[SWI] A joint investigation by European public service broadcasters has uncovered systematic manipulation of news comment sections on Instagram and Facebook – spanning bot-driven hate speech, political campaigns, and commercial spam. Across at least 17.5 million comments left in the 12 months between April 2025 and March 2026 on accounts run by BR24, France 24, LRT, ORF, RTVE, Swissinfo, RFI, Tagesschau and ZDFheute, one topic generated more coordinated inauthentic activity than any other: Iran.
As protests against the Islamic Republic of Iran intensified from January 2026, the comment sections of European public broadcasters reflected the country’s political wrangling – with at least three distinct coordinated networks operating simultaneously on the same platforms, and sometimes beneath the same posts.
The largest single coordinated community identified across the entire dataset supported the Iranian opposition and its figurehead Reza Pahlavi, an exiled opposition figure and eldest son of the former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It generated tens of thousands of comments across the channels analysed, making it by far the highest-volume coordinated presence in the investigation. Accounts in this network posted using shared hashtags – #KingRezaPahlavi, #FreeIran, #IranRevolution2026, #DigitalBlackoutIran – and in many cases used near-identical template text, likely distributed through messaging app channels.
It would appear as if we get some of the same here, targeting Israel et. al. |