Amid reports of Iran bolstering anti-Israel activists in the United States, disinformation researchers fear a similar phenomenon is unfolding across Canada.
Marcus Kolga founded DisinfoWatch in 2007 to monitor and expose state-sponsored attempts to hijack social media for malicious intents. Since the Hamas invasion of Israel last October, he’s seen a spike in such activity.
“Over the past nine months at DisinfoWatch, we’ve observed social media accounts that were previously posting aggressively anti-Ukrainian content, adding anti-Zionist content to their toxic mix,” Kolga told the National Post in an email. “We also know that Russian intelligence has been sponsoring antisemitic active measures and influence operations.”
There have been reports of foreign governments sowing divisions in the West in the wake of the wars in Ukraine and Israel. The U.S. director of national intelligence issued an official statement in July warning that the Islamic Republic of Iran was boosting anti-Israel protests online, and, five months earlier, France accused Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) — the successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB — of a secret campaign to graffiti Paris with Jewish stars to plant fears of antisemitism.
Kolga pointed to a joint effort by American and Canadian intelligence agencies that unearthed nearly a thousand bot accounts designed to promote Russian government messaging as a glaring example of recent attempts to exploit Western democracies. Iran is a major prong in the network that is aligned with Russia, Kolga said.
“We’ve observed a clear crossover of pro-Kremlin/anti-Ukrainian and anti-Zionist/pro-Hamas narratives by prominent far-left and far-right influencers,” said Kolga, who is also a cyber expert with The Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
A new report from XPOZ, a company that uses artificial intelligence to combat disinformation, found that anti-Israel protests at McGill University were boosted by a social media influence campaign with potential ties to Iran.
“Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, McGill and its students have been the target of a coordinated, inauthentic and foreign narrative attack,” XPOZ wrote in a report obtained by the Post.
The company examined howsocial media users discussing the McGill encampment interacted online and found a disproportionate number of Farsi and Arabic commentators. These accounts amplified support for McGill’s student encampment, openly supported Hamas, and denounced Israel for committing genocide in Gaza.
In early July, campus security dismantled the school’s encampment.
“The campaign extensively utilized inauthentic profiles to amplify the discourse and broaden the reach of the narrative. Many of these profiles are inauthentic foreigners,” XPOZ wrote.
According to the company, 60 per cent of anti-Israel social media posts concerning McGill were posted by fake accounts. By comparison, the company found 75 per cent of commentators critical of the encampment were authentic users. The dataset drew on nearly 150,000 posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, over half a million likes on the platform, and more than 65,000 comments.
“In summary, there is a very clear attempt by a foreign power to sow discord and incite public unrest within Canada,” the company concluded, adding that such practices violated X’s terms of use.
“When the activity is authentic, (it) is very different,” an XPOZ researcher who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Post. “This is due to the fact that with authentic activity, we don’t see cases in which hundreds of thousands — up to millions of accounts — are operated to follow a certain command or to promote a certain target.”
The researcher said that authentic social media profiles usually follow a variety of interests — such as cooking or sports — but fake accounts are designed to engage solely in political discourse. Part of their analysis, which is known as network typology, examined users’ followers, people they interact with, activity levels, language, retweets and likes.
“It’s not at all surprising that there’s a significant inauthentic network and activity being observed amplifying narratives that are supportive of Hamas,” Kolga, who reviewed the XPOZ reports, said. “Their conclusions seem to confirm what experts and activists like myself have previously hypothesized.”
Joel Finkelstein, the co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), said that while XPOZ’s findings jibe with similar revelations his group has unearthed, without reviewing the underlying data, the findings should be approached cautiously.
“The claims being made by the research may be hard to determine in specificity, but are largely uncontroversial in terms of broader trends. Based on our data, these assertions align with observed trends and are credible,” Finkelstein told the Post.
He pointed to viral social media posts to show how foreign actors have amplified controversial messages since October 7. “The hashtag campaigns we’ve analyzed, such as #FreePalestine, are often inauthentic, driven by coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Our findings consistently confirm this trend, which is why these analyses are crucial.”
This squares with the Islamic Republic’s decades–long campaign to infiltrate democracies, said Michael Bonner, a historian of ancient Iran and senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.
“Iranian intelligence now targets Western domestic cultural and political weaknesses and inflames them, as we saw in recent protests,” he told the Post in an email.
“If such an intelligence operation has been active in Canada, as reports suggest, most Canadians will not be aware of it,” he continued. “They may not be aware of the extent to which their protests or other activities have been amplified on social media by bots and trolls linked to” the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Bonner called on the federal government to impose “appropriate limits” on foreign meddling in domestic affairs and properly recognize “the dangers posed by … actors who do not respect us or wish us well.”
Neil Oberman, a Montreal-based attorney who recently represented Jewish students at McGill seeking an injunction against the anti-Israel encampment, initially flagged the XPOZ report to the Post, saying it was “not an issue only for the Jewish community” but for all Canadians.
Oberman, who recently announced his candidacy to run for the Conservative Party against Liberal MP Anthony Housefather in the Mount Royal riding in Montreal, called on the federal government to actively investigate the matter. “Canada cannot be allowed to be manipulated by foreign countries to create social upheaval. That is not acceptable. Period.”
In May, a report by the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference found that federal elections in 2019 and 2021 were “tainted” by foreign interference. The commissioner, Marie-Josée Hogue, listed five countries — Iran, China, Russia, India and Pakistan — as the leading state actors meddling in Canadian affairs.
Russia’s goal, the document explained, “is to undermine perceived United States global dominance, discredit the U.S. and Western policies, and undermine support for U.S.-led institutions, partnerships and alliances.”
Iran was not deemed a “significant” foreign meddler at the time, but officials confirmed they were closely monitoring the situation. “In some cases, Iran seeks to silence Canada-based critics through harassment and intimidation,” Hogue wrote in the report. At a recent White House briefing, U.S. National Security Council (NSC) spokesman John Kirby acknowledged Iran played an instrumental role in boosting anti-Israel protests on college campuses.
However, Finkelstein underscored that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) should not be overlooked as politicians zero in on Iran.
In May, NCRI revealed that the Chinese government was instrumental in promoting anti-Israel protests in the U.S., “mobilizing frequent demonstrations as well as gradually escalating direct-action campaigns targeting critical infrastructure and public spaces.” The report, which highlighted the involvement of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) in the Chinese network, drew the condemnation of senior American political leaders.
The Ministry of Public Safety said in a statement that the “government and our intelligence agencies take the threat posed by foreign interference extremely seriously, and we will continue to take appropriate measures to combat it.”
Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsmann said the government is not doing enough. “After nine years of Justin Trudeau, foreign interference has run rampant in Canada. Foreign states have targeted our country, our democracy and our people and the government has failed to take action to stop it,” the Thornhill MP told the Post in an email.
“Whether it be the CCP targeting our elections or the regime in Tehran harassing dissidents and fomenting unrest in our streets; any interference, from any foreign state must be stopped.”
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