Newly revealed geolocation data exposes coordinated regime-linked influence operations disguised as Scottish activism
A British media outlet has revealed that several prominent X accounts posing as supporters of Scottish independence are in fact operated from inside Iran, exposing yet another layer of the regime’s expanding online propaganda machine. According to the UK Defense Journal, newly available geolocation data on X has confirmed long-suspected links between these accounts and the Iranian regime’s cyber operations, which have poured extensive resources into manipulating global public opinion.
The investigation shows that these accounts, which present themselves as Scottish activists through local imagery, regional vocabulary, and cultural references, were active during the recent 12-day Iran–Israel conflict. For a brief period, they even issued posts supportive of Tehran. Crucially, when the regime imposed a nationwide internet shutdown during the conflict, all of these accounts went silent at the exact same moment—an anomaly impossible to reconcile with their claimed Scottish identities.
Over recent months, UK Defense Journal monitored several accounts with suspicious patterns. The introduction of X’s new location-transparency feature has now transformed these observations from inference into concrete evidence. The platform’s data indicates that these accounts repeatedly connected from inside Iran, routing their activity through VPN servers located in the Netherlands to obscure their origin.
This dual connection pattern—an Iranian entry point and a Dutch VPN exit—appears consistently across the identified accounts, including those that disappeared during the wartime internet blackout. Additional accounts with parallel behavior also match the same technical footprint.
Beyond their technical traces, the structural features of the accounts further expose their artificial nature. Each profile changed its username only once at the moment of registration, mirroring a centrally designed template. Their posting rhythms are unusually regular, lacking the natural variability of authentic human users. Their profile pictures are AI-generated, and their biographies contain fabricated or vague personal details.
The content behavior is equally coordinated: the accounts repost one another’s material within seconds, amplify identical slogans, and operate in near synchrony. This creates the illusion of a large, diverse digital community advocating Scottish independence, while in reality the activity stems from a tightly managed foreign influence network.
The UK Defense Journal reports that Iran has invested heavily in its so-called “cyber army,” using it as a tool not only for propaganda but also for large-scale dissemination of disinformation. The newly exposed Scottish-themed accounts fit into this broader strategy of simulating grassroots support abroad to mask state-driven messaging.
Analysts previously suspected Iranian involvement in some Scottish-aligned accounts, but lacked definitive proof due to the difficulty of pinpointing their operators’ physical location. With X now revealing partial origin data, the pattern has become unmistakable.
Since the feature became active, X users have identified dozens of accounts whose stated identities do not match their actual locations, underscoring a wider landscape of global influence campaigns. The revelations about Iran-linked fake Scottish accounts highlight the growing sophistication and reach of the regime’s coordinated online propaganda efforts, even as its digital fingerprints become increasingly difficult to hide.
