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Comment by nopriorarrests | Hacker News Reader

idk man...

"Twitter accounts claiming to be located in Iran and throughout the Middle East pushed out many thousands of tweets under a handful of hashtags, such as #HardRevenge and #DeathToAmerica", well, Iran has population of 81 mln people.

I can easily see 'many thousands of tweets' by legit real supporters of Iran regime, considering that Soleimani was considered a war hero. Honestly, for a country with 81 mln population, 'many thousands' does not sound like a lot. It's not even 'tens of thousands'.

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> The company in June 2019 removed 4,779 accounts it said we linked to the Iranian government. Most of those accounts tweeted international news stories with an angle that portrayed the government in a positive light, while others were focused on engaging in conversations about Israel, and another subset used false identities to target global conversations about Iran, Twitter said at the time.

Also, I can't find a recent source, but Iran censors their people's internet, including Twitter and Facebook. This article from 2013 says they lifted the ban, but then shortly after re-banned it. So it's not even clear to me if legitimate users can even use Twitter. https://mashable.com/2013/09/16/twitter-facebook-iran/

Everyone and their grandmother (literally) uses proxies and VPNs in Iran. Telegram is also banned and censored, yet it remains the most popular messaging/social network in Iran.

yeah, interesting tidbit about Iran and telegram is that russian telegram channels who monetize themselves with ads can easily buy tens of 10k's of fake iran followers to boost their 'social capital'. And since telegram does not allow to check the geolocation of channel followers, some channels are growing from like 3K followers to 100K overnight.

I don't know about the fake accounts. But (almost) every real person I know in Iran is on Telegram.

Yes, this surprises me too, since telegram accounts are tied to SIM cards, and my best guess was that it's not easy to get a bunch of SIM's in Iran. But for some reason, Iran bots are considered the cheapest ones out there...

Very easy to get SIM cards in Iran when I was there some months ago.

What bothers me is that one can easily enter the realm of complete and total paranoia and disregard every opinion he does not like as a 'foreign state propaganda', be that Russia, China, Iran or some other country.

Removing 5K accounts for a nation of 81M people is like removing 15-20K accounts for the US, so it is basically nothing, IMO. Consider that back in 2017, there was an article stating that "As many as 48 million Twitter accounts aren’t people, says study" [0]. Until we speak about millions of accounts, these 4,779 are nothing in terms of influencing public opinion. I will happily sell a Brooklyn bridge to any authoritarian leader who believes that 5K fake twitter bots that are not followed by real people can make a difference.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/10/nearly-48-million-twitter-ac...

Well, all of those accounts might be flagged for further investigation. Of the premise is they are not legitimate, then Iran just burned a large quantity of propaganda assets. Some amount is legitimate and some amount is propaganda, it’s just hard to know where that line is drawn without analysis

Again, idk, but I would not consider 5-9 thousands of fake accounts 'a large quantity of propaganda assets'. You can probably buy that amount of accounts for 10K, or 50K USD, or some similar sum. Chump change for a state actor, and commercial twitter farms existed for a better part of this decade, so there are, probably, 10's of millions of fake accounts to buy. Iran can probably rotate them daily for the whole year. (And I'm not sure that these accounts, being fake, can really influence people opinion).

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