After China, Iran and Russia Saudi too draped disinformation techniques
Earlier Russia, Iran and China were in news for fake propaganda but now Saudi is also going to their path for spreading fake news. Saudi is spreading its wings in different directions for enhancing its influence. It is doing so by signing uranium nuclear deal with United States on one hand and spreading fake propaganda news via twitter by the other hand.
Over the past few years, Saudi-connected entities have successfully utilized and penetrated Twitter to the extent that Twitter itself has become a weapon of authoritarian rule. With Saudi, slowly and steadily entering the league of these Cyber campaigns, it will become more difficult of social media companies like Twitter, Facebook etc to manage the authenticity of information fed through them to masses.
Since its inception,Saudi Arabia today has the most Twitter users in the Arabic-speaking world, and the most verified Twitter accounts as well. Disinformation is just one Cyber axe used by such nations. There are many other verticals of this Cyber ecosystem used by states. For instance, this year the FBI filed a legal case against three men accused of spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia. Two of them worked inside Twitter, accessing private information from Saudi Twitter users.
In this case reported, Saudi Arabia, by using their high levels of Twitter access, Ali Al Zabarah and Ahmad Abouammo appear to have accessed email addresses, IP address, and dates of birth of known critics of the Saudi regime, as well as thousands of other Twitter users. What’s more, their alleged handler, Ahmed AlMutairi, was a media adviser to the Royal family.
The Saudi penetration of the US tech giant had devastating consequence. Saudi citizen Areej al Sadhan, stated that her brother Abdulrahaman was disappeared by Saudi Arabia’s secret police as a direct result of the Twitter breach. At least five others reportedly suffered a similar fate as a direct result of the Saudi infiltration.
Behind China, highest number of twitter accounts removed belonged to Saudi Arabia rather than Iran and China. Most of the Saudi news outlet was followed by Twitter account called SaudiNews50, a project run by the digital marketing company Smaat. SaudiNews50 was one of the most retweeted twitter accounts in the Arab World during the killing of Khashoggi, yet what it was tweeting was pure disinformation.
After Khashoggi’s death, 88,000 accounts were removed by Twitter for spam-like behavior. Some of the examples, are verified twitter accounts are hacked belonging to US famous sports personalities and TV personalities were taken over by account spreading pro-Saudi propaganda.
