Online Effort Backs Military Leaders
CAIRO — Days after Sudanese soldiers massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in Khartoum in June, a digital marketing company in Cairo began deploying keyboard warriors to a second front: a covert operation to praise Sudan’s military on social media.
The Egyptian company, run by a former military officer and self-described expert on “internet warfare,” paid new recruits $180 a month to write pro-military messages using fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Telegram, an instant messaging service. Instructors provided hashtags and talking points.
Since the ouster of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in April, new employees were told, protesters had sown chaos in Sudan.
“We’re at war,” an instructor told the new employees. “Security is weak. The army has to rule for now.”
Covert influence campaigns have become a favored tool of leaders in countries like China and Russia. In the Middle East, though, those campaigns are being coordinated across borders in an effort to bolster authoritarian rule and douse the kind of popular protests that gave rise to the Arab Spring in 2011.
The secretive Egyptian effort to support Sudan’s military on social media this summer by the company in Cairo, New Waves, was just one part of a much bigger operation that targeted people in at least nine Middle Eastern and North African countries, Facebook said.
In August, Facebook announced that it had shut down hundreds of accounts run by New Waves and an Emirati company, Newave. The two companies used money and deception to leverage their audience of almost 14 million Facebook followers, as well as thousands more on Instagram. A Facebook spokesman said the company had not found sufficient evidence to link the operation to the governments of Egypt or the United Arab Emirates.
The New Waves owner, Amr Hussein, retired from the Egyptian military in 2001 and described himself as a “researcher on internet wars.” He is a vocal supporter of Egypt’s authoritarian leader, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Responding to Facebook’s accusations, Mr. Hussein denied any links to the Emirates. “I don’t know what you are” talking about, he wrote in a text message.
The social media posts gave a boost to the Libyan warlord Khalifa Hifter, praised the United Arab Emirates and slammed the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. Others talked up the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
Recruits to the New Waves operation were told their job was to create “balance” between the military and protesters on social media, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s workings. One trainer said: “In the past wars were conducted with weapons. Now it’s through social media.”
Since the first protests against Mr. al-Bashir in December, protest leaders have used the internet to mobilize demonstrations and circumvent censorship. Within hours of the massacre in Khartoum, the military’s first act was to shut down the internet in Sudan. Then it turned to social media to try to soften its image.
The New Waves operation had echoes of the Egyptian state’s approach to controlling online debate. Under Mr. el-Sisi, Egypt has blocked over 500 websites and introduced laws that criminalize criticism of the government on social media.
Executives at New Waves and its Emirati sister company went to considerable lengths to hide their role in the Middle East influence campaign, Facebook said. They obtained 361 fake accounts to administer Facebook pages that purported to be news sites about nine countries, including Sudan, Somalia, Kuwait and Libya.
The pages often featured posts about real news interspersed with fake items that followed a common theme. The Sudan Alyoum (Sudan Today) Facebook page, for example, linked to a news website of the same name that published 60 articles supporting a general’s leadership.
In July, Mr. Hussein claimed New Waves had just one client, a state-run theater production. He is vocal about social media, he said, because Middle Eastern society is “special.”
“I talk about the dangers not only in Egypt — in all our world,” he said.