Below I have reapplied visual clustering and added labels — after filtering to include the 30 most influential accounts (eigenvector centrality algorithm) from the community:

12 of the 30 accounts are Farashgard-affiliated (founding members, senior advisers or associates). Also included are FDD’s CEO @mdubowitz and @Tavaana

Including the @iranfarashgard and @Group_ILSG accounts (both are blue above), nearly half of the 30 most influential accounts (14) are Farashgard-affiliated.

Iranian Liberal Students and Graduates (@Group_ILSG) is being included because the organization’s chair & co-founder, Amir Etemadi, is also a Farashgard founding member (moreover, every tweet from @amiretemadi is amplified in a coordinated fashion by inauthentic accounts that violate Twitter Rules).

Along with Etemadi, Saeed Ghasseminejad is the co-founder (and former spokesperson) of the Iranian Liberal Students and Graduates.

Tavaana and Iran Disinformation Project

Here’s a link to a Tavaana interview with Saeed Ghasseminejad from 2010:

I can state with certainty that Mr. Ghasseminejad — whose Twitter account is verified — regularly engages in activity that violates Twitter Rules.

Tavaana’s founder, Mariam Memarsadeghi (@memarsadeghi), is a long-time State Department contractor, who, over the past decade, has received hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to promote “freedom of expression and free access to information.”

Tavaana is the flagship product of E-Collaborative for Civic Education, a 501c3 organization with a “mission to leverage technology — internet communications technology, social networks, television and radio, mobile phones, e-learning classroom platforms, and more — to promote democracy and human rights internationally.”

Memarsadeghi, along with Akbar Atri, co-founded E-Collaborative for Civic Education in 2011. Atri, an Iranian exile, has participated in “numerous conferences and forums convened by neoconservative think tanks, including a 2006 Capitol Hill forum sponsored by the FDD, where [he] joined supporters of sanctions legislation sponsored by [former] Senators Joe Lieberman and Rick Santorum.”

Iranian-American journalist, Negar Mortazavi, was among those targeted by the Iran Disinformation Project. Mortazavi, who is a diplomatic correspondent with The Independent, broke the story of the State Department funding propaganda (targeting Americans) with this thread:

A couple months later, she shares that State Department officials have confirmed the Iran Disinformation Project was being run by Mariam Memarsadeghi — who appears to have contracted out the dirty work to FDD’s Saeed Ghasseminejad:

OK, So What’s Your Point?

The funding of various Iranian opposition groups by the U.S. is nothing new.

In 2002, following President Bush labeling Tehran as part of the global “axis of evil,” Congress allocated $20 million to promote democracy in Iran. In 2006, the administration “requested an additional $75 million for democracy promotion, all the while insisting that it does not want regime change in Tehran, but rather ‘change in regime behavior.’”

More than half of the $75 million was allocated for Voice of America television and Radio Farda broadcasting. According to policy analysis from The Washington Institute, the remaining funds “will be spent in Iran and abroad supporting NGOs and human rights organizations such as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in New Haven, Connecticut.”

E-Collaborative for Civic Education’s co-founder, Akbar Atri — along with FDD’s Saeed Ghasseminejad — are among the ‘exiles’ being referenced in a 2015 op-ed from USC professor, Muhammad Sahimi: “These exiles also have many websites and ‘non-profit’ organizations through which they espouse their views and those of their benefactors.”

Sahimi, describing the operational structure of E-Collaborative for Civic Education, states the organization “has a ‘faculty’ that carries out the work with contracts, which includes several Iranian exiles who have supported the sanctions, with at least one of them calling for the disintegration of Iran if the Islamic Republic cannot be toppled.”

What’s happening here, effectively, is U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used to craft a narrative that justifies U.S. policy.

These efforts have historically been limited to the more traditional channels (namely, television, print and radio). In recent years, however — as the discovery and consumption of news continues to shift towards social media — battles are increasingly being waged across digital platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Worth noting that Farashgard, as of September 1st, 2019, has been registered as a non-profit in Washington DC:

Coordinated Inauthentic Activity

There are thousands of anti-Iranian regime focused accounts that engage in coordinated inauthentic activity among the 6.3K account dataset.

The intention of this post is to provide a high-level overview of some of the key individuals and groups involved in a massive information operations effort — supported by State Department funding — that pushes for war with Iran.

There will be a separate post to follow that takes a deep dive into the data/network analysis.

That being said, I still would like to mention a few more things on the data front.

Auditing Twitter’s Actions

The initial 26.2K account Iranian-focused dataset consists of more than a million Following/Followers relationships and was sourced in June 2019.

Checking the account status of the 26.2K accounts a few months later (in this case, September) allows for auditing Twitter’s actions.

Relative to the 6.3K account filtered dataset (where this post started) — 13% of the accounts that existed as of June 2019, no longer existed as of September 2019.

In other words, more than 800 anti-Iranian regime focused accounts were recently suspended by Twitter or no longer exist (none of which have been disclosed by Twitter):