Qatar’s Shura elections Issues an advisory against cyber risk

Qatar’s Election Committee Shura published a list of guidelines for the candidates’ technical team managing the campaign to adopt cybersecurity practices. The guidebook aims to raise their awareness on related topics and issues.

The guidelines also urge the candidates to prepare their social media communication channels from their personal accounts, to prevent cyber attacks or fake news from spreading.

In view of recent cyber attack on Shura, the guidebook recommends each candidate to develop a secure response plan to counter potential cyber attacks, and determine the extent to which the campaign is prepared to handle the assault.

Recently, certain hashtags that were related to thousands of suspicious accounts and bots designed to disseminate and amplify critical information to the Gulf countries, became popular in Qatar.

In a data survey, nearly 100,000 tweets were identified from highly active users who used a particular hashtag for an unusual period of time, all of which attempted to promote alleged public dissatisfaction towards Qatar’s government.

“#Qatar_Revolts” is one among the latest hashtags. It attempted to exaggerate a small demonstration initiated by a tribe protesting Qatar’s “exclusion” that was deemed unqualified to vote in accordance with the current law.

On August 2, “boycott Qatar’s Shura elections” was trending. However, the trend was created mostly by UAE-based spam bot accounts. In one case, a pro-normalisation account that previously spread disinformation about Qatar was also trending. This account claimed that women could not vote in the Shura council elections.

In the past few months, a number of anti-Qatar campaigns have emerged as trending topics with little engagement from users. While some hashtags did bring in hundreds of tweets, the accounts used to promote the trends were deemed as dubious bot accounts by many digital experts.

Prior to the 2017 Qatar-blockade, governments utilised social media to fulfil their objectives of influencing public opinion in different countries.

Marc Owen Jones, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Digital Analytics Expert said, “As a small country, Qatar’s Twitter lacks complete control over its Twitter sovereignty. In other words, it is easy for countries to manipulate trends and to dominate the online narratives.”