Anne Applebaum
Saudis unleash bots and trolls to join internet ‘patriot’ games
FOR the past several days, the Saudi Twittersphere has been awash with patriotism. Saudi accounts have tweeted, in Arabic, a “#message of love for Mohammed bin Salman” and encouraged one another to “#unfollow enemies of the nation”. The latter hashtag started trending at 9am on Tuesday, peaked at about 5pm, and by Wednesday had been mentioned 103,000 times.
This might have been because Saudi citizens, consumed by national indignation, took to their smartphones to show their support for the crown prince in his moment of difficulty: The disappearance and presumed murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a ‘Washington Post’ columnist, under exceptionally grisly circumstances, has not been good for the international reputation of the royal family. But it’s equally possible that those hashtags were pushed by bots – fake, computerised accounts – as well as by paid, professional internet trolls.
After President Donald Trump visited Riyadh in 2017, Marc Owen Jones, a Persian Gulf expert at the University of Exeter, tracked the accounts enthusiastically welcoming the US president. “Eighty to 90pc of them were bots,” he told me.
Despite its medieval aspects, Saudi Arabia is in this sense a thoroughly modern authoritarian state: Over the past several years, the government has fine-tuned a sophisticated information policy, one that bears a distinct resemblance to the sort used in other states that have also learned to use social media for social control. As in Russia – where these things were first pioneered on a grand scale – the Saudi government understands it is useless to silence the entire internet. Instead, the regime floods the Twittersphere with patriotic messages designed to drown out critical or credible information.
As in Turkey, pro-regime trolls also gang up and organise online attacks against anyone who disagrees. Saud al-Qahtani, a media adviser to the crown prince with more than a million followers, encourages fellow citizens to add the names of dissidents to an online blacklist. Individual snooping also takes place on Facebook, where requests from “friends” may really be from the state’s online spies.
The Saudis aren’t quite as good as the Russians at manipulation in other countries, though they are beginning to try. Qahtani has played around with pumping up anti-government sentiment in Qatar, Saudi Arabia’s rival.
Over the past few days, Saudi accounts have also tried to spread smears against Khashoggi written in English, sometimes by pro-Trump writers and “conservative” American websites.
None of this is secret. Censorship, in the 21st century, isn’t carried out by old men in hidden offices, marking up newspaper articles with red ink. It is carried out by young men with mobile phones, working in the open, whose “patriotic” assaults on the “unpatriotic” are there for everyone to see.