Iraq: An Anti LGBTQ Campaign Led by Al Sadr and An Army of Bots

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Reports and Investigations

Iraq: An Anti LGBTQ Campaign Led by Al Sadr and An Army of Bots

Dec. 19, 2022 | AFH

This is part of a series of investigative reports published in collaboration with Daraj media

Arabi Facts Hub 29.12.2022

Amid escalating controversy over homosexuality, especially in light of the 2022 Football World Cup in Qatar , Muqtada Al Sadr, the kingmaker, launched an anti-LGBTQ campaign in Iraq to “combat homosexuality by way of raising awareness without resorting to violence”. Groups supporting Muqtada Al Sadr picked up the initiative and supportive hashtags followed.

Iraqi shīʿite religious figure, Muqtada Al Sadr, launched a campaign to combat homosexuality through “raising awareness and increasing intellect” with a “pledge to refrain from the use of violence in any way, so long as such is not legalized in our countries and conservative societies”; according to a statement published by him on Twitter. Since its launch by Al Sadr on 30 November 2022, the campaign became active on social media networks and chatting applications using hashtags across facebook, twitter, and some private telegram channels.

Perhaps Al Sadr attempted to make use of the focus on gay rights, both in mainstream media and virtual space on the sidelines of Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup. A number of European football teams had expressed that they will wear “one love” armbands during their World Cup games amid a wave of criticism to Qatar’s stance on LGBT rights. Meanwhile, Qatar stated that it welcomes all, and requested a show of respect to the traditions and conventions of Arab society at the same time. European teams then backed off from this idea following a warning by the FIFA that it would impose sanctions on players who wear the armband.

Arabi Facts Hub has monitored Al Sadr’s virtual campaign since its launch. While Al Sadr supporters were moving on the ground to obtain signatures, a coordinated online activity was in motion with the goal of emphasizing the campaign’s narrative and gaining reach, through the use of fake accounts, according to our analysis. We take a closer look at these interactions and the most prominent participants.

Awareness without violence

Amid controversy over LGBTQ rights, a campaign by the “kingmaker” appeared in Iraq to “confront homosexuality through awareness instead of violence”. Groups supportive to Muqtada Al Sadr picked the thread and soon after supportive hashtags started to emerge.

Arabi Facts Hub has monitored accounts that are supportive of Muqtada Al Sadr and which tried to increase the volume of the the campaign such as on the hashtag “Religions_Against_LGBTQ”, which was one of the most significant of these hashtags, reaping 6323 tweets, 65408 retweet, and 63518 likes in December 2022.

The following statistics show that the number of retweets (shown in blue in the figure below) exceeds that of the original tweets (shown in orange), which indicates a coordinated activity.

A graph from Sna – InVID showing interactions on the hashtag “Religions_Against_LGBTQ”, the blue color indicates retweeting or quote-tweeting activity, while the orange color indicates the original tweets

Account created around the same time

1625 accounts participated in this campaign, 1438 of which were created in recent years, starting 2020. The year 2020 saw the largest account creation, as 949 accounts [of the 1625 tweeting accounts] were created in 2020. 14 new accounts were created in December 2022, the months of October and November 2022 saw the creation of 128 new accounts each.

What is interesting here is not just the novelty of accounts carrying avatars of Muqtada Al Sadr and his minister Mohammed Saleh Al Iraqi, or stock photos of people and flowers, rather it is that these accounts all share the same content in support of Al Sadr and in opposition to the current Iraqi government.

A look at the timing of launch of these accounts shows that they were created within minutes from one another, which is another indication of fake activity.

For example, this account @zxwjzlpy0jtwi3i was created at 05:16 pm on December 2nd, preceded followed by @ya80kow0omtswex which was created at 05:14 pm on the same day. Similarly, @asdrmomhd was created at 08:26 pm on November 1st, followed by @sahbalzman773 4 minutes later at 08:30 pm.

Some accounts have numbers that follow each other, such as the account @zxwjzlpy0jtwi3i which carries the handle “Abbas Sa’d 7”, while the account that was created around the same time, @ya80kow0omtswex carries the name “Abbas Sa’d 6, and there are accounts that descend in numbers to “Abbas Sa’d 2”, all of which were created within close intervals of each other between October and December. An account carrying the name of “Diaa Al Anzi” also has versions ending with the numbers 2, 3, and 4.

In the following screenshots you can see how these accounts had stopped tweeting for days, with the last common tweet being a photo of Al Sadr with the hashtag “Morocco_the_hope_of_Arab_victory” published on December 6th. The hashtag was used by Al Sadr himself when the Moroccan football team won their game with Spain and qualified to the quarter final of the 2022 World Cup.

The rate of tweeting was noticeably high. On the first day of its creation, these accounts tweeted between 298 and 500 tweets.

An army of bots

Several fake accounts with avatars depicting Al Sadr, or stock photos, and sharing similar content, participated in a tweet campaign through the main hashtag. Participants used a trick to appear real to users and evade Twitter’s bot detection technology. This consisted of dividing the tweeting network into groups, so that one group would publish content such as a statement or video at an exact moment, say 08:52 pm, and then stop so that a second group would then publish the same statement or content at another time. Then the first group publishes another statement and is followed by the second group and so on. On the other hand, some accounts are programmed to publish content at different time intervals, so that the same statement is published from a different account every minute in a given hour. We have also noticed that one fake account can be programmed to publish two different tweets in a one minute interval.

Telegram channels lead the campaign

Telegram is widely used in Iraq. Iraqi factions and their supporters typically use the application to gain reach and mobilization during political events, or for the launch of electronic campaigns. The popularity of Telegram has led to its use by ministries and official agencies as well.

Al Sadr supporters used Telegram channels to promote a campaign against LGBT rights. Some of these channels were public and some were private. An example of a private Telegram channel is “The First Platform”, which requires an application before a member could join and gain access to its content.

“The First Platform” channel was promoted during this last campaign and new members were invited through the Facebook group “Supporters of the Reformer”. The group’s bio states that its purpose is to “gain knowledge, including on tweeting strategies, to confront the LGBTQ community that is active on Twitter, promote your accounts, and train on arguing with them using reason, and evidence.”

Some of the channels were familiar from other campaigns such as “ATwitter Calling”, which actively urged its members to tweet on the designated hashtags. These channels specify what their members should publish on twitter or other social media platforms. This is what the channel with over 20,000 members did. “A Twitter Calling” shared the post below with its members, implying that they should share it as it is on Twitter. The tweet that the channel shared stated that “homosexuality is unnatural behavior that damages health and society”, tying homosexuality to HIV/AIDS through an infographic containing the symptoms of the disease.

The tweet was shared on the Telegram channel at 08:48 pm on December 2nd, 2022. Minutes after, it started appearing on Twitter in a repetitive manner around 9 pm.

The channel deployed religious texts to promote its campaign and gain wide support against homosexuality. It made these texts available for publishing in ready-made designs carrying the channel’s name and logo.

The campaign was also used politically to attack the current Iraqi government, led by Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' Al Sudani, who is supported by the Coordination Framework which has close ties to Iran. Over the past few months, Al Sudani led a vicious political battle with Al Sadr’s camp in order to be able to head the government.

Some tweets blamed the nascent government for what they called an “invasion” by the rainbow flag of Iraqi school books. This is according to a post on a Facebook group carrying the name of Al Sadr’s minister, Mohammed Saleh Al Iraqi: “Under the government of the Shīʿite Coordination Framework, the rainbow flag has invaded children’s school books in Iraq. The ninth grade English Language textbook shows the rainbow flag on page 14.”

Other hashtags emerged on Twitter and Facebook with similar content, some were active over different days, in what seemed like a coordinated effort to maintain activity.

Some of the Twitter hashtags included:

# No to the LGBTQ community: 8326 tweets, 29718 retweets, and 53686 likes.

# With Al Sadr We Combat Homosexuality: 1235 tweets, 2135 retweets, and 3398 likes

# Human nature rejects LGBTQ: 2852 tweets, 29086 retweets, and 22590 likes.

In parallel, there was a campaign on the ground to hang posters and gather signatures from citizens and faction leaders on a form titled “Combatting the LGBTQ Community”.

In summary, the following are the takeaways from this analysis:

There is unoriginal and coordinated activity that seeks to emphasize volume and impact.
The use of Telegram channels to recruit for and launch a campaign against the LGBTQ community.
Twitter and Facebook were the end goals for the activity on the Telegram channels, as the coordinators realized that Twitter is the platform containing the most supportive narrative in terms of LGBTQ rights.
A network of fake accounts were used to gain momentum for the campaign and appear as having large influence.
The existence of repetitive content on Twitter despite attempts to change publishing times and use different accounts.
The accounts participating in this campaign were part of previous campaigns.
The existence of a coordinated effort including training to participants on how to use Twitter and appear in trends, based on discussions on the closed Telegram channel “The First Platform”.