Posted on 07/14/25
| News Source: JPost
When Israeli strikes hit Iran on June 13, it wasn’t only nuclear sites and senior Iranian commanders that were taken out: A covert army of bots meddling in British politics went dark, too.
That’s according to Cyabra, a Tel Aviv-based disinformation detection company that uncovered the operation.
For 16 days, the network — which began operating in May — vanished, according to Cyabra’s report published last week. No posts, no replies, no trace of the 1,300 fake profiles that had posed as British users and fueled online debate around Scottish independence, Brexit and institutional collapse.
The accounts had already reached more than 200 million people through over 3,000 posts, the company said.
When the network returned after Iranian communication was restored, its tone had changed. The same AI-generated personas that had previously blended into UK political discourse were now sharing pro-Iranian content and ridiculing Western leaders.
Cyabra analysts said the 16-day gap offered a rare before-and-after snapshot of direct, time-linked evidence of state-sponsored interference online.
“The sudden disruption to Iran’s influence operations capabilities due to their war with Israel exposed the entire operation,” said Dan Brahmy, Cyabra’s CEO. “It was like watching state-backed disinformation self-destruct in real time. When Iran paused, so did the bots, revealing the strategy, the propaganda, and the 224 million views their fake campaign had already amassed.”
According to the report, roughly 26% of the 5,083 accounts engaged in Scottish independence conversations on X were fake — “substantially higher than platform norms.”
Cyabra’s investigation found that many of the accounts recycled existing content, used identical phrasing and engaged in coordinated bursts of activity. Hashtags like #FreeScotland, #BrexitBetrayal, and #ScottishIndependence were repeatedly deployed to insert state-aligned messaging into organic conversations. Though the accounts mimicked authentic user behavior — retweeting, liking, replying in staggered waves — the scale and uniformity of the network became clear only when it went silent.
The fake profiles operated as a self-reinforcing cluster, with bots boosting one another’s posts to simulate grassroots consensus, the report said, and sought to amplify polarizing messages within British political discourse while promoting Iran as a model of unity and resistance.
Cyabra’s platform uncovered the network by analyzing “engagement clusters, linguistic patterns and behavioral anomalies,” Brahmy told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.