NEW TAKEDOWNS DEMONSTRATE THE PERSISTENCE OF IRAN’S ONLINE DISINFORMATION
NEW TAKEDOWNS DEMONSTRATE THE PERSISTENCE OF IRAN’S ONLINE DISINFORMATION 23 October 2019 - Facebook has been engaged in an ongoing battle with online disinformation ever since it was revealed that the social media platform had been used by foreign entities to undermine the integrity of the American electoral process during the 2016 presidential campaigns. Since first making a commitment to combat false and misleading accounts, Facebook has conducted a series of sweeps resulting in thousands of accounts and pages being shut down. The same is true of other social media giants including Twitter and the Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform Instagram. As reports have emerged about these closures, more details have come to light about the origins of the relevant pages, as well as their methods and the trends involving hacking collectives and government agencies that run them. Although initial concerns about fraudulent social media use were focused on Russian state actors...