When the US Director of National Intelligence said there were several countries trying to influence the mid-term elections in the US, he mentioned Russia, China, and Iran (and some others not named). So, when Facebook started to find Iranian accounts in Indonesia that were employing "coordinated inauthentic behavior" it was not a surprise to anyone but Indonesians who had been looking at those accounts. But there is more to this story than that.
The company being investigated there is Saracen, which was said to have been servicing various clients who wanted to make news, one way or another. It affected Indonesia in the run-up to Indonesia's national election. Reuters is reporting that a police official in Indonesia said "there is no evidence that Saracen actually exists." The Guardian says these accounts were linked to Iran, Russia and Venezuela and were not just Facebook. Twitter was removing accounts as well.
I went to the Digital Forensic Research Lab post, referenced by the Guardian, and it is good reading. For Facebook there were 250,000 followers of these pages and 15,000,000 engagements. In at least one case, the pages were removed previously by Facebook and were restored by the original source. Most of the page managers were in Iran, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. There was no mention of Russia or Venezuela, though the source material may have come from those countries.
Fake companies, attempts to influence the national elections, setting up groups that were issue oriented. Where have we heard about this before? Either Iran is using the Russian playbook so often quoted in discussions about Russian Information War, or the Russians and the Chinese who have been working together on this, have gotten help in their program to influence national elections wherever they can.
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