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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
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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.
I would have thought that attacking the BBC was a good thing.
Yeah, I think that was us.
😉
NickM
Because the objective of the West is NOT “regime change” in Iran.
This is where thee-and-me disagree with President Trump – as I think we both want the tyrannical dictatorship to fall in Iran – we both want the Iranian people to be free of it (and, yes, free of Islam).
President Trump, just like other Presidents before him, wants to make a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran dictatorship – so we are not on the same page with him on this matter.
Regime change, though a worthy goal, is difficult. As is nation-building. And, if you went about trying to change all regimes that need changing…
But some things can be done, and should. More propaganda, more disinformation, more assistance to opposition groups, more sanctions…
This guy gives the BBC a fair bit of grief from time to time.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/
Jacob – yes indeed Sir.
But the major, indeed terrible, blunder was to stop military attacks – just when the regime was on the ropes.
When your opponent is in trouble, do not stop hitting them and go for “talks” (the fatal mistake in China in 1946 and in Vietnam later) – hit them HARDER and carry on hitting them till the enemy regime is destroyed.
There is no substitute for victory – and the way to achieve victory is to destroy the enemy regime.
Nick:
Why use deepfake images of the ayatollahs fucking goats?