Iran Intensifying Social Campaigns To Spread Antisemitism In The US

US media is report­ing that Iran is inten­si­fy­ing its dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign on social media to spread dis­cord and anti-Semit­ic tropes in the US. Accord­ing to the Time.com report:

June 9, 2021 Iran­ian state actors are inten­si­fy­ing their dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign on social media to spread dis­cord and anti-Semit­ic tropes inside the U.S., two U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cials say. Social media accounts tracked to troll farms run by the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment have ramped up dis­in­for­ma­tion after sev­er­al major events this year, includ­ing Biden’s effort to return the U.S. to the Iran nuclear deal, the April 14 announce­ment of the U.S. with­draw­al from Afghanistan, the guilty ver­dict of Derek Chau­vin on April 20, and the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas that start­ed on May 10. “It’s a sig­nif­i­cant lev­el of activ­i­ty,” one offi­cial tells TIME. “It’s active enough that we’re track­ing it.” The offi­cials did not offer details on the spe­cif­ic dis­in­for­ma­tion activ­i­ty after the events. But with­in days of the con­flict begin­ning last month in Israel and Gaza Twit­ter accounts linked to Iran were ampli­fy­ing anti-Semit­ic mes­sages in Eng­lish, includ­ing the phras­es “hitler was right” and “kill all jews” at a rate of 175 times per minute, accord­ing to analy­sis by Net­work Con­ta­gion Research Insti­tute, which stud­ies dis­in­for­ma­tion and is affil­i­at­ed with Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty and the Anti-Defama­tion League (ADL). “You’ve seen tons of mis­in­for­ma­tion,” says Jonathan Green­blatt, CEO and nation­al direc­tor of the ADL, which mon­i­tors hate speech in the U.S. “Many of them have been Tweets asso­ci­at­ed with troll armies of the Islam­ic Repub­lic of Iran.”

Read the rest here.

The arti­cle fur­ther notes that Iran, as well as Chi­na, are observ­ing how effec­tive Russia’s dis­in­for­ma­tion efforts are in the US and is pur­su­ing the same ends: sow­ing dis­cord, under­min­ing con­fi­dence in the gov­ern­ment, and pro­mot­ing their own objec­tives. It is said that Iran and Rus­sia also bor­row each oth­ers’ tech­niques, but Iran’s efforts tend to be eas­i­er to detect than Russia’s.

In April, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed that Face­book had removed a net­work of Iran­ian fake accounts tar­get­ing Israel, the UK, Iraq, and Afghanistan for vio­lat­ing its pol­i­cy against for­eign inter­fer­ence, coor­di­nat­ed inau­then­tic behav­ior on behalf of a for­eign entity.