More than one million bots have flooded the Instagram accounts of prominent Iranian feminist activists, in a coordinated harassment campaign that started mid-April, according to a new report released by Qurium, a digital forensics nonprofit. Almost all the activist accounts are connected to Iran’s #MeToo movement, which rose to the fore of the national conversation in March, after several accusations of sexual harassment and assault in the Iranian film industry made headlines. A number of the accounts have been posting content about sexual abuse allegations in the country over the past few months.

Account holders impacted by the campaign told Rest of World that the deluge of notifications from bots makes it incredibly challenging for them to see comments and DMs from their core audience, making it difficult to accept requests from genuine followers after the holders went private and to focus on their own political work and content. “There is someone who wants to silence you, and I can’t stop thinking about, Who can that be? Why are they here? What do they want to do? What are these bots?” Samaneh Savadi, a prominent Iranian gender equality activist based in the U.K, who has been active in the #MeToo movement, told Rest of World. “It’s that feeling of an invisible enemy. Someone wants to attack me, but I can’t see it; I can’t name and shame it, and therefore, I can’t have a strategy to defend myself.”

When Savadi tried to manually delete more than 400 follower requests at a time, Instagram temporarily disabled the function on her account, sending her a notification that read, “We limit how often you can do certain things on Instagram to protect our community.”

Instagram is the only major global social media platform that can currently be accessed from Iran without a VPN, making it difficult for activists to migrate their followings to other social media platforms. As a result, it has become a hub for dissidents and activists: a rare online venue for vocal criticism of the Iranian government.

On June 16, Qurium published a report outlining the scale of the harassment. It found 25 accounts that had seen engagement from over 1 million fake followers and traced the fake followers to at least two social media marketing firms in Pakistan that resell bots to boost like and follower accounts on Instagram. It is not clear who is purchasing the bots. Savadi’s account was one identified by Qurium as a target.

Tord Lundström, the technical director of Qurium, says that the bots continue to flood activist accounts with follower requests even after they go private, seemingly in an attempt to scare and intimidate the activists. “It sends the message that we know who you are, we know who you work with, and we want to make sure that all of you are attacked in the same way.”

Within 24 hours of the publication of the Qurium report, the number of bots targeting these activist accounts skyrocketed, with Qurium registering as many as 80,000 new follower requests per account per day. The deluge of fake follower requests may be an attempt to automatically flag the accounts, for a suspension or ban by Instagram, for violating the platform’s policies on buying fake followers.

In a joint statement published on June 29, a coalition of human rights organizations, including Article 19 and Access Now, called on Meta, Instagram’s parent company, to do more to protect these activists and remove the bot network from its platform. “The free expression of the Iranian MeToo movement must be protected and Meta must follow its own policies and get rid of these fake followers attacking and undermining the expression of these women human rights defenders,” said Article 19 Middle East and North Africa’s regional director Saloua Ghazouani.

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https://restofworld.org/2022/troll-army-targeting-irans-metoo-activists-instagram/