בארה"ב נחשף מבצע איראני להפצת תעמולה ברשת

Clemson University's media forensics hub uncovered a coordinated influence operation tied to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that's using fake social media accounts to spread anti-Israel and anti-U.S. propaganda. Joining us now to talk about this is Will Biagini, assistant editor of Campus Reform. Will, good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today. Can I just start off by asking you, how extensive is this network of fake accounts? What do you know about this? Right. Thank you so much for having me on. It's great to be here. So we got this crazy story today where researchers at Clemson University have uncovered this political ploy being used by the IRGC to utilize over 60 fake social media accounts across platforms like Blue Sky, Instagram, and X to push anti-Israel and anti-American narratives. Now, what we're seeing is that these accounts are pretending to be individuals from places like Texas and California, as well as places in Europe, too, like Scotland and Ireland, to push these anti-Israel, anti-American narratives onto our social media feeds. Now, what this shows is that Iran's propaganda machine isn't just operating in Tehran anymore. No, it's made it into our own social media feeds, and it's infiltrating American public discourse on campuses. Okay, Will, can you talk to us about what the stakes are then? What impact can such influence operations have on the public in America? Right, so these operations can have massive impacts, especially on our young minds who are eating this up. You know, young students in America are kind of conditioned in leftist-dominated higher education institutions to be super anti-America, super anti-Israel, and we see that a lot with the protests that they're holding. So we had one protest that we covered here at the Leadership Institute's Campus Reform at Arizona State University, where both socialists and pro-Palestinian students joined forces to oppose President Trump in a protest. But interestingly, that protest was challenged by Iranian students, who said that Iranians have lived under a dictatorship for over 40 years, and they actually support pressure on the regime responsible for widespread human rights abuses. So you said that the younger generation potentially is eating this up. Is there any way to differentiate this? You know, how can we tell that some social media posts are actually part of a foreign influence operation? It's kind of hard to tell, but thankfully, a lot of these accounts have been either suspended or banned. That's a great thing that we're seeing. But what we also have to realize is that places like X and Instagram are often treated like the public square where the free ideas of exchange happens. That's actually not the case. These platforms are influenced heavily by foreign propaganda. That's what we're seeing. A lot of this also took very specific approaches by the IRGC. So for example, a lot of these accounts were pretending to be Latina women or European activists. So they're very strategically designed to spread misinformation and anti-American narratives on these social media platforms. So we as Americans have to be very careful. So of course, this can influence opinions, sway public opinion, but do you think there could be actual security threats, physical risks? Could these social media campaigns contribute to real world security risks? 100% it can contribute to security risks, especially considering how online our society is. We have a lot of young minds who spend the majority of their free time online, but it is not just limited to young people or college campuses. We're seeing people in the workforce. They spend a lot of their time online as well. So we have a whole society that's spending most of their time online. And then you have countries like Iran who are foreign adversaries who are spreading all kinds of anti-America, anti-Israel narratives on these platforms. And so it's very easy to see how these narratives can make their way and influence the American education and American people at large.