Researchers detail a five-year influence operation on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others to spread pro-US narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia
Stanford Internet Observatory collaborated with Graphika to analyze a large network of accounts removed from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in our latest report.
Context & Ripple Effects
The takedown beat has been dominated for years by operations traced to Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing — from the apparently global Iranian influence project Facebook dismantled in 2018 to Iranian state broadcasting's 2012 fake-account trial run against US politics. This report inverts the direction of travel: Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika document a five-year network pushing pro-US narratives across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in the Middle East and Central Asia, using the same playbook of coordinated inauthentic accounts.
The significance is symmetry. Platforms have built their takedown machinery largely around foreign interference aimed at US audiences; here the same apparatus catches an operation aligned with US interests, and the disclosure comes from the academic-industry attribution pipeline rather than from any government.
First-order effects
- Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram removed a large linked account network, extending enforcement to a pro-US operation after years of takedowns aimed mostly at Iranian, Russian, and Chinese networks.
- Graphika and Stanford Internet Observatory cement their role as the de facto disclosure channel for influence operations, with platforms acting on their findings rather than governments'.
Second-order effects
- Platforms now face pressure to apply identical 'inauthentic behavior' standards regardless of which side the narrative serves — a precedent that makes future US-aligned networks harder to defend and easier to remove.
- Attribution firms like Graphika gain leverage over platform policy, since their reports effectively set what counts as covert influence and whose accounts get pulled.
Third-order effects
- Covert social-media influence is consolidating into normalized statecraft practiced by all major powers, with enforcement governed by cross-platform behavioral rules rather than by the target or origin of the messaging.
- The pattern points toward industrialized operations: by the time of Meta's removals of AI-assisted influence accounts, the same infrastructure documented here was being scaled with generative tools, raising the stakes for detection methods built on manual network analysis.
The trend: Influence operations are becoming a bidirectional, industrialized great-power practice, with academic-industry attribution partnerships — not governments — driving cross-platform enforcement.