Iran has stepped up its efforts to interfere in the November election and amp up American polarization, including through hacking attempts and fake news sites aimed at the far left and far right, Microsoft researchers said Friday in a report.
The Iranian-built news networks include a site launched in October called Nio Thinker, which focused on the Israeli-Hamas war before it started to publish articles on the coming U.S. election. It takes a liberal slant, calling GOP nominee and former president Donald Trump an “opioid-pilled elephant in the MAGA china shop,” according to the report from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
A related site aimed at conservatives, Savannah Time, writes on Republican politics and LGBTQ issues. Some of the sites use artificial intelligence to plagiarize content from U.S. sites, the company said. The “about us” blurb on the site reads, “We’re opinionated, we’re noisy, and we’re having a good time.”
“They’ve laid the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election-related topics and begun to activate these campaigns in an apparent effort to stir up controversy or sway voters — especially in swing states,” Clint Watts, the Threat Center’s general manager, wrote in a blog post accompanying the report. Since March, another Iran-linked group has been posting in the guise of political and social activists and could escalate to intimidation and incitement, he warned.
Microsoft said another group, run by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, compromised the email account of a former adviser to a U.S. presidential campaign and used that address in June to contact a senior official who was still engaged in the campaign. That email contained a link to a site that could have allowed Iran to intercept the target’s other emails, Microsoft said. A spokesman for the company said it would not reveal whether the attack had succeeded.
One other Iranian group was able to compromise an account belonging to “a county-level government employee in a swing state,” Microsoft said, adding that its motive was unclear.
Iran involved itself in the 2020 election as well, and Microsoft said it expects the country’s activity to escalate in the coming months. Last month, U.S. intelligence agencies told reporters they were seeing Iran use social media personas to sow discord and denigrate Trump.
Microsoft said it was also continuing to see Russian interference, including through Telegram and X accounts such as “TEXASvsUSA,” which uses racial dog whistles and calls for violence. One 30-second video made with AI, titled “Hold the Line,” depicted “a horde of immigrant zombies amassing on the southern US border,” the threat report said.
Those accounts were created by the contract propagandists formerly associated with a Russian troll factory once indicted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, according to the report, and echoed that outfit’s past techniques in amplifying racial divides and echoing Trump.
Microsoft’s blog noted that the company would not be endorsing any presidential candidate, drawing an implicit contrast with X owner and Trump backer Elon Musk, who has let propaganda flourish on his network.