Saudi Arabia’s crown prince promised Trump help to suppress protests against police violence. The UAE has made secret and illegal 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 are all false. They are all based on fake websites, forged screenshots or non-existent events. And, as Facebook announced on Tuesday, several of them were promoted by Iran-based trolls using fake accounts.
A joint investigation by The Daily Beast and Mandiant Threat Intelligence identified dozens of these fake articles published in 35 different Arab news outlets in a nearly two-year wave of disinformation that sparked the laundering of critical pro-Iranian narratives to the US, Israel and Arabia Saudi. in legitimate media by fake reporters ..
After The Daily Beast contacted Twitter about Hanaoui and al-Shumayli’s accounts in October, the company suspended them for violating Twitter’s rules of spam and platform manipulation. The Daily Beast was unable to find any social media accounts in the name of Ben Yousef.
In a report on coordinated inauthentic behavior released on Tuesday, Facebook said it identified four accounts as part of an Iran account network that “was primarily targeted at Arab, French and English audiences worldwide” and “focused in typos outside the domains platform “after reviewing information from The Daily Beast and Mandiant. The company wrote that automated anti-spam systems interrupted the” vast majority “of account activities when they were active in 2020.
It is unclear who was behind the fake content that personas used in their articles. But the raw material for their stories displayed tactics similar to those seen in Iran-aligned Endless Mayfly disinformation activity, first identified by researchers at the University of Toronto Citizen Laboratory.
Content produced as part of Endless Mayfly’s activity often relied on fake news sites that imitated real news organizations to disseminate narratives that discredited the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Shadia Ben Yousef, the most active of the three personas, posted an article posted on an incorrect version of the American Defense One vehicle, which focuses on military issues. The article, formatted to look like the actual website, announced a false claim that the Mossad chief had visited an Iraqi military base where American troops were stationed.
Identity theft on social media has also proved to be a fertile source of content for personas. Ben Yousef relied on a series of counterfeit Twitter accounts, including those on behalf of a U.S. diplomat at the American embassy in Baghdad, a former French intelligence official and member of parliament and a fictional Yemeni jihadist dissident group that threatened an Arab -Israel’s peace conference in Bahrain.
Just before the 2020 presidential election, someone also registered a Facebook account to impersonate an Israeli cyber security officer and claim that the UAE royal family “made a generous $ 200 million donation to the Trump campaign , hoping to keep you in power. ”Hanaoui published a story about counterfeiting in the Algerian daily El Wamid, which alleged a major conspiracy by Israel and the United Arab Emirates to keep Trump in power.
The fake Israeli Facebook account was also shared by a Twitter account that impersonated Corey Lemley, a true Antifa activist in Tennessee. It was an apparent attempt to spread a false history of electoral meddling in the Middle East to an English-speaking left-wing audience. Lemley confirmed to The Daily Beast that the report was false and was in no way associated with it.
Facebook and Twitter suspended the accounts involved when The Daily Beast shared examples of the content, but was unable to determine who was behind them.
The personas published their work on predominantly legitimate Arab news outlets, but some also appeared on fake news sites created by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. At least two stories appeared on Nilenetonline and Libya Al Mokhtar – fake news sites run by the IRGC that pretended to be Egyptian and Libyan vehicles, which the Department of Justice later seized and attributed to the IRGC.
The personas clung to similar themes like the Endless Mayfly activity – critical of 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 Arab normalization process it led in the Middle East.
As the United Arab Emirates approached diplomatic recognition with Israel, the personas sought to tarnish the country’s image and sow the divide between the Emirates and its allies. Ben Yousef’s persona published false stories claiming that the UAE had turned its back on Saudi Arabia and embraced a rapprochement with the Gulf kingdom’s rival, Qatar, conspired with Israel to take control of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and carrying out a “false flag” attack with Israel on oil tankers in the Gulf to blame Iran.
Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al Otaiba, told The Daily Beast that, although he was not familiar with the specific disinformation effort, he did not find it surprising. “This was something that we obviously 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 effort to influence minds against normalization, Otaiba says the propaganda campaign has had no impact on public opinion. “In the United Arab Emirates, this did not affect our approach to Israel. We are in full swing ”.
The personas also took advantage of the global pandemic as an opportunity to use the coronavirus as a propaganda weapon against the United States. Persona Ben Yousef wrote false stories about Americans and symbols of America acting as vectors of infection in allied countries. One story cited a fictional group of coronavirus infections among American troops in Iraq and another used a forged Twitter screenshot of a French MP to claim that a box of four pieces of McDonald’s chicken McNuggets may have given him the virus.
Throughout the nearly two-year news campaign, the personas seemed to attract little critical public attention 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 In January 2020, her friend Rima Najm, a Lebanese journalist and author, wrote about her horror when she discovered a false quote about the incident attributed to her in a Ben Yousef story. The story, published in Egyptian media, used a false quote from Najm to frame death as something suspicious and related to an attempt to leave to work on another network.
Najm did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast, but wrote about the experience in an article shortly after the incident.
“It is painful that some have put you in a position that you do not belong to. So, you end up being associated with an act you didn’t do and a saying you didn’t speak, ”she wrote.
– with additional reports by Kelly Weill