Iranian feminists targeted by thousands of fake Instagram accounts

Iranian feminists targeted by thousands of fake Instagram accounts

Iranian feminists have written a complaint letter to Meta after their Instagram accounts were flooded with fake profiles.


More than 30 people have called on the Big Tech company to take action after they were targeted in a "coordinated cyberattack".


"We ... have been exposed to an unprecedented attack on Instagram and Facebook," the letter from June reads. "The bots swarmed our social media pages in order to temporarily disable them."

Many of the activists say they have received hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers in just one day.


According to the non-profit Qurium, the fake followers have been traced to at least two social media marketing firms in Pakistan, but it is still unclear who is behind the bot campaign.


"It's a sophisticated and intelligent campaign to take one of the defining features of this platform which is high follower count and weaponise it against this group," said Mahsa Alimardani, a Senior Rights Researcher and PhD candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Almost all of the signatories of the letter are connected to Iran’s #MeToo movement, which began in August 2020 and denounces cases of sexual assault and harassment in the country.

The flood of bot accounts has forced many activists to make their accounts private, limiting their online reach and engagement.


Some activists told Euronews they feared that their Instagram account could be blocked because they collected too many fake followers in a short space of time, which the platform could do if it notices inauthentic activity.


Sarah Afrasiabi, who has nearly 75,000 followers, said she was concerned that femi ..

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