Where Did All the Saudi Bots Go?
In 2019 posters, ad campaigns, and propaganda films have been replaced with likes, retweets, and shares.
I’m Scott Nover. Welcome back to Pressing, a newsletter about press freedom. Thank you for being a paid subscriber—this is a special feature for you and I hope you enjoy.
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Earlier today, Twitter removed nearly 6,000 accounts it said were backed by government of Saudi Arabia. It’s part of an ongoing effort to rid the site of accounts manipulating the platform by engaging in misinformation campaigns. Twitter said the Saudi-backed accounts removed today are part of a larger group of 88,000 accounts they’ve removed in total. With the announcement, the social media giant released a trove of data — mostly anonymized — that offers a glimpse into what these accounts were up to.
I’ve also had a glimpse into what these accounts were doing… We’ll get back to that in a bit.
Since October 2018, Twitter has been releasing data on state-sponsored accounts they’ve suspended. The culprits are mostly the usual suspects, but maybe one or two will surprise you:
Bangladesh — 15 accounts
Catalonia — 130 accounts
China — 5,241 accounts
Ecuador — 1,019 accounts
Iran — 7,869 accounts
Russia — 420 accounts
Saudi Arabia — 5,935 accounts
Spain — 259 accounts
The Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, part of the Russian effort to influence the 2016 election.
United Arab Emirates — 4,248 accounts
United Arab Emirates/Egypt — 271 accounts
Venezuela — 1,993 accounts
These are just the accounts that Twitter has released some data about. Again, they’ve supposedly suspended 88,000 accounts. Online misinformation campaigns are a major part of how governments — and non-state actors on the international stage — covertly use propaganda and, in some cases, how modern authoritarian leaders consolidate power. Want to talk about fake news? This is actual fake news.
Twitter said the accounts suspended engaged in “spammy behavior” across a wide range of topics, mostly through “inauthentic engagement tactics such as aggressive liking, retweeting and replying.”
The investigation tracked the effort to an organization called Smaat, a social media and marketing company based in Saudi Arabia, which managed the accounts of many high-profile Saudis and accounts for government departments. In September, Twitter suspended the account of a former royal adviser for similar behavior, the BBC notes. The accounts were “targeting discussions related to Saudi Arabia and advancing their geopolitical interests on the world stage.”
This crackdown comes as Twitter and other social platforms have come under fire from regulators and legislators in Washington, D.C. for the spread of misinformation on their services.
•••
Once upon a time, this world found me too.
Last fall, when Jamal Khashoggi went missing, my editor at The Atlantic called me into his office and asked if I had heard about “this Saudi guy.” I said yes and, admittedly, I was as familiar with Jamal’s work as my editor was—barely.
Soon after we talked, the gruesome details emerged. Jamal went into the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. He didn’t leave the embassy alive. A bone saw was used. Later on, the CIA and the UN each concluded that Jamal’s death was an assassination ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS). MbS was supposed to be a reformer. The veneer vanished immediately. Not only was Jamal a Saudi citizen in exile; he was an American resident. He lived a few miles away from me in Northern Virginia. My editor told me to go talk to his friends.
I talked to his friends. The result was one of the most gut-wrenching experiences I’ve had. After 36 hours of reporting, I broke down and cried. The title of my piece was simple — Jamal Khashoggi’s Friends in Washington Are in Shock — but the process was anything but. I learned, above all things, that this man at the center of an international incident… was just a shockingly normal guy. And he was murdered for doing his job—the same job I do. But, when you write critically about your homeland and your homeland is Saudi Arabia, you can get killed.
A couple of months later I attended a memorial held for Jamal in the U.S. Capitol Building, where I listened to Members of Congress wax poetic about freedom of the press—but only one even mentioned MbS by name. I wrote about that too.
•••
Throughout that time I was getting tweeted at more and more.
Suspicious looking accounts were tweeting Khashoggi-related news items at me. They weren’t very pro-Saudi, mostly regular news articles. But the accounts were odd. Therefore, I imagined they came from a country or organization opposed to the Saudis — cough, cough, Iran, cough, cough. The often tagged me in photos on Twitter — a weird thing to do for any user.
I wrote down some names and accounts:
Carl Fountain @cfountain07
Tricia Perry @CiatriPerry
Antilia Williams @AntiliaWilliams
Jan Scheelar @janscheelar
Yasir Arafat @yasirarafat789
Rizwana Kareem @Rizwana_kareem
Their faces looked like stock images, but simple image searches didn’t confirm they were. Some of them had hundreds of followers even though they barely posted anything original. Their biographies indicated that many of them, allegedly, worked in “human rights.”
It was happening every day, more or less. Until it stopped.
By April, I realized the posts had stopped. I hadn’t reported them or anything, but Twitter clearly caught on and found them. Each one of the accounts I had written down was suspended. Their tweets are gone, but their footprint is still on the platform: I searched one of their accounts on Google and found a thread about comedian Hasan Minhaj, whose show “The Patriot Act” criticized the Saudi government and, in turn, Netflix prevented it from appearing in the Arab nation. This is what it looks like when accounts disappear on Twitter:
Once upon a time, @CiatriPerry’s account was here. And now it’s gone. But was it ever really here?
Much of the Twitter data trove is anonymized. I couldn’t find the accounts I listed in what’s been published. I expect they’ve been anonymized. And I imagine what I experienced is a small morsel of a global information warfare.
In 2019 posters, ad campaigns, and propaganda films have been replaced with likes, retweets, and shares. If you’re interested in affecting global opinion, try to rig a social network, game their algorithms and get your message across in seemingly innocuous ways. (If you’re a dictator reading this, a.) thank you for subscribing and b.) ignore what I just said.)
Under mounting pressure, Twitter and some of its compatriots are, luckily, starting to crack down on what’s been happening online for a long time now.
Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Happy holidays! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.