The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia promised Trump that he would help crack down on protests against police violence. The UAE made secret and illegal contributions to the Trump campaign. The American McNuggets chicken will provide you with COVID.
These are just some 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. They’re all false. All are based on fake websites, fake screenshots or non-existent events. And, as Facebook announced on Tuesday, some of them were advertised by trolls based in Iran using fake accounts.
A joint intelligence investigation by The Daily Beast and Mandiant Threat identified dozens of such fake articles published in 35 different Arab media outlets in a nearly two-year misinformation that pushed pro-Iranian narratives to criticize the United States. , Israel and Saudi Arabia. in legitimate news from fake reporters ..
After The Daily Beast contacted Twitter about Hanaoui and al-Shumayli’s accounts in October, the company suspended them for violating the rules of spam and manipulation of Twitter platforms. The Daily Beast could not find any social media accounts in Ben Yousef’s name.
In a report on coordinated inauthentic behavior released on Tuesday, Facebook said it identified four accounts as part of a network of accounts in Iran that “was aimed primarily at Arabic, French and English-speaking audiences worldwide. ”And“ focused on off-platform domain domination ”after reviewing information from The Daily Beast and Mandiant. The company wrote that automated antispam systems stopped the “vast majority” of account activity when they were active in 2020.
It is unclear who was behind the fake content that people used for their articles. But the raw material of his stories showed tactics similar to those of the Endless Mayfly disinformation activity, aligned in Iran, first identified by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
Content produced as part of Endless Mayfly’s activity was often based on fake news websites that mimicked real news organizations to drive narratives that discredit the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
Shadia Ben Yousef, the most active of the three people, published an article published in a poorly written version of the American outlet Defense One, which focuses on military issues. The article, with a format similar to the actual site, made a false claim that the Mossad chief had visited an Iraqi military base where U.S. troops were.
Impersonation on social media also proved to be a fertile source of content for people. Ben Yousef relied on a large number of used impersonated Twitter accounts, including those on behalf of a U.S. diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, a senior French intelligence official and member of parliament. and a fictitious group of Yemeni jihadist division that threatened an Arab. -Israel’s peace conference in Bahrain.
Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, someone also registered a Facebook account to impersonate an Israeli cybersecurity official and claim that the UAE royal family “made a generous donation of $ 200 million to the campaign. Trump in hopes of keeping him in power. ”Hanaoui published a story in the Algerian newspaper El Wamid about the falsification that 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 impersonating Corey Lemley, a true Antifa activist in Tennessee. It was an apparent attempt to spread a false story about voter turnout in the Middle East to an English-speaking left-wing public. Lemley confirmed to The Daily Beast that the account was fake and was not associated in any way with him.
Facebook and Twitter suspended the accounts involved when The Daily Beast shared examples of the content, but were unable to determine who was behind it.
The characters published their work in Arab media, mostly legitimate, but some also appeared on fake news sites created by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. At least two stories appeared on Nilenetonline and Libya Al Mokhtar – fake news sites run by the IRGC that purported to be Egyptian and Libyan outlets, which the Justice Department later confiscated and attributed to the IRGC.
The characters joined themes similar to the Endless Mayfly activity (criticism of the United States and its allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel), but also added a new approach in response to events in the Middle East: the United Arab Emirates and the Arab normalization process he led. in the Middle East.
As the UAE approached diplomatic recognition with Israel, the characters tried to tarnish the country’s image and sow division among the UAE and its allies. The person of Ben Yousef published false stories claiming that the United Arab Emirates had turned its back on Saudi Arabia and adopted a rapprochement with the Kingdom’s rival, Qatar, which plotted with Israel to take control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and carry out a “fake.” flag attack ”with Israel on Gulf oil tankers to blame Iran.
The UAE ambassador to the United States, Yousef al Otaiba, told The Daily Beast that while he was unaware of the specific disinformation effort, he did not see it as surprising. “This was something we obviously knew would happen. We knew where he would come from. We all knew what the messages would be, ”Otaiba said.
Despite the apparent effort to influence the mind against normalization, Otaiba says the propaganda campaign has had no impact on public opinion. “In the United Arab Emirates, our approach to Israel has not affected us. We have all the strength ahead of us. “
The characters also seized the global pandemic as an opportunity to use the coronavirus as a propaganda weapon against the US. Ben Yousef’s person wrote false stories about Americans and symbols of America that acted as vectors of infection in allied countries. One story cited a fictitious cluster of coronavirus infections among U.S. troops in Iraq and another used a fake Twitter screenshot of a member of the French parliament to claim that a box of four pieces of chicken McDonald’s, McNuggets, could have given him the virus.
Throughout nearly two years of the ake news campaign, the characters seemed to capture little critical public attention until a Ben Yousef story 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 terror discovering a false quote about the incident attributed to her in a story by Ben Yousef. The story, published in the Egyptian media, used a false quote from Najm to frame the death as suspicious in some way and related to an attempt to go out to work on another network.
Najm did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast, but wrote about the experience in one piece shortly after the incident.
“It’s painful for some to put you in a position you don’t belong to. So you end up relating to an act you didn’t do and a saying you didn’t speak,” he wrote.
–with additional reports from Kelly Weill