Fake Iranian Twitter accounts directed Scottish nationalists to a conspiracy news site which sparked a “nuclear” spat between Israel and Pakistan, new research suggests.
This week the social media giant identified Russian and Iranian accounts behind more than nine million tweets, raising fresh concerns over authoritarian regimes trying to interfere in UK politics.
Analysts from the Altantic Council, a think-tank linked to Nato, have concluded that there were "co-ordinated" pushes for a Leave vote in 2016 and some activity around Scottish independence two years earlier.
However, the raw data dump has also helped expose links between Iran and fake news.
The news website ThinkProgress used the new data dump from Twitter to plot connections between Twitter accounts appealing to Scottish independence supporters and AWD News, a site accused by fact-checking service Snopes of "playing on nationalistic fantasy and conspiracy theory to create alarming (and thus clickable and shareable) stories".
ThinkProgress found Iranian twitter accounts pushing links to AWD News which has, among other things, previously sparked a brief escalation of nuclear tensions between Israel and Pakistan.
READ MORE: Rangers fans, Janey Godley and the emir of Qatar; a Twitter mystery
An AWD story in 2016 said that Israel's defence minister had threatened to destroy Pakistan with a nuclear attack if the largely Muslim country send troops to Syria. The claim was false. Pakistan's defence minister nevertheless took to Twitter to threaten Israel with retaliation.
Scottish political parties have all warned of the dangers of "troll farms" - indistrial-scale groups of fake social media accounts.
The SNP has accused Kremlin trolls of posing as Scottish nationalists to attack First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on Twitter.
The page, which was called Free Scotland 2014 and had more than 20,000 followers, was one of the most popular on the social media site devoted to Scottish independence.
It was also among a string of bogus pages which connected to fake “news” sites, including Quest 4 Truth which is linked to Iran’s main propaganda source, Press TV.
However, Scotland is only on the edge of industrial-scale misinformation campaigns mounted by Russia and Iran. Both governments and their proxies have focused on campaigns closer to their core policy interests, researchers suggest.
Ben Nimmo, of the Atlantic Council, analysed all the Russian and Iranian tweets released. The main focus of Iranian tweeting was Saudi Arabia, its main regional rival. Scotland did not feature prominently.
Social media this week meanwhile has lit up with bots supporting crown prince of Saudia Arabia. This comes after disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who is widely belueved to have been killed after criticising the prince.
BBC Monitoring this week recorded widespread retweeting of hashtags supporting the current Saudi regime, including one trying to close the Al Jazeera news station, which is based in Qatar.
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