In May 2019, FireEye Threat Intelligence published a blog post exposing a network of English-language social media accounts that engaged in inauthentic behavior and misrepresentation that we assessed with low confidence was organized in support of Iranian political interests. Personas in that network impersonated candidates for U.S. House of Representatives seats in 2018 and leveraged fabricated journalist personas to solicit various individuals, including real journalists and politicians, for interviews intended to bolster desired political narratives. Since the release of that blog post, we have continued to track activity that we believe to be part of that broader operation, reporting our findings to our intelligence customers using the moniker “Distinguished Impersonator.”
Today, Facebook took action against a set of eleven accounts on the Facebook and Instagram platforms that they shared with us and, upon our independent review, we assessed were related to the broader Distinguished Impersonator activity set we’ve been tracking. We separately identified a larger set of just under 40 related accounts active on Twitter against which Twitter has also taken recent enforcement action. In this blog post, we provide insights into the recent activity and behavior of some of the personas in the Distinguished Impersonator network, in order to exemplify the tactics information operations actors are employing in their attempts to surreptitiously amplify narratives and shape political attitudes.
Personas in the Distinguished Impersonator network have continued to engage in activity similar to that we previously reported on publicly in May 2019, including social media messaging directed at politicians and media outlets; soliciting prominent individuals including academics, journalists, and activists for “media” interviews; and posting what appear to be videoclips of interviews of unknown provenance conducted with such individuals to social media. The network has also leveraged authentic media content to promote desired political narratives, including the dissemination of news articles and videoclips from Western mainstream media outlets that happen to align with Iranian interests, and has amplified the commentary of real individuals on social media.
