Disinformation experts warned Friday activists are harnessing the resources of the Iranian regime to mastermind anti-Israel protests in Canada.
Marcus Kolga founded DisinfoWatch in 2007 to monitor and expose state-sponsored attempts to hijack social media for malicious intents designed to fuel social division.
Since the Hamas invasion of Israel last October, he’s seen a spike in such activity, with recent anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protests at McGill University seemingly boosted by a social media influence campaign with potential ties to Iran, the National Post reports. He told the outlet via email:
Over the past nine months at DisinfoWatch, we’ve observed social media accounts that were previously posting aggressively anti-Ukrainian content, adding anti-Zionist content to their toxic mix.
We also know that Russian intelligence has been sponsoring antisemitic active measures and influence operations.
Kolga further pointed to a joint effort by American and Canadian intelligence agencies that unearthed nearly a thousand bot accounts designed to promote Russian government messaging as a glaring example of recent attempts to exploit Western democracies.
Iran is a major prong in the network that is aligned with Russia, Kolga said.
“We’ve observed a clear crossover of pro-Kremlin/anti-Ukrainian and anti-Zionist/pro-Hamas narratives by prominent far-left and far-right influencers,” said Kolga, who is also a cyber expert with The Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
A new report from XPOZ, a cyber security company that uses artificial intelligence to combat disinformation, found that anti-Israel protests at McGill University were boosted by a social media influence campaign with potential ties to Iran.
Pro-Palestinian students and activists protest at an encampment on the campus at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, on April 29, 2024. About a hundred people have set up an encampment demanding the university divest from Israel-connected funds. ( GRAHAM HUGHES/AFP via Getty)
“Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, McGill and its students have been the target of a coordinated, inauthentic and foreign narrative attack,” XPOZ wrote in a report obtained by the Post.
The company examined how social media users discussing the McGill encampment interacted online and found a disproportionate number of Farsi and Arabic commentators. These accounts amplified support for McGill’s student encampment, openly supported Hamas, and accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza.
In early July, campus security dismantled the school’s encampment and cleared the area.
“The campaign extensively utilized inauthentic profiles to amplify the discourse and broaden the reach of the narrative. Many of these profiles are inauthentic foreigners,” XPOZ wrote.