Social media giant Facebook has announced that it removed dozens of accounts, pages, and groups linked to Iran for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The company also disabled several accounts on its sister-platform Instagram. Facebook cited in its statement Tuesday a report by the cybersecurity company FireEye, which revealed that the network...

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Israel’s Foreign Ministry’s Persian account won a Twitter contest sponsored by a satirical Iranian account, Calcalist reported Wednesday. The Iranian account, @tanasoli, which has 115,000 followers, sponsored a contest looking for followers to nominate “the most absurd or foolish” statements made by the regime over the past 40 years. The...

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Following a report released this week by a cybersecurity firm, social media giants Facebook and Twitter shut down hundreds of accounts, including many from Iran, for engaging in what Facebook called “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on the platforms, Wired reported Tuesday. The report issued by FireEye on Tuesday said that the...

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Thousands of Iranians defied the regime’s call to join anti-Israel marches last Friday, Quds Day, and instead showed their support for Israel on social media, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, The Times of Israel reported Thursday. The campaign using the hashtag #WeStandWithIsrael is meant to bring people of the two...

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The global social media platform Twitter announced that it suspended 125,00 accounts that were threatening or promoting terrorism, primarily on behalf of the Islamic State, since the middle of last year, CNBC reported Friday. The announcement is the first time that Twitter indicated the scope of terror-related activity on its network. A Brookings Institution study...

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The death of a young woman sparked rioting in Mahabad, an Kurdish city in northwestern Iran, The New York Times reported today. Furious over the unexplained death of a chambermaid, ethnic Kurds in an Iranian provincial capital rioted on Thursday, apparently setting the fire that roared through the hotel where...

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Steven Cook, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, published a blog post today questioning the criticism Ken Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, leveled at Israel for sending aid to earthquake-stricken Nepal. Roth had tweeted last week, “Easier to address a far-away humanitarian disaster than the nearby one...

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In addition to being one of the most violent and brutal terror groups in the Middle East, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) also has a very sophisticated media system and public relations strategy. A new report (Arabic link) found that ISIS has seven distinct media outlets through which...

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The New York Times reported Thursday that Turkey suspended YouTube “after an audio recording was uploaded to the platform in which the foreign minister and senior military and intelligence officials could be heard discussing the security situation in Syria.” A Turkish court on Wednesday overturned a government ban on Twitter, the latest...

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Turkish officials over the weekend and on Monday deepened their efforts to cut the country off from Twitter, despite being met with quite literally global ridicule last week for trying and conspicuously failing to stifle public use of the popular microblogging service. “Fortunately, the people of this world, including Turkey, are strong, and democracy...

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