Dublin, April 12 An analysis conducted for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue has found an Iranian information operation that seem to be allegedly targeting Ireland. During the analysis, certain impersonated social media accounts linked to Iran, Russia and China were found to be posting about Ireland.
It was revealed that those might be a part of Storm-2035 -- a covert influence operation affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said Ciaran O'Connor, a researcher and journalist in The Irish Times.
The accounts' profile location data reflected that the platform was being accessed via Iran.
Moreover, it came to the fore that AI platforms like Chat GPT was being used to create content to criticise the US and Israel and express solidarity with Iran and Palestine.
O'Connor said that in recent years, public figures from the UK and North America have sharpened their focus on Ireland.
"They exploit events in Ireland with disingenuous and alarmist framing to promote their own agenda, target our public institutions and depict Ireland as a draconian police state," he said in the Ireland daily.
However, he added that in the digital age how many state-backed foreign actors are involved in targeting Ireland, remains under-explored.
Giving a detailed information about their analysis, O'Connor said that four X accounts impersonating Irish people were identified last year.
He emphasised that none of them consisted of any evidence to suggest that they were real.
Moreover, people operating the accounts claimed to be recent converts to Islam and all of them "dreamed of a united Ireland".
What proves O'Connor's and the research's theory is the fact that all the accounts posted almost exclusively about former IRGC Major General Qasem Soleimani, in the days preceding the sixth anniversary of his assassination.
"Over the course of five days, all four accounts posted near identical statements that celebrated Soleimani. Similarly, during June 2025, the four posted celebratory statements about the then Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei," the journalist said.
O’Connor added that the activity linked to Russia was "highly dispersed".
He wrote that a distribution pipeline in the country helps to launder content from state media, often sanctioned in the European Union (EU).
"This spreads through affiliated outlets and websites masquerading as legitimate news outlets which, crucially, are not sanctioned," he said.
"Moreover, the analysis revealed that migration in Ireland was used as a backdrop by a constellation of state-backed and state-aligned entities for promoting claims about the fragility of Western governments, the alleged degradation of sovereignty within the EU and the "failure of liberal democratic institutions"," O'Connor said in the Irish Times.
The research found the most curious activity had a link with China.
It found a Facebook page named 'CGTN Gaeilge', having the label "China state controlled media" and hence appearing to be run by the country's state-run media channel China Global Television Network (CGTN).
According to O'Connor's report, before July 2025, this page had a different name, CGTN Malagasy, and it was allegedly used to link to CGTN reporting about Madagascar. Then, last summer, it was renamed CGTN Gaeilge, the report noted.
The Irish Times revealed that following the rebranding of the page, "it began publishing English and Irish language content about China and Ireland, using language that appears to be machine-translated".
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor