MEK elderlies from nursing home, sick and tired of freeing Iran
Tirana Times: Facebook Removes 300 Accounts tied to Iranian exile group MEK in Albania
A network of 300 Facebook accounts, Pages, Groups and accounts on Instagram which appeared to be run from a single location in Albania and operated by the exiled militant opposition group from Iran, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), were removed by Facebook, due to their “coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign country.” According to the March 2021 Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour Report published by Facebook, the network “targeted primarily Iran and also global audiences with content related to Iran.” During the investigation, Facebook uncovered three separate clusters of activity, which included “consistent and long-running infrastructure connections between the fake accounts and authentic accounts of MEK-linked individuals and Pages operated from Albania.”
According to Facebook, the network operated by MEK appeared to have been most active in 2017, with another spike in activity in the second half of 2020. Although they posted at high volumes, in general, they failed to build an audience on Fb, with only some exceptions. The people behind this activity relied on a combination of authentic and fake accounts to “post MEK-related content and comment on their own and other people’s posts, including those of international news organizations like Radio Liberty, Voice of America, and BBC. They also frequently posted links to websites and other social media channels affiliated with MEK.” Although the network used a variety of tactics to disguise its fake accounts, the automated system of FB disabled over the years a significant portion of them, while some accounts were also disabled since they violated the Community Standards against violence and incitement.
Regarding the followers that these accounts attracted, Fb reported that about 9,000 accounts followed one or more of the 41 Pages created, about 150 accounts joined at least one of the 21 Groups created, and around 112,000 people followed one or more of the 146 Instagram accounts. There were also 128 accounts on Facebook. The network almost exclusively “posted about events in, or related to, Iran. It routinely praised the activity of MEK and its leaders and criticized the Iranian government,” the report adds. In many cases, the accounts used fake profile names and photos, while other accounts used photos of Iranian celebrities or deceased dissidents.
The operators according to FB routinely shared technical infrastructure, meaning that the same operator could run multiple accounts, and multiple operators could run the same account. “These are some of the hallmarks of a so-called troll farm — a physical location where a collective of operators share computers and phones to jointly manage a pool of fake accounts as part of an influence operation,” said the report of Facebook.
According to the Associated Press, “the National Council for Resistance in Iran, an umbrella group that includes MEK, said in a statement that no accounts affiliated with it or MEK have been removed. The group also denied the existence of an Albanian troll farm affiliated with MEK.”
MEK is an Iranian opposition group many of whose members moved to Albania in 2013, where they live in a camp on the outskirts of Tirana.
Balkan Insider: Facebook Clamps Down on Iranian Dissident ‘Troll Farm’ In Albania
By Fjori Sinoruka,
Facebook has closed over 300 accounts belonging to members of the exiled Iranian dissident group Mojahedin-e Khalq, MEK, which is now based in Albania, saying their ‘inauthentic behavior’ violated company policy.
Facebook removed more than 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to members of an Iranian dissident group based in Albania that had been targeting Iran and content related to Iran.
“The network violated our policy against foreign interference which is coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign entity,” the social media giant said in its March report, “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report”, which it published on Tuesday.
According to the report, the network now taken down was very active in 2017 and in the second half of 2020.
“The people behind this activity relied on a combination of authentic and fake accounts to post MEK-related content and comment on their own and other people’s posts, including those of international news organizations like Radio Liberty, Voice of America and BBC,” said the report.
The People’s Mujahedin of Iran, MEK, is an Iranian opposition group many of whose members moved to Albania in 2013 on the advice of the US. They live mainly in a camp on the outskirts of the capital Tirana.
Facebook added that it will continue to monitor any attempts to re-establish the network by people behind this campaign.
“The operation relied heavily on fake accounts to post and amplify its messages. Some of these accounts went through repeated name changes. Other accounts used the names of deceased members of MEK. Some claimed to be located in Iran but were operated from Albania. All the accounts were overt in their support of MEK and their criticism of the Iranian government,” the report continued.
Some of the fake accounts were a decade old but most of them were created between 2014 and 2016. They were particularly active in 2017, reduced activity in 2018–2019 and resumed in 2020.
The Secretary of Iranian Judiciary’s Human Rights Headquarters took to Twitter to criticize the impunity of MKO terrorist group in Germany, noting that terrorist laundering is Berlin’s human rights strategy.
“3-year-old Fatima,burnt alive in 1980s,was one of 1000s victims of Nazi-style massacre by MKO terrorist group in Iran.”, Ali Bagheri Kani wrote.
He also published the photo of the three-year-old girl who was burned alive to ashes by MKO terrorists.
3-year-old Fatima,burnt alive in 1980s,was one of 1000s victims of Nazi-style massacre by MKO terrorist group in Iran. To serve justice, Germany should establish trials as huge as Nuremberg, not granting MKO impunity!
Is terrorist laundering, Berlin’s #human_rights strategy? pic.twitter.com/SdnTKCqpMJ
— علی باقریکنی (@Bagheri_Kani) April 11, 2021
“To serve justice, Germany should establish trials as huge as Nuremberg, not granting MKO impunity!”, he said, adding, “Is terrorist laundering, Berlin’s human_rights strategy?”
Meanwhile, European politicians, in Germany and France, are supporting the MKO terrorist group by turning a blind eye to their crimes against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Ms. Ann Singleton wrote the book Saddam’s Private Army in 2003 on “How Rajavi changed Iran’s Mojahedin from armed revolutionaries to an armed cult”
![Rajavi and Saddam](https://www.nejatngo.org/en/wp-content/uploads/Rajavi_Saddam_25.jpg)
Part One – From prison to Ideological Revolution
Chapter 1 – Historical context
Chapter 2 – Rajavi’s first bid for power
Chapter 3 – National Council of Resistance
Chapter 4 – Foreign Relations
Chapter 5 – Armed Struggle
Chapter 6 – Internal Relations
Chapter 7 – Ideological Revolution
Part Two – From Ideological Revolution to Cult Status
Chapter 8 – Internal Relations
Chapter 9 – Armed Struggle
Chapter 10 – Foreign Relations
Chapter 11 – Rajavi’s second bid for power
Chapter 12 – Internal Relations
Chapter 13 – National Council of Resistance
Part Three – The Mojahedin in the Present
Chapter 14 – Dissent within the Mojahedin
Chapter 15 – Political Scene
The Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Albania-based militant organization dedicated to the overthrow of the Iranian government, has long played an unusual and outsized role in online discourse about American foreign policy toward Iran. The group, which is classified as a terrorist organization by Iran and Iraq, is reportedly behind a fake Twitter “sockpuppet” persona named Heshmat Alavi with over 80,000 followers, who has been featured in publications such as Forbes, The Hill, and The Daily Caller. Alavi’s account frequently shares personal criticism of foreign policy specialists who are perceived as dovish toward Iran, and despite its artificiality, its content regularly percolates into the wider anti-Iran discourse by real people on Twitter. While Twitter prohibits coordinated inauthentic behavior, standalone inauthentic accounts are not against the platform’s terms of service, effectively enshrining a place for this runaway sockpuppet success in the Middle East’s political milieu.
MEK does, however, also carry out coordinated inauthentic influence operations on social media as well — and one such troll farm operating in Farsi, Arabic, and English was taken down on Facebook in March. The network, which primarily targeted Iranians and accumulated a global following of about 120,000, included 128 Facebook accounts, 41 Pages, 21 Groups, and 146 Instagram accounts. Facebook also took down networks of several dozen Facebook and Instagram profiles from Iran targeting Israel; about two dozen accounts from Egypt targeting Ethiopia, Sudan, and Turkey; and several dozen domestically-oriented accounts in Israel.
The MEK network, which was the largest taken down in March, used fake personas with faces created by an artificial intelligence technique known as a generative adversarial network, or GAN — the seventh of its kind that Facebook has identified and taken down. A GAN pits two AIs — a generative network and a discriminative network — against one another: the generative network is trained on a data set to generate new, artificial entries that fool the discriminative network to identify them as genuine. The most visible use of this technology has been to generate fake human faces that achieve photorealistic verisimilitude, but it has also been used to create fake art, fake chemical compounds, and (of course) fake cats.
While GANs and other technologies like deepfakes raise alarming prospects for the future of disinformation, researchers have sought to soften some of the public’s concern. Small irregularities often slip past the discriminative network, such as deformed ears, asymmetrical glasses, mismatched earrings, unusual clothing, or bizarrely unreal backgrounds. While sometimes these abnormalities are readily apparent and even jarring to a human viewer, often they can be quite subtle, especially with a human intermediary supervising the algorithm.
By Michael Sexton
Fellow and Director of MEI’s Cyber Program
In it’s one of most nocturnal moderation efforts, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) has wiped out a troll farm. Situated in Albania, the troll farm was circulating misinformation and was creating deepfake images. According to CIB report, the troll’s members used to target the Iranian public. It was also reported that they had links with a militant group, namely Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), with several thousand members.
Circulating Misinformation
Having been exiled to Albania in 1980, MEK used to create fake accounts to propagate against Iran’s government. The group used to leverage artificial intelligence to create deepfake images. By using deepfakes, generative adversarial networks (GAN) pose as investigative journalists and autonomous news outlets.
These accounts were operated from Albania. The operators used to share technical infrastructure routinely. A single operator used to run corpus accounts, and corpus operators were also able to operate the same account.
However, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and MEK have rejected Facebook’s claims. They refuted the company’s claims of having a troll farm. According to MEK, the group never created fake accounts on the platform.
According to Facebook, MEK’s activities in social media witnessed a surge in 2017 & 2020. However, they didn’t succeed in their mission of reaching out to the masses. Thanks to FireEye’s research on Spain & El Salvador’s GAN network, Facebook wiped out accounts & pages. Through these accounts, information related to the mayoral election was published. Moreover, two more networks were also removed that used to create deepfake images.
The Report
In its Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) report released this week, Facebook mentioned its efforts to decrease inauthentic activities across its network. According to the company, 14 CIB operations were interrupted in several countries that include Egypt, Israel, Argentina, Mexico, & Georgia, in March. More than 1,100 accounts, 34 groups, & 255 pages were eliminated.
In the previous month, Facebook detected and curbed cyber attackers of Chinese origin distributing malware through Facebook. These cyber attackers used to target journalists & activists through fake profiles.
By Kyle Landeck – Journaltranscript.com
Mr. Hossein Arefian, the father of Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) member Ahmad Arefian in Albania, wrote a letter of complaint from the Albanian government to the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances.
Respectfully,
I am Hossein Arefian, the father of Ahmad Arefian
Ahmad Arefian was a polite student and a moral boy. Unfortunately, he was abducted by deception and taken to Iraq and to the Ashraf garrison, the headquarters of the MEK. We are now informed that the organization has been transferred to Albania and is based in a closed camp.
Ahmed’s mother died of grief over her son’s absence and ignorance. Her brothers and sister are also depressed and worried, and I am sick, helpless and sad.
So far, I have tried various ways to communicate and meet my son, but I did not succeed. I have written many times to the Albanian authorities, but they have not responded. I applied for a visa many times to go to Albania and follow the issue closely, but I realized that Iranian citizens are not granted Albanian visas.
Therefore, my request is that you address my complaint against the Albanian government and get a trace of my son so that I can communicate with him.
Respectfully,
Hossein Arefian
Iran – Qom
Secretary of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights on Monday berated the German Government for recognition of MKO terrorist group.
Through a Twitter post, Ali Bagheri-Kani reacted Monday to Germany’s approach towards interacting with and officially recognizing terrorist group of Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO).
![Bagheri Kani](https://www.nejatngo.org/en/wp-content/uploads/Bagheri-Kani.jpg)
“3-year-old Fatima, burnt alive in 1980s, was one of 1000s victims of Nazi-style massacre by MKO terrorist group in Iran.
“To serve justice, Germany should establish trials as huge as Nuremberg, not granting MKO impunity!,”Bagheri-Kani wrote.
“Is terrorist laundering Berlin’s #human_rights strategy?”
European politicians, the ones in Germany and France in particular, have closed eyes on the MKO crimes, and have cooperation with the group members and support them.
Recently, some former representatives at German parliament spoke about human rights at the MKO webinar.
April 12, 2021
abna24.com