Over a span of several months, Iranian agents infiltrated Israeli activists' encrypted messaging apps, sending controversial content and directly messaging members in an apparent effort to stir up trouble and make community members wary of one another, according to a report by Israeli disinformation watchdog group FakeReporter.

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Director Achiya Schatz told The New York Times: "What was so smart and unprecedented about this was the way they moved through small group chats where no one would expect to find an Iranian agent. They really gained people's trust and slipped under the radar of Facebook, Twitter, and all the other tech companies."

It took anywhere from weeks to months before the Iranians' poor grammar and reluctance to meeting in person or speaking via telephone led the Israeli activists to report the Iranian accounts to FakeReporter.

A Shin Bet officer told The New York Times the intelligence agency had opened its own investigation into the disinformation campaign upon learning of it from FakeReporter.

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, removed several WhatsApp accounts tied to Iran after The New York Times contacted it about the evidence collected by FakeReporter. Confirming the accounts were tied to Iranian content the company removed earlier this year, a spokeswoman for the tech giant said: "Iranian-based threat actors are some of the more persistent and well-resourced groups attempting to operate online, including on our platform."

While many countries are believed to engage in such campaigns, FakeReporter was the first to demonstrate just how regimes penetrate small online communities as well as how disinformation campaigns operate on encrypted apps.

Similar campaigns could be underway in the United States, American intelligence agencies have warned. Last week, the US Justice Department announced it was blocking access to dozens of websites linked to Iranian disinformation campaigns. A US intelligence official told The New York Times authorities were keeping an eye on private messaging apps for such efforts.

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Facebook said that it had suspended more than 350 accounts and pages with about 1.4 million followers, the latest take-down in an ongoing effort to combat "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on its platform, and the first such activity it has linked to the Saudi government.

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Countries in the Middle East have increasingly turned to websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube to peddle covert political influence online.

Reuters detailed an expansive Iranian-backed campaign last year and Riyadh has been accused of using the same tactics to attack regional rival Qatar and spread disinformation following the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any involvement in Khashoggi's death and not responded to previous allegations about its activity on social media. Along with allies, it has imposed a trade and diplomatic boycott on Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism, which Qatar denies.

Facebook announces take-downs of "inauthentic behavior" as often as multiple times a month, but statements that directly link such behavior to a government are rare.

"For this operation, our investigators were able to confirm that the individuals behind this are associated with the government of Saudi Arabia," said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy.

"Any time we have a link between an information operation and a government, that's significant and people should be aware."

Facebook also said on Thursday it had suspended a separate network of more than 350 accounts linked to marketing firms in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. In that case it did not directly link the activity to a government.

Gleicher said the Saudi campaign operated on Facebook and its Instagram photo-sharing platform, primarily targeting countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Qatar, the UAE, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority.

The operation used fake accounts posing as those countries' citizens and pages designed to look like local news outlets. More than $100,000 was spent on advertisements, Facebook said.

"They would typically post in Arabic about regional news and political issues. They would talk about things like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – his internal and economic social reform plan, the successes of the Saudi armed forces, particularly during the conflict in Yemen," said Gleicher.

Social media companies are under increasing pressure to help stop illicit political influence online.

US intelligence officials have said that Russia used Facebook and other platforms to interfere in the 2016 US Presidential Election and are concerned it will do so again in 2020. Moscow denies such allegations.

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The department said the work done by @IranDisinfo largely conformed to the guidelines it laid out for projects it funds to counter foreign government propaganda. But, it said it suspended the funding after discovering recent tweets that violated those terms and would not resume it until the contractor responsible for the account ensures that all future activity meets the guidelines.

The identity of the person or group contracted to run the account or how much money it had received was not immediately clear.

When its funding was suspended, the year-old account, which says it was created with the goal of "exposing and countering disinformation from the Islamic Republic of Iran," had only a modest audience with fewer than 2,000 followers. At least some of those followers are fierce opponents of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal from which U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew last year.

The funding suspension was announced on Friday after several people targeted by @IranDisinfo pointed out what they called harassment by a U.S. government-linked account. They suggested they were being targeted for criticizing or questioning the Trump administration's hardline stance on Iran.

Among those criticized by the tweets, which have now been deleted, were a researcher for Human Rights Watch, a Washington Post columnist, a BBC journalist and a professor at Georgetown University, according to Negar Mortazavi, an Iranian-American commentator who was also targeted.

Mortazavi published a lengthy series of tweets with screenshots of the offending @IranDisinfo posts on Thursday.

The project is funded by the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which was created by Congress to run online efforts to combat extremism. That portfolio was later expanded to include fighting foreign government propaganda, particularly from Russia, after Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in part by using social media.

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