The Make America Great Again movement is confronting a new and insidious threat. The U.S. political right has become the target of a coordinated foreign influence campaign — led by Russia and Iran — that uses social media bots to spread conspiracy theories online. These foreign troll farms aim to sow mistrust, deepen divisions, stir chaos, and ultimately ‘destabilize MAGA from within.’
The Network Contagion Research Institute is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that searches for, identifies, and analyzes extremism on the internet. The group’s stated mission is “to track, expose, and combat misinformation, deception, manipulation and hate across social media channels.”
After noticing some puzzling rhetoric in the social media posts of self-identified “MAGA supporters,” the NCRI conducted an investigation and published their findings on Wednesday. Their report, titled False Flags and Fake MAGA: How Foreign and Inauthentic Networks use Fake Speech to Destabilize the Right from Within, can be viewed here.
NCRI researchers found that a coordinated group of Russians and Iranians, impersonating MAGA supporters, has been flooding social media with propaganda that’s intended to sow division among conservatives in the U.S. over the Israel-Iran war. These false narratives are then amplified by tens of thousands of social media bots.
[Note: Cloudflare defines social media bots as “automated accounts designed to interact with users and content, often mimicking human behavior. … Some are benevolent, but most are used for malicious and manipulative purposes,” as they are in this case.]
NCRI researchers have seen these types of operations before, shortly after a major news event, particularly a crisis, has been reported.
[These initiatives are intended to] trigger an immediate surge in online “false flag” discourse, emerging within minutes of initial reports and aimed at recasting the events as evidence of hidden conspiratorial plots, obscuring the true motives and perpetrators.In the days following these crises, Kremlin-affiliated propagandists and Iranian state-linked media are able to rapidly inject narratives that are taken up by MAGA-impostor influencers [humans], who then inject them into MAGA-branded spaces [via social media bots], often within minutes of breaking news.
And just like that, their preferred new narrative — aimed at “destabilizing the [American] right from within” — enters the social media discourse.
An NCRI analyst told the New York Post (the first media outlet to report on this study), “If you talk to Republicans right now, more than 80 percent of them support the war against Iran. But if you go on Twitter you get the sense that there is a civil war raging.” He added, “This is exactly the purpose of the psychological operation — to destabilize people’s perceptions of institutions that are supposed to protect us.”
The bots create the illusion that extreme viewpoints have far more support than they actually do, which can influence unsuspecting social media users into believing the content is real. They generally use generic, unremarkable names and craft profiles designed to resemble everyday Americans.
According to the report, “during one such activation window, 650,000 posts citing false flag conspiracies drew nearly four million interactions, powered by a pipeline of Kremlin-affiliated propagandists, spam-bot networks, and domestic influencers.”
Following President Trump’s recent public spat with Elon Musk:
The same network first turned inward to smear Donald Trump with accusations of pedophilia and Epstein ties, deploying the same bot-driven infrastructure that had amplified false-flag narratives days earlier. In the lead-up to the war with Iran, this network then pivoted outward and amplified false Iranian claims that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was operating under foreign control, echoing Tehran’s strategic messaging.This constitutes a systematic effort to impersonate MAGA-adjacent audiences, fracture right-leaning coalitions, and repurpose nationalist symbols in service of foreign subversion. Such a network operates as a constant amplification system driven by foreign seeding accounts, inauthentic engagement farms, and U.S. influencers.
NCRI explains how two MAGA-impostor influencers, Noctis Draven, “who is a regular consultant for Kremlin media,” and his colleague, Megatron, tried to spread the “false flag conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the deaths” of two Israeli embassy staff members outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., last month.
Noctis Draven reposted an earlier post from Megatron which said, “The shooter that killed the Israeli embassy staff in Washington reportedly yelled ‘Free Palestine.'”
In his repost, Noctis Draven remarked: “They even made sure to leave him alive and unharmed and they MADE SURE to get that shot of him saying, ‘Free Palestine.’ … Guys, if you can’t tell this is a false flag, I don’t know what to tell you.”
NCRI reported, “Combined views exceeded 4.7M within hours, illustrating how foreign seeding and domestic amplification work in tandem to hijack crisis narratives.”
The report said “@AdameMedia amplified the narrative hours later and repeatedly throughout the day with widespread engagement.” The post read:
The world was turning on Israel.The media was turning on Israel.Politicians were turning on Israel.Everyone was racing to be on record as being against Israel.Then this false flag happens.And its all labelled antisemitism.Genius.
Similarly, after Egyptian national Mohamed Sabry Soliman attacked demonstrators at a peaceful event to support Israeli hostages held in Gaza with a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails in Boulder, Colorado, earlier this month, the group sprang into action.
An influencer posted a photo of Soliman on X with the caption: “This man is not a Muslim. This man is not called Mohammed. This man is an Israeli agent who has just perpetrated a false flag event in Boulder Colorado. It is all theater. Period.”
And the charade began anew.
The NCRI report says, “Domestic personalities with large but unstable followings … supply a veneer of grassroots legitimacy, completing an ‘asset-adjacency’ model in which fringe US influencers ride the same engagement farms that propel Kremlin messaging.”
The report delves much deeper into the mechanics of these operations, offering detailed analysis and screenshots of the posts cited as examples. It’s a highly eye-opening read that lays bare just how sophisticated and targeted these influence campaigns have become. It reveals a digital battlefield most people don’t even realize they’re standing on.
Because clearly, we needed one more thing to stress over.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn or X.
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