Anti-US threats flood Twitter and Instagram after Qassim Soleimani's death
Thousands of messages threatening retribution for the killing of Iran’s top intelligence commander have flooded social media in a “coordinated” propaganda campaign.
More than 21,000 Instagram posts used the hashtag #hardrevenge on Friday, along with almost 7,000 unique Twitter accounts, following the death of Qassim Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force, by an American drone strike.
The accounts shared repetitive images of coffins draped in American flags, heroic depictions of Soleimani and photos of US military officials, such as Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with bullseye targets digitally imposed on their faces and the words “coming soon”. One widely-shared picture showed a beheaded Donald Trump.
According to Marc Owen Jones, a social media expert and professor of Middle Eastern studies, around 250 of the accounts were created after Soleimani was killed on Thursday, "a large proportion". The majority were created in recent months as tension escalated between Iran and the US, which Mr Jones described as "indicative of increased coordinated messaging campaigns".
Lee Foster, information operations analyst at cyber defence company FireEye, said that Iran had long been working on a disinformation army to rival Russia’s Internet Research Agency, as well as other tactics such as the creation of fake news outlets and "fabricated journalist personas".
Mr Foster said: “We are already seeing Iranian disinformation efforts by these networks surrounding last night’s strike, and the US should expect that Iranian influence efforts surrounding the US will increase over the coming days or weeks as political developments evolve.”
"Iran’s efforts, in general, have been more geographically widespread than Russia’s, being directed at audiences in most parts of the globe. They have heavily pushed traditional state propaganda and criticised geopolitical rivals."
Mr Jones said that many popular retweets on Friday were written in English, suggesting they were deliberately sending a message to English speakers. “At a cursory glance you can see the most popular retweets are in both English and Persian, indicating that this is obviously meant to send a message to English speakers,” he said.
Social media giants have been fighting Iranian-linked bot campaigns for several years. In August 2018, Facebook and Twitter deleted hundreds of fake accounts and pages linked to Iran and Russia after finding a series of campaigns aimed at causing havoc in British and American politics.
Some of the accounts were linked to Iranian state media, Facebook said at the time. Months later it deleted a number of Iranian accounts posing as Britons spreading politically divisive topics like racism, opposition to the government and immigration.
A large proportion of pro-Iranian activity was on the picture-sharing app Instagram rather than on the more politically-oriented Twitter. The latter is banned in Iran.
Soleimani maintained an Instagram account from which he posted images taunting US president Donald Trump, until he was banned along with many other Iranian military figures last April.
