they are all fake. They are all based on fake websites, fake screenshots or non-existent events. And as Facebook announced on Tuesday, some of them were hyped by trolls in Iran using fake accounts.
A joint investigation by intelligence agency The Daily Beast and Mandiant Threat identified dozens of these bogus articles published in 35 different Arab news outlets in a nearly two-year disinformation attack targeting pro-Iranian stories criticizing the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. prompted. in legitimate news broadcasts by the fake reporters.
After The Daily Beast reached out to Twitter in October about Hanaoui and al-Shumayli’s accounts, the company suspended them for violating Twitter’s spam and platform manipulation rules. The Daily Beast was unable to find any social media accounts in Ben Yousef’s name.
In a report on coordinated inauthentic behavior released Tuesday, Facebook said it had identified four accounts as part of a network of accounts from Iran that “ primarily targeted Arabic, French and English-speaking audiences worldwide ” and were “ centered around typos outside the platform. domains ”after reviewing information from The Daily Beast and Mandiant. The company wrote that automated anti-spam systems stopped the “vast majority” of account activity when they were active in 2020.
It is unclear who was behind the fake content that the personas used for their articles. But the raw material for their stories showed similar tactics to those of the Iran-focused Endless Mayfly disinformation activity first identified by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
Content produced as part of Endless Mayfly’s activity often relied on fake news websites mimicking actual news organizations to spread stories that discredited the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Shadia Ben Yousef, the most active of the three personas, posted an article about a misspelled version of the US outlet Defense One, which focuses on military affairs. Formatted to look like the real site, the article made a false claim that the head of the Mossad had visited an Iraqi military base where US troops were stationed.
Imitations on social media also proved to be a fertile source of content for the personas. Ben Yousef relied on a variety of counterfeit Twitter accounts used, including accounts in the name of a US diplomat at the US embassy in Baghdad, a former senior French intelligence officer and MP, and a fictional Yemeni jihadist splinter group threatening an Arab. – Israel Peace Conference in Bahrain.
Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, someone also registered a Facebook account impersonating an Israeli cybersecurity official, claiming that the Royal Family of the United Arab Emirates “ made a generous $ 200 million donation to Trump’s campaign in hoping to keep him in power. Hanaoui published a story about the forgery in Algerian daily El Wamid, claiming that Israel and the UAE had committed a major conspiracy to keep Trump in power.
The fake Israeli Facebook account was also shared by a Twitter account posing as Corey Lemley, a real-life Antifa activist in Tennessee. It was an apparent attempt to spread a false narrative of election meddling in the Middle East to a left-wing, English-speaking audience. Lemley confirmed to The Daily Beast that the account was bogus and in no way associated with him.
Facebook and Twitter suspended the affected accounts when The Daily Beast shared samples of the content but couldn’t determine who was behind them.
The personas published their work in predominantly legitimate Arab news outlets, but a few also appeared on fake news sites set up by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. At least two stories appeared on Nilenetonline and Libya Al Mokhtar – IRGC-run fake news sites posing as Egyptian and Libyan outlets, which the Justice Department later confiscated and attributed to the IRGC.
The personas stuck to themes similar to the Endless Mayfly activity – criticizing the US and its allies Saudi Arabia and Israel – but also added a new focus in response to events in the Middle East: the United Arab Emirates and the United Arab Emirates. Arab standardization process it led in the Middle East.
As the UAE moved closer to diplomatic recognition with Israel, the personas sought to damage the country’s image and divide the Emirates and its allies. The Ben Yousef persona published fake stories claiming the UAE had turned its back on Saudi Arabia and reached out to the Kingdom’s rival, Qatar, who had worked with Israel to take control of the al-Aqsa. mosque in Jerusalem and a flag attack with Israel on tankers in the Gulf to blame Iran.
The Emirati Ambassador to the US, Yousef al Otaiba, told The Daily Beast that while he was unfamiliar with the specific disinformation effort, he didn’t consider it surprising. “This was something we clearly knew was going to happen. We knew where it would come from. We all knew what the messages would be, ”said Otaiba.
Despite the apparent attempt to turn the mind against normalization, Otaiba says the propaganda campaign has had no impact whatsoever on public opinion. “In the UAE it has not affected our approach with Israel. We are full steam ahead. “
The personas also seized the global pandemic as an opportunity to use the coronavirus as a propaganda weapon against the US. Ben Yousef’s persona wrote fake stories about Americans and symbols of America acting as infection vectors in allied countries. One story cited a fictional cluster of coronavirus infections among US forces in Iraq, and another used a fake Twitter screenshot from a French MP to claim that a four-piece box of McDonald’s chicken McNuggets might have given him the virus .
During the nearly two-year ake news campaign, the personas seemed to attract little critical attention from the public, until a story by Ben Yousef victimized a grieving Lebanese woman, when Najwa Qassem, a popular Al Arabiya broadcaster, died suddenly of a heart attack in January 2020, her friend Rima Najm, a Lebanese journalist and author, wrote about her horror when she discovered a fake quote about the incident attributed to her in a Ben Yousef story. The story, published in Egyptian news outlets, used a fake quote from Najm to make the death suspicious in some way and related to an attempt to leave for a job with another network.
Najm did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast, but wrote in a piece about the experience shortly after the incident.
“It’s painful that some of you put you in a position where you don’t belong. So you’re associated with an action you didn’t do and a saying you didn’t speak,” she wrote.
– with additional reporting by Kelly Weill