The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia has promised Trump that he will help crack down on protests against police violence. The United Arab Emirates has made secret, illegal contributions to the Trump campaign. The American McNuggets will give you COVID.
These are just some of the articles that three “journalists” – Shadi Ben Yousef, Rumaisa Hanaoui and Ahlam al-Shumayli – have published in dozens of articles since May 2019. But not only are the stories false. All are based on fake websites, fake screenshots or non-existent events. And as Facebook announced on Tuesday, a number of them were exaggerated by trolls based in Iran using fake accounts.
A joint investigation by The Daily Beast and Mandiant Threat intelligence identified dozens of these fake articles published at 35 different Arab media outlets in a nearly two-year period of misinformation that pushed critical pro-Iranian narratives about money laundering USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia. in legitimate news by bankrupt reporters.
After The Daily Beast contacted Twitter about Hanaoui and al-Shumayli’s accounts in October, the company suspended them for violating Twitter’s spam rules and manipulating the platform. The Daily Beast failed to find social media accounts in Ben Yousef’s name.
In a report on coordinated non-genuine behavior released on Tuesday, Facebook said it had identified four accounts as part of a network of accounts in Iran that “primarily targeted the global Arabic, French and English-speaking public” and ” centered around off-platform printing domains ”after examining 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 not clear who was behind the fake content that people used for their articles. But the raw material for their stories displayed tactics similar to those seen in the Iran-aligned Endless Mayfly disinformation activity, first identified by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
The content produced as part of Endless Mayfly’s activity was frequently based on fake news websites that mimicked real news organizations to push narratives that discredit the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Shadia Ben Yousef, the most active of the three people, posted an article posted on a spelled version of the American Defense One outlet, which focuses on military issues. The article, formatted to look like the real site, made a false statement that the Mossad chief had visited an Iraqi military base where American troops were stationed.
Identity imitations on social media have also proven to be a fertile source of content for people. Ben Yousef relied on a series of used Twitter accounts, including those of an American diplomat at the US embassy in Baghdad, a former French intelligence official and member of parliament, and a fictitious Yemeni jihadi group that threatened an Arab -Conference Peace of Israel in Bahrain.
Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, someone also registered a Facebook account to identify an Israeli cybersecurity official and claimed that the United Arab Emirates’ royal family “made a generous donation of 200 million of US dollars in Trump’s campaign, hoping to keep him in power. “Hanaoui published a quote about the fake in the Algerian daily El Wamid, which involved 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 replaced Corey Lemley, a true Antifa activist from Tennessee. It was an apparent attempt to spread a false story about mixing the Middle East elections with an English-speaking left-wing audience. Lemley confirmed to The Daily Beast that the account was fake and was not associated with him in any way.
Facebook and Twitter suspended the accounts involved when The Daily Beast shared content examples, but could not determine who was behind them.
People published their work in legitimate predominant Arab news, but a few also appeared on fake news sites set up by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. At least two stories have appeared on Nilenetonline and Libya Al Mokhtar – fake news sites run by the IRGC that pretend to be Egyptian and Libyan stores, which the Justice Department later confiscated and assigned to the IRGC.
People clung to themes similar to the work of Endless Mayfly – criticism of the US and its allies Saudi Arabia and Israel – but 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, people tried to tarnish the country’s image and sow division between the Emirates and its allies. Ben Yousef has led false stories by claiming that the United Arab Emirates has turned its back on Saudi Arabia and embraced a rapprochement with its rival Gulf of Qatar, 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 companies to blame Iran.
The Emirate’s ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, told The Daily Beast that although he was unfamiliar with the specific disinformation effort, he did not find it surprising. “It simply came to our notice then. I knew where it was coming from. We all know what the messages will be “, said Otaiba.
Despite the apparent effort to influence the mind against normalization, Otaiba says the propaganda campaign had no impact on public opinion. “In the UAE, it has not affected our approach to Israel. We are in full force ahead. ”
People also took advantage of the global pandemic as an opportunity to use the coronavirus as a propaganda weapon against the United States. Person Ben Yousef has written false stories about Americans and symbols of America that act as vectors of infection in allied countries. One story cited a fictitious group 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 four-piece box of McDonald’s McNuggets chickens i- could have given the virus.
Throughout the nearly two years of the AKE news campaign, people did not seem to receive much critical attention from the public until a story by Ben Yousef victimized a grieving Lebanese woman. In January 2020, her friend Rima Najm, a Lebanese journalist and author, wrote about her horror by discovering a fake quote about the incident attributed to her in a Ben Yousef story. The story, published in the Egyptian press, used a false quote from Najm to frame the death in a suspicious way and related to an attempt to leave for a job in another network.
Najm did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast, but wrote about the experience in a play shortly after the incident.
“It’s painful that some have put you in a position where you don’t belong. 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