Troll farms, an Institutionalised internet trolls group were been found using deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives to the social media users in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Consequently, these deceptive campaigns were consistently promoting the advanced narratives of the United States while opposing countries like Russia, China and Iran.
Around 150 Twitter accounts between March 2012 and February 2022 posted around 3,00,000 tweets. Consequently, Twitter found that the account’s country of origin appeared to be the United States and the United Kingdom. Around 39 Facebook profiles, two groups and 26 Instagram accounts which Meta has disabled, were active between 2017 and July 2022.
The deceivers created fake persons with GAN-generated faces that posed as an independent media outlets. Afterwards, they supported memes and short videos, which attempted to start hashtag campaigns and launched online appeals. Initially, the same tactics were used in the previous cases of social media abuse. They did it for manipulation and spam and conducted influence operations by using a limited set of tactics.
