Fake News in the Middle East
This is an extract from my new report “State of Social Media, Middle East: 2018,” which was co-written with Payton Bruni and published earlier this year. Read the Executive Summary and other sections on Market Context, Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat and Bitmoji, YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram, and Arab Youth.
Analysis by Reuters discovered a network of at least 53 websites which, “posing as authentic Arabic-language news outlets, have spread false information about the Saudi government and [Jamal] Khashoggi’s murder.”
The sites, such as Alawatanews.com, published falsified news reports, such as claims that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had been forced out of power. These false stories are amplified by automated Twitter bots.
The weaponization of bots in the region works both ways.
Following the disappearance, and death, of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Twitter accounts — belonging to real people and bots — helped to stress denials of involvement by the Saudi government.
In October, following an investigation by NBC, Twitter suspended multiple ac- counts which were promoting pro-Saudi Arabia talking points related to the Khashoggi case.
“Twitter became aware of some of the bots on Thursday when NBC News presented the company with a spreadsheet of hundreds of accounts that tweeted and retweeted the same pro-Saudi government tweets at the same time.”
The Qatar Insider Twitter account is an example of a social media account (and associated website) created to push a particular political agenda, Public Radio International (PRI) reported.
“The anti-Qatar website [which is now closed, but it’s Twitter account remains visible] went live last year, advertising itself as “your comprehensive source for information on #QatarCrisis.”
In May 2018, 29% of tweets in Arabic about Qatar were tweeted by bots, the academics Marc Jones and Alexei Abrahams found. This was up from 17% a year before.
Writing in the Washington Post they noted:
“While social media may ultimately act as an incubator for political opinion formation, it is more crucially the place where citizens go to find out what other citizens think — a vital ingredient to mobilizing…
Perhaps more than anywhere, the Gulf shows us how social media is being weaponized as a crucial delivery system for fake news, hate speech and propaganda.”
These problems are not unique to the Gulf region.
Middle East Monitor flagged a ‘fake’ photo of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi circulating on social media and the New York Times examined how Facebook is being used in Libya to promote political manipulation and violence.
In Morocco, the Moroccan News Agency (MAP) “launched an SOS Fake-news service that allows subscribers to immediately correct inaccurate information about them…”
“In the new age of information wars, technology has made the manipulation and fabrication of content simple, and some users of the social networks dramatically amplify falsehoods and spread them like wildfires, unchecked and unstoppable,” wrote the Saudi writer Maha Akeel in Arab News.
Addressing efforts to tackle this, she argued:
“All these codes and regulations raise questions about the possibility of controlling the flow of information in cyberspace, and whether that conflicts with freedom of expression and the right to access information. There are also questions about who will control the information, and who decides what information is “fake” and what is true.”
Read more about social media in the Middle East by downloading the full study today from the University of Oregon Scholars’ Bank, or view it online via Scribd, SlideShare, ResearchGate and Academia.Edu.
