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On April 27, 2023, a Telegram account associated with Yemen's Iran-backed Ansar Allah Movement (the Houthis) published a poster calling on supporters to participate in an online campaign using English and Arabic hashtags. The call generated some noticeable traction on Twitter.
Anti-U.S. Call To Action
The poster depicts the Statue of Liberty with a skull for a face, against the ruins of a city, superimposed with blood and red stripes. The text blames the U.S. for the humanitarian crisis Yemen faces today:
"It feeds on war. It obstructs reconciliation and perpetuates treachery. It is America, and no one else, who is leading the aggression against Yemen. With its weapons, it kills and besieges the Yemeni people."
It then calls on supporters to participate in a Twitter campaign using the aforementioned hashtags in English and Arabic.
The poster also features a QR code for users to scan as well as a bit.ly link, both leading to a website page with pre-written tweets in English, which supporters can tweet from their accounts. The page featured a timer which as of this writing, shows that 22 hours have passed since the launch of the campaign.
The poster calls on users to begin using the suggested hashtags to post at 9:00 (no time zone specified) on April 27, 2023, providing the date using both the Hijri and Gregorian calendars.
Dissemination And Themes
MEMRI JTTM detected 1,475 tweets from 227 unique users featuring the hashtags in the last 11 hours.
The majority of the posts hit on familiar anti-U.S. themes, with a focus on Yemen and its involvement in the ongoing war between the Iran-backed Houthis and the UAE- and Saudi-backed government.
Several specific narratives emerge from the tweets, including claims that U.S.-imposed restrictions on banking and imports, the sale of U.S. weapons to parties in the conflict, and alleged U.S. diplomatic efforts undermined peace negotiations.[2]
Suspicious Patterns
The apparent reach of the campaign s far has been skewed by a relatively small number of users posting multiple times using the hashtag. Of the 227 unique posters, 74 posted more than once. Thirty-five posted five or more times, while 25 users were responsible for 1,159 posts.
Behavior shown by some of these accounts raises questions about the authenticity of this activity. For example, one user posted 205 times using the hashtags from the poster, but generated no original content prior to March 23, 2023, despite having ostensibly joined the site in November 2023.
Some of the content shared by the account is in English, while all other descriptions and text generated by the account is not.[3]
Another user, who posted 89 times, only joined the site in March 2023, posting almost exclusively pro-Iran, pro-Houthi, anti-Israel political content.[4]
Other examples of questionable accounts abound. For example, a user posted seven lengthy posts in the span of a minute, with multiple posts including links or multiple media attachments, suggesting the possibility of a managed or automated account.[5]
[1] Telegram, April 27, 2023.
[2] Twitter, April 28, 2023.
[3] Twitter, April 28, 2023
[4] Twitter, April 28, 2023.
[5] Twitter, April 28, 2023.
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