Impersonating Journalists A tactic favoured by pro-Iranian accounts has been to impersonate prominent public figures such as journalists, academics, or activists, in an operation dubbed ‘Distinguished Impersonator’ by FireEye. Researchers found direct overlap between six personas operating on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Whilst they have not been able to connect this operation directly to the Iranian government, the content was directly in line with Iranian political interests, such as anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and anti-Trump messaging. Tactics included amplifying favourable authentic content and disseminating news articles and videoclips from Western media that aligned with Iranian interests (Revelli & Foster, 2020). Fake Accounts The extent of Iran’s computational propaganda efforts is evidenced by multiple takedowns of accounts across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in the period 2018-2020. Facebook first announced in August 2018 that it had removed 652 Iran-based pages, groups and accounts that were part of a network linked to Iranian state media organisation IRIB (Facebook, 2018a). The network targeted people across the Middle East, Latin America, UK, and US. Twitter and Google also suspended an expansive network of accounts and websites that had links to the IRIB (Lapowsky, 2018). Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president for global affairs, said they had “identified and terminated a number of accounts linked to the IRIB” which had been sharing English-language political content in the US (Timberg & Romm, 2019). Twitter made public in October 2018 an Iranian foreign influence operation comprising 770 users and one million tweets. The social media accounts targeted Saudi Arabia, mentioning ‘Saudi’ nearly ninety thousand times. Researchers from the Computational Propaganda project at the Oxford Internet Institute found that Arabic was the third most used language in the data set, more than 69% of the links shared were to pro-Iran Arabic-language news websites, and the most widely shared websites pushed an Iranian political narrative (Elswah et al., 2019). Analysis by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab stated that Iranian Twitter accounts peaked earlier than the Russian troll accounts—surging in activity in 2014 and during a smaller peak in October 2017 (@DFRLab, 2018). Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused Twitter of double standards by shutting down the accounts of ‘real’ Iranians while letting an army of fake bot accounts continue. He tweeted “How about looking at actual bots in Tirana used to prop up ‘regime change’ propaganda spewed out of DC? #YouAreBots”. Iranian media accused the MEK, Israel and Saudi Arabia of being behind social media campaigns that have called for the overthrow of the Islamic government (Stubbs & Bing, 2018). 198