Iran, Russia and China targets of US disinformation campaign

Recent studies have uncovered material that appears to be the part of the ongoing disinformation campaigns of the United States. These are aimed at maligning Iran, Russia, and China by using bogus accounts to spread pro-Western narratives.

In a study conducted by researchers from the Stanford Internet Observatory and research company Graphika, it was found that pro-US covert influence operations utilized deceptive techniques to sway public opinion in West Asia and Central Asia for over five years.

The accounts running the activities posted articles in at least seven languages, including Farsi, Russian, Arabic, and Urdu, and frequently pretended to be news organizations or to be persons who weren't real.

Some of the accounts posted links to websites maintained by the US military as well as news pieces from media organizations financed by Washington, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

The country of origin of the accounts, according to Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, was the United States, while according to Twitter; the presumptive countries of origin for the accounts were the United States and Britain.

The study also stated that in July and August, when the fraudulent pro-US influence campaign was being promoted, Twitter and Meta erased hundreds of phony accounts.

The Russian social media networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, Google's YouTube, and Telegram were all utilized in the activities.

According to YouTube, multiple channels that were promoting US foreign policy in Arabic, Farsi, and Russian, as well as channels connected to a US consulting business, were removed. Based on the researchers, the accounts used regionally specific language and message.

Between November 2020 and June 2022, a total of 21 Twitter accounts, six Instagram accounts, five Facebook profiles, and two Facebook pages allegedly targeted Iranian audiences.

It was revealed that several of the aliases had possibly artificial intelligence-generated profile images.

Many made an effort to appear authentic by sprinkling poems and images of Persian cuisine with political messaging.

Numerous posts on Facebook and Instagram also unfairly contrasted chances for Iranian women with those available to women abroad.

In addition, 12 Twitter accounts, 10 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook profiles, and 10 Instagram accounts were made with a Central Asian concentration between June 2020 and March 2022.

These accounts subsequently posted articles that sharply denounced Russia's military campaign in Ukraine and supported anti-Russian demonstrations taking place in Central Asian nations.

Another set of reports honed down on West Asia, praising US efforts in Iraq and using encounters between US troops and Syrian children to support Washington's occupation of Syrian territory and theft of the natural riches of the Arab nation.

The research shows that none of the propaganda tactics were successful in reaching a sizable audience.

Only 19% of the discovered covert accounts had more than 1,000 followers, and the majority of posts and tweets only garnered a handful of likes or retweets.

The study is one of the most thorough evaluations to date of a covert, pro-US influence campaign, according to Shelby Grossman, a member of the research team that published the report.

Need to find out reasons for downing of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

Users have begun reporting Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp returned to function after going offline for users across the globe on Monday and remaining down for nearly six hours. Some users are still experiencing difficulties writing or uploading new posts or stories, but their feed has reloaded.

Downdetector that tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, said that they saw almost 14 million total reports for Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger said, "We are starting to see reports begin to decline now that Facebook is back up."

Facebook apologized but did not immediately explain what caused the failure. The firm owns Instagram and WhatsApp.

As the world flocked to competing apps such as Twitter and TikTok, shares of Facebook fell 4.9%, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday. Shares rose about half a percent in after-hours trade following resumption of service.

"To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry," Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it "may take some time to get to 100%."

Several Facebook employees who declined to be named said that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems. The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same network in order to work compounded the error, the employees said.

Security experts said an inadvertent mistake or sabotage by an insider were both plausible.

"Facebook basically locked its keys in its car," tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, Director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

As the company was struggling to resume connection, Schroepfer said in a tweet, "We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore." He also apologized sincerely to everyone "impacted by outages."

During the crisis, Facebook workers also reported issues with using their company phones and equipment, and some have even been locked out of the building when their digital cards failed to function, the New York Times reported on Monday.

Other platforms such as Amazon and Telegram have been experiencing difficulties ever since the Facebook shutdown as well, possibly as many users turned to these alternative platforms instead of Facebook, and overloaded their systems.

The severe outage comes immediately after a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation on Sunday. 

"Strange that hours after a whistleblower calls out Facebook saying they engaged in a 'betrayal of democracy' that Facebook and other companies it owns are totally down." Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on Monday. "I'm sure it's a coincidence."

#Facebookdown and Whatsapp have become trending on Twitter as the world experienced several hours with only one large active social media platform out of the top four used in Israel, Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Twitter became the hottest arena for the hours when Facebook was off the grid, and started a thread reading, "hello literally everyone." Many industrial giants responded to the tweet, including McDonalds, Microsoft Teams, Alexa, and the culprits themselves, Whatsapp, Instagram and Real Mark Zuckerberg, who tweeted, "Am also here literally. Lol," and assured the fanbase that he was working on the app issues.

Security experts tracking the situation said the outage could have been triggered by a configuration error, which could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.

An outside hack was viewed as less likely. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world's most popular sites, on the other hand, would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.

Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or how many were affected by the outage.

"We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Facebook said.

Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.

Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters also faced issues.

"If your game isn't running as usual please note that there's been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal," puzzle game app Match Masters said on its Twitter account.