Powerful Iran? Iranian Twitter Bots #FAIL

The Iranians appear to be engaged in a strange soft-war propaganda campaign projecting to a Western audience using the hashtag, "Powerful_Iran" (#powerful_iran)

Multiple fake Twitter accounts have been publishing content from accounts with English names and profile photographs of Hollywood celebrities. The tweets have photographs of Iranian military equipment and cover a range of countries, media outlets, political slogans and other issues.

All of the tweeted photos have a logo of a dove with a rifle on its back showing the Iranian flag. They also include a caption using the "Powerful Iran" hashtag in English, Arabic and Persian.  Many of the tweets have images which vainly state that, "Islamic Republic of Iran is an international power" If you say so...

Here are some of the obviously fake Twitter accounts (seems that these 16 accounts are sending most of the tweets):

@daniel_mathew12 (created:12/15/2015)
@coreenwright3 (created: 12/26/2015)
@brianrauscher3 (created: 12/15/2015)
@harrisonangela5 (created: 12/15/2015)
@Williams2070 (created: 12/27/2015)
@daisybailey01 (created: 12/27/2015)
@EthelBell2016 (created: 12/26/2015)
@charlesmeyer201 (created: 12/26/2015)
@agustinarobbin1 (created: 12/27/2015)
@thomasanaya3 (created: 12/26/2015)
@Halina1321 (created: 12/13/2015)
@Peggy_Seitz (created: 12/26/2015)
@stefan_witcher (created: 12/26/2015)
@TillieMedeiros (created: 12/26/2015)
@shahab945 (created: 08/05/2015)
@pablofisher1990 (created: 12/22/2015)

The profiles are fake because:

1. They have clearly mostly been created around the same time.
2. They replay the same content between profiles.
3. They don't tweet about much else!
4. They have a lot of followers & tweets in a short time.
5. They use images of celebrities, obviously!

Similarities to Letter4u

Last year, the hashtag "Letter4u" was used by many bot-like accounts following the release of an open letter by Iran's supreme leader addressed to Western youth and the "Powerful_Iran" shows similarities to that campaign: "Letter4u" was also launched by an army of bots using photos of celebrities and also used a similar range of random hashtags. The themes of the tweets coincides with the predictable goals of the Iranian state, that is to destroy Israel and shut down traffic in the Persian Gulf, suggestions that Israel and Saudi Arabia are working together, & that Iran is a major global military country.

While it's not entirely clear who is behind the "Powerful_Iran" campaign, but it gained traction following the nuclear agreement between the West & Iran.

#FAIL

John Little, author of Blogs of War states that, "...the campaign is a miserable failure. Almost all of the tweets have gone unnoticed and have no retweets or favourites. The few interactions that I can find also appear to be faked by other bots".   

Links

You can follow the Twitter & Telegram accounts for: @powerful_iran