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EXPOSED: The most extensive case of covert pro-Western information operation on social media

Declassified Australia exposes and analyses a massive secret propaganda operation being run out of the US, that has been buried by Western media.

by Peter Cronau
 
Part 1
 
A covert online propaganda operation said to be the world’s largest promoting ‘pro-Western narratives’ has been found to be operating primarily out of the United States, targeting Russia, China, and Iran.

We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western IO [Information Operation] on social media to be reviewed and analysed by open-source researchers to date,’ say the researchers from Stanford University and internet research firm, Graphika.

The researchers found most of the Information Operation ‘likely originated in the United States’. From there it ran a massive, interconnected web of automated ‘bot’ accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. 

The covert operation to influence online audiences has been using ‘deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives’, while ‘opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran’.

The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit of the Kremlin’s “imperial ambitions” following its invasion of Ukraine in February this year,’ the report says.

Declassified Australia is publishing here a detailed analysis of the remarkable report by Stanford University’s Internet Observatory (SIO) and network analysis firm Graphika, released on August 24.

This report is all the more surprising because SIO and Graphika have deep connections to the US national security state and to information campaigns against US-designated enemies Russia, China and Iran.

SIO’s director, Alex Stamos, for example, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institute, and on the advisory board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. He was chief security officer at Facebook where he led the company’s investigation into alleged Russian manipulation of the 2016 US election.

Graphika’s director of investigations, Ben Nimmo, is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, was a consultant to the UK’s Integrity Initiative propaganda unit, previously worked as press officer for NATO, and is now intelligence chief at Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram). There he produced a report that attempted to link Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to a Russian influence operation prior to the 2019 UK general election.

Ironically titled ‘Unheard Voice: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations’, the report has been studiously ignored by almost all in the Western establishment media since its release last month. Despite the scale and targeting of the propaganda operation, the spectacular revelations have received only scant attention like this slight mention in the Sydney Morning Herald.

A light-hearted column in the Washington Post referred to it as a ‘splashy report’, saying some of the covert US accounts had posted ‘cat pictures’ in order to appear authentic. The column references Russian and Chinese cyber-espionage operations in framing its remarks about the report.

Part of the reason the report has been effectively buried may be because the report was conveniently overshadowed on the very same day of its release by another Stanford Internet Observatory release titled, ‘A Front for Influence: An Analysis of a Pro-Kremlin Network Promoting Narratives on COVID-19 and Ukraine’. 

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