Iran Latest Bad Actor to Spread Misinformation on Facebook
*By Carlo Versano*
Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft all announced this week they had shut down accounts and websites created to spread misinformation or malware almost immediately after discovering them.
But the scope of the threat remains unclear.
"I don't think anybody has a sense of how big the disinformation efforts are online by various foreign adversaries," said Washington Post technology reporter Craig Timberg. "It's not clear to me there are any systems set up to catch it."
The latest sweep targeted accounts and posts all traced to Iran ー hundreds, in the case of Facebook and Twitter ー though they pale in comparison to the coordinated misinformation campaign the Russians deployed in 2016, Timberg said Wednesday in an interview on Cheddar.
The speed with which these companies are alerting the public indicates they realize a need to be proactive about manipulation efforts on their platforms, said Sara Fischer, a reporter for Axios who also appeared Wednesday on Cheddar.
"I think it gives them a little bit of an upper hand every time they come out and say, 'We found something,'" Fisher said. The hope is that a "more holistic effort" will develop between the public and private sectors to take on cybersecurity issues, she added.
Fischer said that Silicon Valley's attempts at transparency are currying favor with regulators in Washington and strengthening users' trust in the platforms.
"This is evolving from being a tech policy and tech response conversation to a national security conversation," she said.
Facebook [announced](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/08/more-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior) on Tuesday it removed 652 accounts and pages with ties to Iran. Soon after, Twitter [said](https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1032055161978585088) it suspended 284 accounts, many of which also originated in Iran, all meant to engage "in coordinated manipulation."
The Iranian Facebook campaigns included anti-Saudi and anti-Israel content and were aimed at users in the U.S., UK, Latin America, and the Middle East, according to [Fireye](https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2018/08/suspected-iranian-influence-operation.html), a cybersecurity firm that worked with Facebook on the investigation.
Both announcements follow a [report](https://cheddar.com/videos/microsoft-uncovers-new-russian-hacking-scheme) earlier in the week from Microsoft that found Russian intelligence groups had built a suite of fake U.S. political sites in an attempted spear-phishing campaign.
It has been well-established that social media can be used as a tool for manipulation by bad actors, Timberg said.
"We shouldn't believe everything we read on the internet," he said.
For full interview, [click here] (https://cheddar.com/videos/iranian-fake-news-accounts-targeted-people-around-the-world).
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The White House laid out plans for a $5 billion investment into a national network of charging stations to ease EV driving anxiety. Bruce Brimacombe, CEO of EV infrastructure GOe3 joined Cheddar News to discuss how much needs to be done for drivers to get over the fear of running out of energy. "People need to be able to do what they're doing now," he said. "But that is the way that if you're going to buy an electric car, you got to feel like you're not changing your world." Brimacombe noted that building out the infrastructure between cities was GOe3's own focus.
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On this episode of Cheddar Innovates: WALDO CEO breaks down why now is a good time to make eyecare a priority, and how they are democratizing access to eyecare for all; COO at PetDx explains how next-generation sequencing technology is being used to detect cancer in pets early; Cheddar gets a look at Curiosity Stream's 'Inside The Mind of a Con Artist.'
