← The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
Iran's information war: the battle for control of the internet
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- [00:03]
A
Sky News, the full story. First, We have our Internet connection back since today. This week, the Internet returned partially back in Iran. And after weeks of a blackout, we're starting to get a sense of the brutality that took place, especially around January 8 and 9. We are. We were all depressed because we knew. We saw the massive killing live in.
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B
Front of our eyes.
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A
We witnessed everything. Horrifying stories are emerging, especially from hospitals, from mortuaries, from cemeteries where body bags, thousands of body bags have been emerging. The Iranian authorities in power since 1979 have regularly used the Internet as a tool against protesters. And they've shut it down many times, especially since 2019, to control the population and inflict the kind of brutality that we have seen over the course of the last few weeks. It's really weak. The connection comes and goes, but is not stable. Of course, it has spent millions of dollars to centralize the Internet system so that they can control it. We didn't know that it happened in.
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B
Every spot of our country.
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A
It is really hard to tolerate that they killed everybody.
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B
I'm sorry.
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A
I really want to understand the mechanics of the shutdown. How does it work and why is it so important for the regime to control it? Mahsa Ali Mardani is Iranian. She was born in Canada, but spent some time growing up in Iran. She witness the 2009 Green Revolution there where technology was used to suppress protesters. That is what inspired her work today in the disinformation space and now here in the UK she is an associate director of technology threats at Witness. During these protests, she's worked with human rights organizations to verify the videos coming out of Iran. Mahsa says that AI has never been used to such an extent as it has during these particular protests. I'm Yalda Hakim and as always, you can send me your questions the usual place. Theworldatsky.uk and welcome to this episode of the World Podcast. Mahsa, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Like all regimes, this regime, like all authoritarian regimes and dictatorships, controlling narratives, information, propaganda is part of the tools that they use. Just help us understand over the course of the last 40 plus years how that has evolved in Iran and how information was disseminated, was controlled right from the very beginning.
- [03:07]
B
So it's interesting, in 2009 really was the spark for how technology and the Internet can help you witness and document a social movement. And one of the very first global Internet shutdowns happened in Iran in 2009. When the regime realized the power of the Internet. They were always A little bit hesitant and worried about how it was being introduced. And of course the Internet wasn't like how it was introduced in North Korea. Iranians very quickly had access because the government wasn't ready and didn't have that infrastructure. So after 2009, you saw a very fast consolidation and a lot of fast pooling of resources to them, trying to centralize control. They started creating bodies like the Supreme Council for Cyberspace and really turning the Internet into this national security question. And you know, Fast forward to 2019 when we had a week long Internet shutdown in Iran.
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A
That was the first time.
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B
It wasn't the first time we had an Internet shutdown. It was the first time we had such a prolonged Internet shutdown. Right. So I mean, before, basically since 2017, on average every two years there's been some sort of uprising against the regime. It's been sparked by something like an economic crisis. But each time they had different types of information controls, very heavy disruptions across the network that would basically make it impossible to use the Internet or sudden censorship of popular applications. So telegram got censored. In 2017, it was the 2017, 2018 protests, Telegram got censored. Extremely popular. Some people would even say Telegram was the Internet for Iranians up until then. And then during Woman Life freedom, we saw WhatsApp and Instagram censored. So increasingly they kept on cutting off any sort of popular application that was helping people with mobilization or getting their authentic voices out to the fore. In 2019, again, a very prominent uprising happened and they shut down the Internet and they shut it down for about six days. And under which, you know, the COVID of that shutdown, 1500 protesters were massacred. It's very still very hard to document exactly the death toll, but that's what the minimum number is said to be. And of course they use this as a means to commit their crimes and to put down a popular uprising. And then again in 2022, it was a bit different because 2022, it was sparked by the killing of Masagina Amini. Of course, I know you know this well. And it was a bit of a more prolonged movement. Right. So it was sparked mid October and it was, went on into, well into 2023. And we saw different forms of control. So they had mobile curfews, because during the times when people would be out on the streets, they would shut off mobile connectivity. Or in certain provinces where things were quite intense, like Sistan and Baluchistan, we saw prolonged Internet shutdowns. And some of the bloodiest Massacres of the woman life. Freedom happened there.
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A
Talk me through that. You know, how it emerged, the killing of Mahsa Amini, those images and then the confrontation between the regime and protesters.
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B
Yeah, of course. I mean, it became a women led revolution. It was very powerful to see what the women were doing, taking off their headscarf, you know, defying brutal security forces by doing this. So I do know that it was a moment that captured global attention to have that, you know, the defiant Iranian women and this ability to stand up to the government. And it was very powerful because that movement did have, you know, some lasting impact because the regime in some ways knows that the people are not afraid of them. They used to be afraid. They used to want to toe the line to avoid their brutality. But there are so many people who basically have let go of the fear. And so it became kind of everyday resistance. Even after, you know, the uprising and the protests kind of simmered down. The fact that you had, I mean, just within my own network, so many women that were dealing with the finds of the cameras on the streets, recording them, getting the text messages that their hijab was not, you know, properly held up. I mean, Amnesty had done great reporting on this, but like the defiance and still, you know, just dealing with it, dealing with the, the state regulations and the inconvenience. Like, so many women had their cars impounded because they were caught on camera. But, you know, that kind of fear was broken and people kept on defying it. And it's incredible to see it now because, I mean, on January 8, when the shutdown happened, that was the darkest.
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A
Period, January 8 and 9 that weekend. But if we talk about, you know, you talked about the Internet shutdown, the longest period in 2019, and then it happened again in 2022. The state apparatus, like, how is the decision made to shut down? You know, who makes the decision? Is it. Is it the council? Is it the irgc, the Revolutionary Guard, who within the system says, okay, this is it. This is getting out of control. These images are, you know, being broadcast around the world and within Iran. We need to manage and control this. Go into some kind of cris management where they shut the Internet down, which, by the way, we'll talk about the, the economic impact it has as well, because it shuts the entire country down.
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B
Yeah. So it becomes a national security issue. It's a decision within Supreme National Security Council that's taken. And it's kind of a multi government body that involves many different ministries, including the presidency. But ultimately they don't have the biggest say within the Supreme National Security Council. So they decide as a matter of national security with these ones. I think they were prepared. They knew that they had the shut. They didn't wait to see like what was going to come out. They knew that on January 8th because.
- [09:39]
A
Reza Pahlavi, the Crown Prince made this announcement telling people to go out onto the streets.
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B
It was a viral announcement. I think there were some others, like Kurdish political parties also had some of these calls. So it was kind of expected what was happening. And just before the shutdown happened there was incredible videos coming out like crowds you have never seen before on popular streets. Like I'm not even sure if we had that level of People mobilized in 2009 across many cities across Iran. So it was really incredible. Just that like brief moment before it shut down. And then of course they broke their own record. They broke the six day record from 2019 and they went on for over two weeks. I mean up until today there's been some connectivity and some people coming back online. But yeah, the fact that we were, we had that small window through the availability of satellite Internet gave us some insight and has been helping with some of this documentation. And you know, I've been trying to, you know, go through the information fog and Iran often is quite a complex place to navigate when it comes to documentation, evidence, footage.
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A
I was reading somewhere where you were saying that, you know, it's probably one of the most sophisticated the regime in terms of how they use disinformation, how they use AI and all of these technological tools that are now at, you know, in their reach to not just control the population but control the messaging that's going out. Talk us through that. Because you've talked about how the 12 day war between Israel and Iran last year was almost like a turning point where you saw, you know, an information war from both sides being used as that war was progressing.
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B
Yeah, it's really interesting because the 12 Day War happened about a couple weeks after Google launched VO3, which was extremely sophisticated generative AI model, very accessible to the point that you could see some regime clearly like regime backed accounts, Iranian Islamic Republic regime. I mean with the VO3 watermark on some of the videos they were trying to pass off. And of course we saw some very sophisticated efforts from the Israeli side. It was kind of propaganda war was happening.
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A
Can you give me like specific examples of moments where you, you know, to the naked eye it probably looked quite real and it was going viral on, on social platforms, on digital platforms. But you and your Teams were looking at it going, this isn't. This isn't real.
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B
Yeah. So during that war, the most notable example that media actually I think fell for was when Israel bombed Evan prison. And immediately an account put out a very powerful a video of the bomb just very precisely striking the gates, as if they were just opening the gates. And the narrative was from the Israeli campaign that they were freeing the political prisoners because, as you know, even is filled with famous activists and political prisoners and some of the greatest minds in Iran. And so that was the narrative when in fact they did actually hurt political prisoners in the process. And it wasn't as precise, but that video suddenly was spread. I think various mainstream media had it in their headlines showing the image from the video.
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A
And Mahsa, you know, we often hear phrases like troll farms and, you know, a lot of these states having just hundreds of people who are scanning, you know, digital platforms, social platforms, and then fighting that disinformation, is that sort of what exists within the regime as well?
- [13:43]
B
So if you spend any time on Persian social media, which I hope you don't, because it's a wild place, but you know, of a common trope, which is cyber accounts exist on Persian social media, especially on X. So cyber accounts are regime accounts, regime trolls that pretend to be members of the opposition. And there's been evidence, there's a very well known leak because, you know, the cyber operations that the regime employs, there's like various consultants and firms they hire across different government institutions. Like they love to launder money across all these different projects. So one, at one point, one consultant or someone tied to one of these operations leaked a video of what one of these dashboards looks like for Twitter. And they have invested the most money on Twitter X and the dashboard had all of these different identities that you would have within the opposition. It was Moja Dina Khalq, which is the militant and controversial opposition group, Monarchist Identity. I think they even had reformist identity or secular opposition or leftist opposition. They had all of these identities on the dashboard and they would show like, okay, we're going to attack someone as MEK or we're going to attack someone and undermine this person in the opposition as a monarchist. So this is quite common.
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A
And is there awareness that that's happening? Are these accounts sort of known or does it actually sow confusion and chaos?
- [15:25]
B
Yes, both. There's been some well known cases where we have seen these cyber accounts like become very evident. So in 2023, as Women Life Freedom evolved at one point in 2023, the movement were a lot of protests outside of prisons. So there was a very fast mobilization for a few days outside of a prison in Karaj because one of the protesters was about to be executed. And if you follow these stories, it's always like, will they, won't they? Oh, we're going to take it back. And there was a momentum where the protests and a lot of international focus on preventing one of those executions from happening in Karaj had a lot of momentum and people really thought that they could stop it with enough attention and protests. And then suddenly this well known kind of opposition account in Iran, if you're operating from Iran, you have to be anonymous. It was called Jupiter, had a lot of followers. I think it had something like 300,000 follow. And people often turn to it as a credible source from on the ground. And it put out this news story that the hanging judge, I think his name is Abul Qassem Salavati, very famous judge who passes out the execution sentences and has sentenced very famous political prisoners known as hanging judge, has been assassinated by an activist in Tehran. And I think at one point even like well known Western mainstream media pushed out this headline that this may have happened in Tehran and the world's attention and everyone's attention goes on this possible assassination that would be a win for opposition because so deeply hated this man. And it turns out this was complete disinformation. And the account people started looking into it and they realized this account was a cyber account.
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A
Wow. When they actually thought it was a credible account for the opposition.
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B
And I believe X took it down.
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A
And in this current round of protests, are there images that come to mind where you think immediately you thought, this isn't real, this is being pushed out by the regime or the protesters, you know, from the other side. Are we seeing things, an information war taking place between the two sides now?
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B
Yeah. So, I mean, the most interesting thing is the prevalence and role of the former Crown Prince. And this has been a very controversial topic in terms of, you know, how popular is he really? And there was one form of disinformation that started that a lot of the footage of the chants were fake, that the like, monarchists were putting over the chants on these videos. And it was really interesting to see and do a deep dive on this and to see the people who were kind of calling out the like, manipulated audio were the ones who like first shared it. And my deep dive into some of them made me believe that more than likely they were cyber A accounts that had started the rumor that oh, this is a fake video. But like you, you created the fake video and you created the accusation. And then it became part of all of these information networks and connected accounts related to the regime that were perpetuating this rumor. So there were a lot of those.
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A
And how would you say then over the course of the last 20 years the role that AI has is now playing and these tools that you say the regime has access to, changing the way in which they are selling their own messaging essentially.
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B
So this is one of the things I spend a lot of time working on at Witness, because we've trying to preserve truth and documentation and video and audio, visual content. And this is something my colleague Sam Gregory has really pioneered the work in. And I mean back in, I believe it was 2021, he had called out that this emerging AI ecosystem is going to be a gift to authoritarians. And we have seen this very, very obviously with what's been happening in Iran. And so, you know, the accusations that a lot of the protest content are AI slop has been a big narrative that has been pushed by the regime, by people sympathetic to the regime, for example. And we were talking about symbolic viral protest imagery. There was something, another viral image from the very beginning of these protests. And that was the tank man image that came out, if you recall. I believe it was from December 28th. It was a Iranian protester sitting very defiantly in front of like a gang of security forces on motorcycles with weapons. And this was documented and verified by many credible sources. It was filmed from a very, from a high rise with like extreme zoom, very bad quality video and someone takes a screenshot of it to share because it's powerful. But AI editing software is used to enhance it. And folks might not know, but increasingly a lot of editing tools have AI incorporated into them. And if you Adobe has announced that like they're fully moving towards editing software that's integrated with AI. And so sometimes AI artifacts can come from AI editing. And so this authenticity real image had some like manipulation. Yeah. And so, and I think at some point this got picked up by, you know, the Israeli state Twitter account got picked up by a state department Twitter account. And then it became this narrative that this is all AI slop generated by Iran's enemies, when in fact it was real. And they could push this narrative forward because there's, there's generally a misunderstanding of how AI works.
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A
So tell us about C2PE. This sort of tool is it that protesters can use to self authenticate.
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B
Right. So Witness my organization like over a decade ago they started a project before AI even really became a major consideration. So Witness and this other human rights tech organization, Guardian Project, started this application called Proof Mode because, you know, authoritarian regimes have been trying to say evidence of their crimes have been lies forever. And so knowing this and trying to figure out how to use footage and documentation in ways that you could prove in court, we came up with this project called Proof Mode, which was trying to embed metadata into footage that protesters take in ways that, you know, couldn't be discounted with very, like, credible cryptographic certificates that say, like this was taken here on this phone at this time, so then you could use it in court. And the thinking behind Proof Mode really went into Witness trying to push and create this coalition of all the tech companies, most of the tech companies with major generative AI models and all the major companies with cameras. So there's a way to create a standard to kind of authenticate the content. And so that's one of the things we work on in terms of trying to create an ecosystem, especially as we move towards this AI world, where it's really hard to tell.
- [23:11]
A
To tell, yeah. I mean, certainly, you know, news organizations, I mean, we have verification modes as well. But actually, you know, when. When you're talking about things being picked up by the media a lot, it is. It is quite disturbing. When you assess the last few weeks and the kind of material that's come out from both sides, how much. What percentage would you say of stuff coming out is actually real? And is it a higher percentage? That's not. And how deeply worrying is that for you going forward?
- [23:43]
B
To be honest, I'm not really concerned that there's that much fake content coming out. It's more of how much of the content that you get can be used for accountability. So, for example, Human Rights Watch, many human rights organizations are doing very heroic documentation efforts to capture everything, especially during the Internet shutdown. They escalated a case a couple weeks ago about footage that documented security forces shooting directly at protesters. And the person who had shared the image had basically shared the video, had slowed it down at the moment to try to. Because it was like a very quick video in the middle of people being shot at. And they had slowed it down and we didn't have the original file. And so we had to do an AI forensics assessment within our deepfakes Rapid Response Force, which is something my team has. It's this coalition of various AI forensics experts with different abilities to assess audio images, facial features, or natural background. So it's a massive effort to do this kind of detection. And so we try to help because, you know, Human Rights Watch are like, we're. There are accusations, this is manipulated, so we need to prove to, like, what degree and sometimes there's a lot of uncertainty that this is authentic, that this is really capturing the fact that they were shooting at people with this weapon. So we do a lot of that kind of work.
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A
I know that, you know, Starlink has been used probably Most around the 2022 Women Life Freedom protests and again this time around. But one of the biggest problems that the protesters have is when the state shuts down the Internet, Starlink or no Starlink, working around it is really difficult for them to. They are in a complete blackout and occasionally they are able to get some information out. How much of a problem do you think that's going to remain for protesters going forward?
- [25:51]
B
So this issue of connectivity I've been working on for a long time. And on January 8th, when this was happening, I was like, I don't know what scale of brutality we're going to see, because shutdown like this only means horror. And there really needs to be a way. I mean, any Iranian will tell you in the diaspora, like feeling the trauma, what's happening secondhand, talking to people, I mean, talking, able to like, connect to some of my loved ones inside of Iran and like hearing just like everything has changed, you know, in terms of what, like what the scale of these massacres are. And like, we really need to reconceive how we think about these communication methods. We cannot be relying on infrastructure that a country can control for our communication, for our ability to get humanitarian aid. I mean, medical workers will tell you how difficult it's been to coordinate and to be able to help their patients, for protesters to get in touch with each other and the ability to document the truth, for Iranians to be able to voice their truth to the world without the regime having any kind of part in it. So how do we divest from these methods that an authoritarian regime can control? And of course, Starlink is this really promising idea that we can move away from these models of digital sovereignty where Internet infrastructure is in their hands. But yeah, it can be circumvented through this new model. And so Starlink provided a very small scale vision of what this could be. And if this could scale to all the Iranian people could really be a massive game changer. I mean, not just for Iranians, but for anyone facing any sort of repression against their voices, any sort of censorship.
- [27:55]
A
And you know, equally, it impacts, I mean, A shutdown like this does massive damage to the economy, which is, you know, the economic crisis was the crux and the beginning of this particular protest.
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B
That's how it started.
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A
The fact that, you know, they can shut down the Internet and then do billions of damage to Iran's economy and put people in a worse position when they come out. Not just the death toll, obviously, which is horrific, but people's daily lives will now be impacted because of this month long Internet shutdown or one that's lasted several weeks and it's not fully back either. Now it's something like 30 or 40% back. So it has all sorts of impact on people.
- [28:39]
B
I mean, I've only done deep dives on Internet policy and Internet budgeting, but just through studying digital repression and the hundreds of millions of dollars this regime has spent over the past two decades on trying to centralize and like useless projects like national applications that the government invested in trying to become like a Chinese WeChat that have failed. The amounts of money they've invested into these structures of repression and like the sophistication of this shutdown, the damage that they've done to themselves and to their people because of the shutdown, I just think imagine if they had invested this money in building a better Iran instead of investing in repression. It's really sad. And yeah, I hope we can. I mean we proposed this. We've launched the Coalition for Direct to Sell to work towards a way to scale access to the Internet and hopefully empower people to not to have those economic means as well by being connected to the global Internet.
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A
Mahsa, just finally, I mean, on a personal level, I wanted to ask you, I mean you talked about the fact that many of these protesters no longer have fear and we've seen the death toll continue to rise and we're still trying to figure out the numbers. But do you think also as far as the protesters are concerned, you know, repres tools or not, that are being used against them, they're going to find sort of their own tools and a way out of this.
- [30:14]
B
I have a lot of hope and belief in the Iranian people. I have zero hope in the regime, obviously. Yeah, I think they need a lot of support from the outside, whether it's through this investment in free Internet and developing the means for that. Yeah, I think they need a lot of support to ensure that they can have their authentic movements and their authentic vision for what Iran should be.
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A
Mahsa, really great to talk to you.
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B
Thank you so much for having me.
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A
So that was Mahsa Alimardani, associate director of technology threats at Witness. I'll be back with Richard next week as usual on the World podcast. Goodbye.