Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East by Marc Owen Jones

Author:Marc Owen Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Operation Endless Mayfly and Ephemeral Disinformation24

A somewhat similar operation to the Arab Eye and Persia Now network, with a different ideological bent, was Operation Endless Mayfly, uncovered by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab in 2019. Endless Mayfly was, according to Citizen Lab, ‘an Iran-aligned network of inauthentic personas and social media accounts that spreads falsehoods and amplifies narratives critical of Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel’.25

The purpose of the network was to push divisive and adversarial content by impersonating legitimate, mostly Western, news outlets. Its main modus operandi was to create web pages that impersonated genuine websites and post deceptive content on them. In November 2018 Ali al-Ahmed, an expert in Gulf terrorism based in Washington DC, received a private message on Twitter from someone called Mona A. Rahman. Rahman chatted with al-Ahmed, and eventually shared an article linking to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The website looked identical to that of the Belfer Center. The only tell-tale difference was that the impersonating domain was belfercenter.net as opposed to belfercenter.org. This process, known as typosquatting, involves creating a typographically similar domain to the target website. It operates on the basis that people will not be savvy or aware of such minor discrepancies in the web address.

The article that Rahman sent to al-Ahmed contained information that would potentially be damaging to Russia–Israel relations, and ‘contained a purported quote from former Mossad director Tamir Pardo, alleging that former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman had been dismissed by Netanyahu for being a Russian agent’. The Endless Mayfly network had performed similar impersonations for reputable or well-established media outlets including Haaretz, Al Jazeera, the Times of Israel, The Guardian, Bloomberg and The Atlantic. In total, Citizen Lab ‘identified 135 inauthentic articles, 72 domains, 11 personas, 160 persona bylines, and one false organization’.26 However, Mayfly also impersonated other domains, such as a German government website, Twitter and a pro-Daesh outlet.

Like the Raphael Badani network, the Endless Mayfly operatives created social media personas which they would use to engage people on Twitter with. Often they described themselves as activists or journalists. Like the Arab Eye and Persia Now network, Endless Mayfly’s writers would target genuine websites that allowed for user-generated content, such as ‘China Daily, FairObserver.com, Buzzfeed Community, Medium, Opednews.com, and WN.com, among others’.27 Some of these, such as Fair Observer, were also targeted by the Badani network, revealing ongoing problems for sites that permit unverified user-generated content.28 This tactic is not new. Back in 2009, Liliane Khalil, the fake journalist who features at the beginning of this book, and who attracted a large following in 2011 during the Arab Uprisings, wrote content for CNN’s iReport section – which allowed for user-generated content.29

At times the Endless Mayfly accounts would take screenshots of their false op-eds and circulate them on Twitter. This tactic is not unique to the operation. It was common in the Gulf Crisis too, often breaking out into international media. The Endless Mayfly network appeared to be directing most of its criticism at Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

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