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Samizdata quote of the day – Iran’s bots went dark… and that gave them away

When Israel struck Iranian targets on June 13th, something strange happened four days later—thousands of Twitter accounts tweeting about Scottish independence just… stopped.

That silence? It wasn’t just suspicious. It was evidence.

In this video, I walk you through how a digital blackout in Iran exposed one of the largest Iranian disinformation operations targeting the West. Working with Cyabra, we tracked over 1,300 fake accounts—AI-generated personas pushing division in the UK, attacking the BBC, and praising Iran. And when the lights went out in Tehran, those bots vanished too.

Then they came back… parroting entirely new propaganda.

This is a masterclass in how modern influence warfare works—how state-sponsored actors weaponize your feed and how even silence can be a signal.

Ryan McBeth

2 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Iran’s bots went dark… and that gave them away

  • NickM

    I know this story. What I utterly fail to uderstand is why the West can’t massively attack countries like Iran in similar fashion. We’re net-savvy. Well, I am. Quite why we can’t plaster Iranian webshi’ites with deepfake images of Ayatollahs getting jiggy with goats is beyond me.

  • Stonyground

    I would have thought that attacking the BBC was a good thing.

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