MEK elderlies from nursing home, sick and tired of freeing Iran
Ashraf 3
In the Tirana’s countryside, MEK has constructed a vast compound called Ashraf-3 where men and women lead segregated existences.
The gates are usually firmly closed, guarded by two sculpted lions atop stone pedestals and a large team of Albanian security guards. Unannounced visitors are not welcome at the fenced-off, secretive site, where more than 2,000 MEK members live, marks Shaun Walker.
Tirana Times: Facebook Removes 300 Accounts tied to Iranian exile group MEK in Albania
A network of 300 Facebook accounts, Pages, Groups and accounts on Instagram which appeared to be run from a single location in Albania and operated by the exiled militant opposition group from Iran, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), were removed by Facebook, due to their “coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign country.” According to the March 2021 Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour Report published by Facebook, the network “targeted primarily Iran and also global audiences with content related to Iran.” During the investigation, Facebook uncovered three separate clusters of activity, which included “consistent and long-running infrastructure connections between the fake accounts and authentic accounts of MEK-linked individuals and Pages operated from Albania.”
According to Facebook, the network operated by MEK appeared to have been most active in 2017, with another spike in activity in the second half of 2020. Although they posted at high volumes, in general, they failed to build an audience on Fb, with only some exceptions. The people behind this activity relied on a combination of authentic and fake accounts to “post MEK-related content and comment on their own and other people’s posts, including those of international news organizations like Radio Liberty, Voice of America, and BBC. They also frequently posted links to websites and other social media channels affiliated with MEK.” Although the network used a variety of tactics to disguise its fake accounts, the automated system of FB disabled over the years a significant portion of them, while some accounts were also disabled since they violated the Community Standards against violence and incitement.
Regarding the followers that these accounts attracted, Fb reported that about 9,000 accounts followed one or more of the 41 Pages created, about 150 accounts joined at least one of the 21 Groups created, and around 112,000 people followed one or more of the 146 Instagram accounts. There were also 128 accounts on Facebook. The network almost exclusively “posted about events in, or related to, Iran. It routinely praised the activity of MEK and its leaders and criticized the Iranian government,” the report adds. In many cases, the accounts used fake profile names and photos, while other accounts used photos of Iranian celebrities or deceased dissidents.
The operators according to FB routinely shared technical infrastructure, meaning that the same operator could run multiple accounts, and multiple operators could run the same account. “These are some of the hallmarks of a so-called troll farm — a physical location where a collective of operators share computers and phones to jointly manage a pool of fake accounts as part of an influence operation,” said the report of Facebook.
According to the Associated Press, “the National Council for Resistance in Iran, an umbrella group that includes MEK, said in a statement that no accounts affiliated with it or MEK have been removed. The group also denied the existence of an Albanian troll farm affiliated with MEK.”
MEK is an Iranian opposition group many of whose members moved to Albania in 2013, where they live in a camp on the outskirts of Tirana.
Balkan Insider: Facebook Clamps Down on Iranian Dissident ‘Troll Farm’ In Albania
By Fjori Sinoruka,
Facebook has closed over 300 accounts belonging to members of the exiled Iranian dissident group Mojahedin-e Khalq, MEK, which is now based in Albania, saying their ‘inauthentic behavior’ violated company policy.
Facebook removed more than 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to members of an Iranian dissident group based in Albania that had been targeting Iran and content related to Iran.
“The network violated our policy against foreign interference which is coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign entity,” the social media giant said in its March report, “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report”, which it published on Tuesday.
According to the report, the network now taken down was very active in 2017 and in the second half of 2020.
“The people behind this activity relied on a combination of authentic and fake accounts to post MEK-related content and comment on their own and other people’s posts, including those of international news organizations like Radio Liberty, Voice of America and BBC,” said the report.
The People’s Mujahedin of Iran, MEK, is an Iranian opposition group many of whose members moved to Albania in 2013 on the advice of the US. They live mainly in a camp on the outskirts of the capital Tirana.
Facebook added that it will continue to monitor any attempts to re-establish the network by people behind this campaign.
“The operation relied heavily on fake accounts to post and amplify its messages. Some of these accounts went through repeated name changes. Other accounts used the names of deceased members of MEK. Some claimed to be located in Iran but were operated from Albania. All the accounts were overt in their support of MEK and their criticism of the Iranian government,” the report continued.
Some of the fake accounts were a decade old but most of them were created between 2014 and 2016. They were particularly active in 2017, reduced activity in 2018–2019 and resumed in 2020.
The Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Albania-based militant organization dedicated to the overthrow of the Iranian government, has long played an unusual and outsized role in online discourse about American foreign policy toward Iran. The group, which is classified as a terrorist organization by Iran and Iraq, is reportedly behind a fake Twitter “sockpuppet” persona named Heshmat Alavi with over 80,000 followers, who has been featured in publications such as Forbes, The Hill, and The Daily Caller. Alavi’s account frequently shares personal criticism of foreign policy specialists who are perceived as dovish toward Iran, and despite its artificiality, its content regularly percolates into the wider anti-Iran discourse by real people on Twitter. While Twitter prohibits coordinated inauthentic behavior, standalone inauthentic accounts are not against the platform’s terms of service, effectively enshrining a place for this runaway sockpuppet success in the Middle East’s political milieu.
MEK does, however, also carry out coordinated inauthentic influence operations on social media as well — and one such troll farm operating in Farsi, Arabic, and English was taken down on Facebook in March. The network, which primarily targeted Iranians and accumulated a global following of about 120,000, included 128 Facebook accounts, 41 Pages, 21 Groups, and 146 Instagram accounts. Facebook also took down networks of several dozen Facebook and Instagram profiles from Iran targeting Israel; about two dozen accounts from Egypt targeting Ethiopia, Sudan, and Turkey; and several dozen domestically-oriented accounts in Israel.
The MEK network, which was the largest taken down in March, used fake personas with faces created by an artificial intelligence technique known as a generative adversarial network, or GAN — the seventh of its kind that Facebook has identified and taken down. A GAN pits two AIs — a generative network and a discriminative network — against one another: the generative network is trained on a data set to generate new, artificial entries that fool the discriminative network to identify them as genuine. The most visible use of this technology has been to generate fake human faces that achieve photorealistic verisimilitude, but it has also been used to create fake art, fake chemical compounds, and (of course) fake cats.
While GANs and other technologies like deepfakes raise alarming prospects for the future of disinformation, researchers have sought to soften some of the public’s concern. Small irregularities often slip past the discriminative network, such as deformed ears, asymmetrical glasses, mismatched earrings, unusual clothing, or bizarrely unreal backgrounds. While sometimes these abnormalities are readily apparent and even jarring to a human viewer, often they can be quite subtle, especially with a human intermediary supervising the algorithm.
By Michael Sexton
Fellow and Director of MEI’s Cyber Program
In it’s one of most nocturnal moderation efforts, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) has wiped out a troll farm. Situated in Albania, the troll farm was circulating misinformation and was creating deepfake images. According to CIB report, the troll’s members used to target the Iranian public. It was also reported that they had links with a militant group, namely Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), with several thousand members.
Circulating Misinformation
Having been exiled to Albania in 1980, MEK used to create fake accounts to propagate against Iran’s government. The group used to leverage artificial intelligence to create deepfake images. By using deepfakes, generative adversarial networks (GAN) pose as investigative journalists and autonomous news outlets.
These accounts were operated from Albania. The operators used to share technical infrastructure routinely. A single operator used to run corpus accounts, and corpus operators were also able to operate the same account.
However, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and MEK have rejected Facebook’s claims. They refuted the company’s claims of having a troll farm. According to MEK, the group never created fake accounts on the platform.
According to Facebook, MEK’s activities in social media witnessed a surge in 2017 & 2020. However, they didn’t succeed in their mission of reaching out to the masses. Thanks to FireEye’s research on Spain & El Salvador’s GAN network, Facebook wiped out accounts & pages. Through these accounts, information related to the mayoral election was published. Moreover, two more networks were also removed that used to create deepfake images.
The Report
In its Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) report released this week, Facebook mentioned its efforts to decrease inauthentic activities across its network. According to the company, 14 CIB operations were interrupted in several countries that include Egypt, Israel, Argentina, Mexico, & Georgia, in March. More than 1,100 accounts, 34 groups, & 255 pages were eliminated.
In the previous month, Facebook detected and curbed cyber attackers of Chinese origin distributing malware through Facebook. These cyber attackers used to target journalists & activists through fake profiles.
By Kyle Landeck – Journaltranscript.com
Mr. Hossein Arefian, the father of Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) member Ahmad Arefian in Albania, wrote a letter of complaint from the Albanian government to the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances.
Respectfully,
I am Hossein Arefian, the father of Ahmad Arefian
Ahmad Arefian was a polite student and a moral boy. Unfortunately, he was abducted by deception and taken to Iraq and to the Ashraf garrison, the headquarters of the MEK. We are now informed that the organization has been transferred to Albania and is based in a closed camp.
Ahmed’s mother died of grief over her son’s absence and ignorance. Her brothers and sister are also depressed and worried, and I am sick, helpless and sad.
So far, I have tried various ways to communicate and meet my son, but I did not succeed. I have written many times to the Albanian authorities, but they have not responded. I applied for a visa many times to go to Albania and follow the issue closely, but I realized that Iranian citizens are not granted Albanian visas.
Therefore, my request is that you address my complaint against the Albanian government and get a trace of my son so that I can communicate with him.
Respectfully,
Hossein Arefian
Iran – Qom
The cult-like MEK, whose allies have included Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, and John Bolton, was linked to hundreds of sham FB profiles—some using AI-made photos of fake users.
Facebook says it busted a troll farm run by the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK)—a dissident Iranian group that lobbies for the overthrow of Iran’s revolutionary government—that used artificial intelligence-generated fake faces to populate sham accounts.
The social media company linked the troll farm, based alongside the MEK’s headquarters in Albania, to 300 different assets on Facebook’s platform, including pages, groups, and accounts engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior.
The MEK, which began as a Marxist revolutionary organization, opposed Iran’s monarchy in the 1970s and fought alongside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to overthrow the shah of Iran. After the revolution, the IRGC cracked down on the MEK and the group sought refuge in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The U.S. designated the group as a terrorist organization in 1997, but the Obama administration removed the designation in 2012.
Since then, the group has spent millions of dollars cultivating allies in the U.S. and advocating for regime change in Iran. It’s also spent big on speaking fees for high-profile Democratic and Republican heavyweights it considers allies, including Rudy Giuliani, former Vermont governor and DNC chair Howard Dean, and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton.
The group is known for its strict control of members. A 2005 study by Human Rights Watch based on interviews with MEK dissidents included testimonies about “abuses ranging from detention and persecution of ordinary members wishing to leave the organization, to lengthy solitary confinements, severe beatings, and torture of dissident members.”
In a 2009 study, RAND researchers alleged that the group displayed a number of “cult characteristics,” including “intense ideological exploitation and isolation,” “sexual control,” “emotional isolation,” and other such tactics.
While the U.S. has accounted for much of the MEK’s lobbying focus, the troll farm it ran was apparently focused more on Iranian and diaspora audiences. Facebook says the majority of posts by the troll farm were in Farsi with a smaller number in Arabic and English.
In terms of content, the troll farm pushed traditional MEK messages that criticized Iran’s clerical regime and praised the MEK itself. The trolls also tried to push its audience towards websites that served as fronts for the MEK without disclosing their association with it. The effort, however, was mostly a failure, as the operations “achieved little to no audience visibility,” garnering few followers on its various accounts, groups, and pages, according to Facebook.
MEK trolls used a few different tactics to populate their Facebook properties with identities that would seem authentic. In some cases, the trolls used photos of famous poets as avatars. In a smaller number of cases, the trolls used AI-generated fake faces of people who didn’t exist.
The operation posted content on a schedule that aligned with Albania’s time zone and bore “hallmarks of a so-called troll farm—a physical location where a collective of operators share computers and phones to jointly manage a pool of fake accounts as part of an influence operation,” according to a report on the operation released by Facebook.
Reports of MEK-run troll operations on other social media platforms surfaced long before the recent takedown by Facebook. In 2019, The Intercept reported that Heshmat Alavi, a pro-MEK Twitter account with over 80,000 followers, was run by a team of four MEK social media trolls, according to an MEK defector interviewed by the news outlet. Twitter briefly suspended the Alavi account after The Intercept’s reporting but subsequently reinstated it.
Facebook announced its identification and enforcement against the MEK’s troll farm as part of its monthly announcement of coordinated inauthentic behavior operations on its platforms. The latest report included an announcement of takedowns from 11 different countries, ranging from Mexico to Egypt, Spain, and others.
The company also announced the takedown of a small Iranian-run network aimed at sowing discord within Israeli politics. Facebook says it identified 29 Facebook accounts, two pages, and 10 Instagram accounts involved in an effort to masquerade as left-wing Israelis critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
In a press conference, Facebook’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher said the scale of the latest monthly takedown of coordinated inauthentic behavior was a reflection of the company’s investments in detection and enforcement—making such operations more difficult for adversaries to pursue in the future.
In a statement released after Facebook’s announcement, the MEK denied any affiliation with the accounts and called the company’s report “absolutely false.”
by Daily Beast
Families of the captured members at the MEK camp in Albania wrote a letter to the Director General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, expressing concern about the health of their loved ones seeking help to gain information about their family members.
The text of the letter is as follows:
Dear Dr. Tedros Adhanom
Director General of the World Health Organization
Greetings and best regards,
Congratulations on the occasion of the 7th of April, World Health Day, to you and all your colleagues around the world and wishing a healthy and disease-free world on the year 2021 which is named”Year of the Health and Care Workers”, with the slogan of”Building a fairer, healthier world”.
We would like to inform you that:
Covid-19 virus disease has taken a heavy toll on the world body, and its impact on countries that were previously considered vulnerable before the pandemic has been far greater. These communities, which are more prone to disease, do not have access to adequate health care services and as a result, face many difficulties in controlling the virus.
Your Excellency,
You are well aware that one of these countries is Albania. A country that has housed about 2,500 members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK, MKO) in a remote and isolated camp outside Tirana.
Since the outbreak of the disease, there is no exact information about the health status of the people living in the camp, despite numerous letters and expressions of concern from the families about the ambiguous health status of the camp, as well as the news that several people died of Covid-19 virus.
On the anniversary of the establishment of the World Health Organization, we, the families of those stationed in the MEK Camp in Albania, are increasingly concerned.
Therefore, in line with this year’s slogan of the World Health Organization, we desperately ask you to help us families to contact and get information about the situation of our loved ones in Albania.
A group of families of members of the MEK from Yazd province in Iran
CC:
Honorable representative of the World Health Organization in Iran
Honorable representative of the World Health Organization in Albania
Mr. Ali Asghar Rasekhi sent a complaint to the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances:
United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances,
I respectfully inform you that we have been unaware of my brother Ali Rasekhi, who is a member of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK, MKO), for 40 years. I only met him once in 2004 at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. But then once in 2015, I went to a camp near Baghdad airport, which was guarded by American forces, but the officials of the organization did not allow me to visit and talk to my brother.
I have been informed that the MEK has been transferred to a camp in Albania. Unfortunately, there is no possibility for families to contact this camp, and the Albanian government has left all our letters unanswered and does not grant Iranians visas to travel to that country and pursue the matter.
I ask that international organization to investigate our complaint and provide a means for us to contact Ali Rasekhi and find out about his condition.
Thanks
Ali Asghar Rasekhi
Iran – Qom
Mr. Esmail Taherkhani, the brother of Issa Taherkhani, who was detained in the MEK camp in Albania, wrote a letter to the World Health Organization requesting immediate action on his brother’s health.
The text of the letter is as follows:
Representative of the World Health Organization in Albania
Greetings and best regards
I am Esmail Taherkhani, the brother of Issa Taherkhani, who is apparently at this time in the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) camp in Albania.
My brother was captured by Iraqi forces during the Iran-Iraq war and was deceitfully transferred to the MEK camp in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule. I have not heard from my brother since then and the family has not been allowed to contact him.
Due to the outbreak of the coronavirus disease and its epidemic all over the world, especially in Albania, according to the latest media reports, several dozen members of this group have died of the Covid-19 virus in recent weeks. They were buried in the local Manëz (Manzë) cemetery in Durrës, Albania.
The MEK, which operates a camp on the outskirts of Tirana, does not allow journalists and doctors to enter the area and works with patients with coronavirus disease and deaths outside the protocols of the World Health Organization and the Albanian government.
This has raised our concerns about the health of a large number of members, most of whom are elderly and over 60 years old. We have to wait for a humanitarian catastrophe in the Manëz area of Tirana and endanger the health of hundreds of thousands of people in this area and its neighboring areas, because the camp where the MEK members are based is completely closed and people have group life and are not allowed to have communication with their families. Also, the Albanian government does not grant visas to Iranians at the request of the MEK leaders to travel to that country and follow the issue closely.
I desperately urge you not to neglect any action that is imagined in order to alleviate the worries of me and my expectant family, so that news of my brother will reach us and we will be able to communicate. Please do not hesitate to take any action and follow up in this regard.
Thanks a lot
Esmail Taherkhani
Qazvin – Iran