meIf you want to know the Middle East, Raphael Badani is your man.
As a Newsmax “Insider” columnist, you have insights on how Iraq needs to shed Iranian influence to attract investment and why Dubai is an oasis of stability in a turbulent region. His career as a “geopolitical risk consultant and interactive simulation designer” and “senior international relations analyst” for the Labor Department has given him many insights about the Middle East. He has printed those ideas in a variety of conservative media such as the Washington examiner, RealClear Markets, American Thinker and The National Interest.
Unfortunately for the media that published his articles and the readers who believed them, Raphael Badani does not exist.
His profile photos have been stolen from the blog of an unintentional founder of San Diego startups. His LinkedIn profile, which described him as a graduate of George Washington and Georgetown, is equally fictional.
Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake people that he has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different posts. The articles praised the United Arab Emirates and called for a tougher approach towards Qatar, Turkey, Iran and their representative groups in Iraq and Lebanon.
On Monday, Twitter suspended Badani’s account along with 15 others after The Daily Beast shared the results of its investigation online for violating the company’s “platform manipulation and spam policies”.
“Using technology, human review, and partnerships with researchers and other independent organizations studying these issues, we work to identify tampering with the platform in our service and take action,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Beast in a statement. “As standard, if we have reasonable evidence to attribute any activity to a state-backed information operation, we will disclose it, after a thorough investigation, to our public record.”
“This vast operation of influence highlights the ease with which malicious actors can exploit the identities of real people, deceive the international media, and legitimize propaganda from unknown sources through reputable means,” Marc Owen Jones, assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, who first noticed suspicious posts from network members, told The Daily Beast. “We must be careful not only with fake news, but with fake journalists.”
The network’s wave of successes targeted a variety of publications and placed articles critical of Qatar and supporting tougher sanctions against Iran in conservative North American media such as Human Events and The Post Millennial by conservative writer Andy Ngo, as well as Israeli and Middle Eastern newspapers like The Jerusalem Post and Al arabiyaand Asian newspapers like him South China Morning Post.
Uniting the network is a series of shared behavior patterns. People identified by The Daily Beast were generally contributors to two linked sites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now; had Twitter accounts created in March or April 2020; They presented themselves as political consultants and independent journalists mainly in the European capitals; lied about their academic or professional credentials on fake LinkedIn accounts; used manipulated fake or stolen avatars to defeat reverse image searches; and linked or amplified the work of others.
The first posts by people on the network date back to July 2019 and were written by Lin Nguyen, a bogus “South Asia regional security analyst,” according to the author’s biography. Nguyen and another person, Cindy Xi, wrote mainly on East Asian issues, particularly on how the Hong Kong economy was going through the coronavirus pandemic.
But the network soon grew and expanded its focus to the Middle East. In February, two websites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now, were registered the same day and began acquiring a large number of collaborators.
The Arab Eye describes itself, ironically, as a bulwark against “‘Fake News’ and partial narrative” with a mission that “now more than ever it is crucial to hear opinions from across the aisle on Middle East related issues. “
The sites may not appear to be linked to the external observer, but a search of the RiskIQ database shows that both sites share the same Google Analytics account, are hosted on the same IP address, and are linked through a series of certificates. shared encryption.
Like most of its contributors, the sites themselves appear to be fake.
Persia Now lists a non-existent London email address and an unanswered phone number on its contact form. Apparent media editors Sharif O’Neill and Taimur Hall have virtually no fingerprints or online records in journalism.
In Persia Now, The Arab Eye, and in dozens of other posts, fake contributors have embraced similar themes in their opinion pieces. They are critical of Qatar and, in particular, of their state-funded Al Jazeera media. They are not big admirers of Turkey’s role in backing one of the factions in Libya’s civil war and have called it “bad news” aimed at “restricting the flow of vital energy resources” to Europe, and “driving a gap between “dividing NATO.”
There are constant editorial lines such as arguing for more sanctions against Iran or using international leverage to weaken Iran’s power groups in Lebanon and Iraq. People are also big fans of the United Arab Emirates and have praised the Gulf nation for its “exemplary resistance” to the COVID-19 pandemic, its “strong diplomatic ties” with the European Union, and allegedly supporting gender equality. through Expo 2020 in Dubai.
More recently, people have taken to criticizing Facebook for their decision to appoint Tawakkol Karman, the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to their supervisory board. The media in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have criticized the appointment of Karman, a former member of the Islah Party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen, for his association with the group.
In pieces for the Jewish News Service, Asia Times, Politcalite and Middle East Online, the network portrays Karman as a “nefarious political actor with a questionable past” who will make Facebook the “platform of choice for extreme Islamist ideology.”
None of the Twitter accounts associated with the network had more than a few dozen followers, but some managed to obtain high-profile endorsements for their work. A “Joyce Toledano” article in Human Events about how Qatar is “destabilizing the Middle East” received a thanks from Students for Trump co-founder Ryan Fournier’s Twitter account, and French Senator Nathalie Goulet crashed all five. with Lin Nguyen. cost about Facebook and Tawakkol Karman.
Shit stories
People on the network used a mix of stolen or AI-generated avatars and fake biographies to make it seem more plausible.
The Twitter account “Raphael Badani” used Barry Dadon, a true San Diego businessman and startup founder, as the source for his profile photos. Without his knowledge or consent, the account owner took a photo from Dadon’s blog for a Twitter profile photo and stole a photo from Dadon’s wife’s Facebook page for the Badani Newsmax columnist’s page.
“Mikael Virtanen”, a fake Finnish businessman who wrote about the Middle East for the Jewish News Service, stole his avatar from a database of free images. Other avatars were stolen from a Vietnam analyst at a Singapore financial consulting firm and a California insurance agent.
All of the stolen avatars were reversed and trimmed from their originals, making them difficult to find through common Google reverse image searches.
Fake contributors also appear to have used AI-generated avatars for a handful of their characters. A high-resolution profile photo of the person of Joseph Labba, posted for an article in The Post Millennial, shows some of the telltale flaws commonly found in AI-generated faces. The left ear is strangely smooth with no creases in the earlobe. Middlebury Institute of International Studies associate researcher Sam Meyer reviewed Labba’s photo using image analysis software and also noted that he appears to have three poorly matched teeth in his mouth, where there should be four.
“This mouth looks fake or has a sad dental history behind it,” said Dr. Leonard Kundel, a dentist who agreed to review Labba’s avatar for The Daily Beast. “The third tooth in the center doesn’t seem real to me. If you compare it to the canine on the other side, it’s obvious.
Also, the two front teeth do not seem to belong to this mouth. They’re both narrower than they should be and a little bit ahead, whiter, and whiter.
Other avatars, such as those used by the people of Lisa Moore and Joyce Toledano, show amazing symmetrical features when they are superimposed on top of each other, with an almost perfect alignment of eyes, mouths and eyebrows.
The backstories used to reinforce the credibility of the network are equally false. Some authors pretended to be journalists, whether independent or former journalists. On her LinkedIn page, “Salma Mohamed” claimed to be a former London-based AP reporter, although no public record of an AP journalist matching the description of Salma Mohamed is available.
Another person, Amani Shahan, described herself in the Global Villages and Persia Now biography as a contributor and “ghostwriting articles” to The Daily Beast. No one by that name has written for The Daily Beast, and The Daily Beast does not employ ghostwriters. (Shahan also referred to herself with male and female pronouns in different biographies of the authors.)
Others lied about their academic credentials. In articles published in The ASEAN Post, the Malaysia Reserve and Manila Times, Cindy Xi stood out as a “Singapore-based research analyst for private sector clients” with a PhD from the National University of Singapore. In an email, NUS said it was “unable to retrieve previous records in the Department’s database” that matched Xi’s name. A search of the National Student Clearinghouse database for the alleged college degree by Navid Barani from James Madison University was similarly empty.
Sometimes, network operators displayed a mischievous sense of irony or a complete lack of self-awareness. One of his first pieces, “How Qatar is Using Disinformation Tactics to Attack Its Rivals,” complained about the state-funded Al Jazeera broadcasts and lamented that “the picture highlights a fascinating case study of how the fake news they can affect regional political discourse. ”
The piece is also the only public evidence that someone may have known about the web forgery. The editors of the International Policy Digest, where it was published in September 2019, promptly removed the article with a note saying it was removed “in response to criticism of the article’s source” and that “we regret its publication.”
It is not that it has caused many problems to the network. “Lin Nguyen” put up a similar thematic piece attacking Qatar over “misinformation becoming the currency of soft power” a few days later in the Asia Times. In November, another person on the network, Michel Haddad, republished in the International Policy Digest.
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