As Turkish forces invaded northern Syria in early October, supporters of the offensive launched a different kind of campaign — online.
Dozens of images claiming to show Turkey’s soldiers cuddling babies, feeding hungry toddlers and carrying elderly women spread across Twitter and Instagram where they were liked, retweeted and viewed thousands of times thanks also to popular hashtags.
Except some of the photos weren’t of Turkish soldiers. None of them were recent and some had been taken in parts of Syria unconnected to the invasion – even in other parts of the world.
The online campaign follows a pattern of social media propaganda that seeks to sway global opinion when controversial, international events erupt. In August, for instance, Twitter announced it had suspended more than 200,000 accounts thought to be run by Beijing to peddle propaganda targeting the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. YouTube soon followed, disabling more than 200 videos believed to be part of a coordinated, misinformation attack on the demonstrations.
In last month’s instance, the images began making the rounds in the days after President Donald Trump’s widely criticized withdrawal of U.S. troops opened the way for the Turkish offensive against the Kurds on the border with northeastern Syria.
They weren’t the only ones. Social media posts sympathetic to the Kurds also wrongly linked Turkey to horrifying images of military assaults or war victims. Such tweets included a photo of a girl with severe burns on her face that purported to show that Turkey had dispersed white phosphorus on Kurds. In fact, the April 2015 image was shot by a Reuters photographer in Yemen.
But unlike the pro-Kurdish images, the false and misleading posts promoting Turkey appeared to get a boost from a coordinated network of Twitter accounts that amplified the content through trending hashtags and retweets.
“That is not the norm of normal behavior on Twitter,” said Gideon Blocq, the CEO of VineSight, a technology company that tracks misinformation online and reviewed the pro-Turkey tweets at The Associated Press’ request. Their analysis examined the frequency of the tweets, use of stock photos and locations of six Twitter accounts that promoted the images and their followers, among other things, all traits that signal inauthentic behavior.
“One can conclude that these automated accounts are there to push content,” Blocq said.