Iran-linked disinfo campaign targets Canadian media

TRENTON

A suspected Iran-based disinformation campaign tried to spread fake news in Canada, including a bogus article that claimed the CIA was behind an aborted coup in Turkey, a report said Friday.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) analyzed thousands of Twitter posts from a source nicknamed Endless Mayfly and uncovered a systematic campaign designed to get Canadian media to publish misinformation.

The ruse was first discovered by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and the findings were made public in a report released recently.

The report listed a number of key findings.

“Endless Mayfly is an Iran-aligned network of inauthentic personas and social media accounts that spreads falsehoods and amplified narratives critical of Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel,” the report said.

“Once Endless Mayfly content achieves social media traction, it is deleted and the links are redirected to the domain being impersonated.

“This technique creates an appearance of legitimacy while obscuring the origin of the false narrative. We call this technique ‘ephemeral disinformation.’”

It found that in 2016 and 2017, 12 Canadian media outlets including the CBC were targeted with the fake failed CIA-backed coup in Turkey story.

That story was debunked, as was another under the persona “Mona A. Rahman”, a supposed political analyst and writer. She cited Turkish officials as naming Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the man behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

But not all stories were discarded as fake.

Reuters reported the fake story that six Arab countries asked FIFA, soccer’s governing body, to eliminate Qatar from holding the 2022 World Cup. It was published on a fake Swiss news site and picked up from Reuters and published by Canada’s Global News. The outlet later corrected the story.

But even when stories were labelled fake and a spotlight was shone on Endless Mayfly by real news outlets, the campaign was at least partially successful by sowing confusion among journalists and others, the report states.

The CBC only looked at accounts mentioned in tweets that identified Canadian Twitter users, but there were thousands of targets all over the globe.