In the post-2016 U.S. election world, secretive online campaigns intended to shape global politics have ceased being anything out of the ordinary. Yet while adversaries of the United States, including Russia, Iran, and China have been identified with government propaganda on major social media sites, there has been little evidence to date that the U.S. and its allies have used similar tactics to shape international opinion, though it is almost impossible to picture that they haven't.

This week, for the first time, social networks in cooperation with research group Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory uncovered a pro-US influence operation that worked across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, as well as other social media apps. Neither Meta nor Twitter attributes the activity to specific governments or organizations; however, Twitter said the campaign's "presumptive countries of origin" were the United States and the United Kingdom. While Meta said the U.S. was the "country of origin" for the activity.

The network of accounts attempted to influence public opinion in Asia and the Middle East by promoting pro-Western views in these regions, including criticism against the Russia-Ukraine invasion. Sometimes the accounts linked stories from news articles produced by Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other websites funded by the U.S. military.

We believe this activity is the most extensive case of secret pro-Western [influence operations] on social media that ever has been analyzed and reviewed by open-source researchers," Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory wrote in a paper analyzing the activity.

Facebook took down a new wave of suspicious activity linked to Iran.

Like other online influence campaigns based elsewhere, this also used fake personas sporting AI-generate faces made with a technique called GANs, or generative adversarial networks. Artifically generated faces are one way to stay hidden because their visual signatures often end with small anomalies. GANs can sometimes be easily detected, however. Using the fake personas, the influence campaign worked as independent journalists, pushing much of its messaging through short videos, memes, hashtag campaigns, and petitions.

Despite its multi-pronged effort, the campaign did not get much positive momentum, with most of the posts and tweets garnering only a "handful" of likes or interactions. Only fewer than one-fifth of the fake accounts garnered more than 1,000 followers, although two of the most popular accounts linked to the campaign falsely claimed ties to the U.S. military.

The researchers said most of the accounts started working in 2019, while a small group targeted Afghanistan and had started posting on Twitter late in 2017. Of the fake accounts, some activity continued until July 2022 on Facebook and Instagram.

The influence wing focused on Central Asia and ran programs across Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, and two social media platforms that are only available in Russia. Accounts targeting Russian speakers in the region pushed stories extolling U.S. aid and denouncing Russian foreign policy and China's domestic treatment of Muslim minority communities.

Another group of accounts and pages focused on promoting pro-Western views in the Persian language, often promoting content related to the U.S. military. Many of the posts ridiculed the Iranian government, raised questions about differences between Iran and the rest of the world on women's rights, and condemned Iran's foreign policy moves. A contiguous set of accounts focused on users in Afghanistan also targeted criticism of Iran as well as the Taliban and the Islamic State.

"With few exceptions, the study of modern [influence operations] has overwhelmingly focused on activity linked to authoritarian regimes in countries such as Russia, China and Iran, with recent growth in research on the integral role played by private entities," the researchers wrote. "This report illustrates the wider range of actors engaged in active operations to influence online audiences."