5000 bots connected with Pro Saudi propaganda suspended by Twitter, for denouncing Muller Report

In a major step Twitter recently suspended 5000 bots found violating Twitter policies. The suspended bots were found to be incepting and promoting an anti- Muller Report sentiment with a bend towards Trump policies.

Interestingly, a researcher was able to gauge that the suspended accounts were associated closely with an account that earlier workers for promoting Saudi leader and his policies and had limited activity of 3–4 posts.

All the involved bots were found frequently retweeting content posted by a handle, @TheGlobus projecting itself to be a global news handle. As per the information revealed by NBC News Researchers the same handle was earlier named as Arabian Veritasa and was involved in circulating pro-Saudi content.

The revelations were made possible collectively by NBC News by researchers and Foreign Policy Research Institute senior fellow Clint Watts who is also a non-resident fellow of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund — the organization behind the Hamilton 68 project, an effort to track Russian disinformation campaigns on social media.

As per available media reports, Watts suggested that the campaign was rough and primarily focused on increasing visibility of particular hashtags. These hastags were found to be the ones which are been used by important leaders such as Sean Hannity and other Trump supporters. The aim clearly seemed to promote Trump and denounce Muller Report with set US audience as targets.

Apart from the content posted to meet the objective rest of the content posted by the Twitter account was to maintain an image of global news handle. The domain was registered through Tucows in October 2017 but was not updated until March — when it was moved behind the Cloudflare content distribution network.

A deep timeline study further suggests that many of the stories posted by the handle had missing links. These stories promoted Saudi Arabia and Egypt and negative stories about Iran and Turkey. Apart from it there were summarized stories from Fox News and Muller investigation.

Twitter spokesperson too approved the fact stating “We suspended a network of accounts and others associated with it for engaging in platform manipulation — a violation of the Twitter Rules.”

However, in this case it is still not clear whether the activity is state sponsored or not. As per Twitter spokesperson “If we do have reasonable evidence to support state-backed activity, we will disclose the accounts as part of our information operations archive.”

This is not the first time Saudi bots have came under Twitter radar for spreading sensitive information affecting politics of a nation. Last October also propagated messages supporting Saudi Leader were found to be active n Twitter. One of the prominent post even denounced Saudi’s involvement in murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Reports by New York Times even claimed that Saudi has installed a spy in Twitter tracking the dissents and has a troll farm that works for countering the dissents. The current incident though does not have any established connection with the last found report as of now.