Key Takeaways
1. Digital Authoritarianism: A New Era of Deception
Digital authoritarianism is the ‘use of digital information technology by authoritarian regimes to surveil, repress, and manipulate domestic and foreign populations’.
Weaponized deception. The Arab Spring's techno-utopian hopes have given way to a new reality where digital tools are weaponized for control. This involves a wide array of repressive techniques, including surveillance, censorship, social manipulation, cyber-attacks, and targeted persecution against online users. The primary focus is on disinformation and deception through social media.
Information disorder. The proliferation of digital technologies has amplified an "information disorder," where disinformation and misinformation fundamentally alter perceptions of established truths. Unlike traditional propaganda, digital disinformation leverages new platforms and the ubiquity of smartphones to spread false narratives at an unprecedented scale and speed, often exploiting people's emotions.
Beyond good and ill. Technology is not inherently liberating; it can be used for good or ill. Social media, being largely unregulated and easy to manipulate, has become fertile ground for propagandists, fraudsters, and states to spread pro-government narratives, silence critics, and maintain authoritarian control, challenging the naive belief in technology's inherent benevolence.
2. The Global Deception Order: A Public-Private Enterprise
The deception order is an agglomeration or assemblage of many of the following: hacker/entrepreneurs, PR agencies, political consultancies, media organisations and government entities, as well as social media companies themselves.
A lucrative industry. Digital authoritarianism is not solely state-driven but a complex public-private venture, a "deception order" where various actors profit from creating a "pseudo-reality." Western PR firms and political consultancies, often based in global financial capitals like London and Washington, play a significant role in "reputation laundering" for despotic regimes.
Transnational collaboration. These firms offer sophisticated services, from creating fake grassroots campaigns (astroturfing) to manipulating search engine results and curating lists of dissidents. Examples include:
- CTF Partners burnishing MBS's image.
- Bell Pottinger inflaming racial tensions in South Africa and creating fake blogs.
- McKinsey compiling lists of Saudi social media influencers.
- Cambridge Analytica influencing elections through data misuse.
Devolving deception. This outsourcing provides political distance for governments, especially democracies, allowing them to pursue foreign policy objectives while maintaining plausible deniability. The commodification of deception thrives in a permissive environment where human rights violations are often overlooked for economic or strategic gains.
3. Saudi Arabia's Ascent as a Digital Superpower
In particular, it argues that Saudi Arabia, and to some extent the United Arab Emirates, are the main projectors of digital media power in the Arabic-speaking Middle East.
Strategic media capture. Saudi Arabia's rise as a digital superpower stems from decades of strategic investment in media infrastructure, evolving from traditional censorship to dominating pan-Arab media. Post-1990s, the Kingdom invested heavily in TV channels like MBC and Al Arabiya to shape regional discourse and promote its anti-Iranian stance.
MBS's digital vision. Under Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), this media power extended aggressively into the digital sphere, leveraging Saudi's high internet penetration and youth bulge. MBS's "Make Arabia Great Again" vision relies on a hyper-nationalist online civil society, deploying thousands of Twitter and Facebook accounts to praise leadership and attack critics.
"Lord of the Flies." Saud al-Qahtani, MBS's former adviser, orchestrated Saudi's social media and digital espionage policy, earning the moniker "Lord of the Flies." He sourced digital tools to:
- Delete critical social media posts.
- Fabricate artificial activity to boost pro-regime content.
- Infiltrate Twitter's headquarters to identify dissidents.
This multi-faceted approach combines infiltration, intimidation, and co-optation to control the digital narrative.
4. Automating Reality: Bots, AI, and Pseudo-Journalism
Indeed, a defining aspect of the Gulf’s post-truth moment has been the instrumentalisation of hundreds of thousands of Twitter bots, often propagating state propaganda disseminated through legacy media institutions.
Robot citizens and journalists. The Gulf's post-truth moment is characterized by the automation of disinformation, with bots and rudimentary AI dominating online journalism. Saudi Arabia's granting of citizenship to a robot, Sophia, was a PR stunt symbolizing the authoritarian fantasy of programmable, subservient citizens.
Industrial-scale manipulation. Saudi news outlets like SaudiNews50 and Saudi 24, often linked to digital marketing firms implicated in state espionage, use bots to:
- Flood regional hashtags with sanitized, pro-government content.
- Promote sectarian hate speech, demonizing Shi'a populations.
- Drown out criticism of Saudi policies, such as the war in Yemen.
This creates a "pseudo-civil society" where artificial engagement stifles genuine public discussion.
The botmaster's craft. Investigations have revealed "botmasters" like Ali Milan, an Egyptian programmer, who created software (Diavolo) for mass automation of Twitter accounts. These tools enable the rapid dissemination of nationalistic and sectarian content, demonstrating how even crude automation can be highly effective in a loosely regulated digital environment.
5. Weaponizing Geopolitics: Disinformation in Regional Conflicts
The Trump administration’s policy of maximum pressure on Iran was a jarring reversal of US policy in the Middle East, and has been the proximate cause in much of the Gulf-oriented disinformation since 2017.
Exploiting political ruptures. Major geopolitical shifts, like Trump's abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, trigger massive influence operations. Saudi bots amplified pro-Trump, anti-Iran hashtags, creating a false impression of widespread support for bellicose policies. This "deception synergy" aligns US right-wing narratives with Gulf states' anti-Iran agenda.
The Gulf Crisis: A manufactured conflict. The 2017 Qatar blockade was a watershed moment, initiated by a cyberattack and sustained by an unprecedented disinformation campaign. This involved:
- PR firms creating anti-Qatar films and lobbying campaigns.
- Bots generating anti-Qatar hashtags and spreading false economic claims.
- "Rent-a-crowds" attempting to stage protests against Qatar in London.
The goal was to legitimize Qatar's isolation by portraying it as a terrorist-supporting state.
Interfering abroad. Powerful deception actors, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the UAE, exploit porous online borders to influence elections and protests in vulnerable democracies. In Iraq, Lebanon, and Algeria, foreign-backed accounts hijack local hashtags to:
- Shape narratives around protests.
- Promote specific political factions.
- Demonize rivals like Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood.
This demonstrates how digital influence can undermine national sovereignty and democratic processes.
6. The Pseudo-Reality Industry: Fabricating Personas and Events
In it, a group of fake journalists fooled dozens of news outlets from across the globe into publishing propaganda for over a year.
Audacious deception. Deception actors constantly innovate, and one of the most audacious tactics involves creating entirely fake personas. The "Arab Eye" and "Persia Now" networks, for instance, employed non-existent journalists with impressive, yet fabricated, credentials to publish propaganda in dozens of international news outlets.
AI-generated identities. These "pseudo-journalists" used stolen photos or, more disturbingly, AI-generated faces to create realistic but fake identities. Their articles consistently pushed narratives aligned with UAE foreign policy, praising the UAE and criticizing Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood. This highlights the growing threat of AI in disinformation, making detection increasingly difficult.
Ephemeral disinformation. Another tactic, "Operation Endless Mayfly" (Iran-aligned), involved creating imposter websites of legitimate news outlets and quickly deleting articles after they gained traction. This "ephemeral disinformation" aims to spread false narratives while obscuring their origin, making accountability challenging for both researchers and the public.
7. Silencing Dissent: Targeting Journalists and Activists
The extremely violent killing of Khashoggi reflects an important aspect of disinformation: the attitudes of regimes towards criticism.
Brutal repression. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, epitomizes the extreme measures regimes take to silence critics. His killing was preceded by an intense online intimidation campaign, orchestrated by Saud al-Qahtani, and followed by a massive disinformation effort to:
- Minimize his death on social media.
- Smear him as a terrorist or Qatari agent.
- Control the narrative through manipulated Twitter trends and official lies.
Gendered cyber-violence. Women journalists and activists are particularly vulnerable to industrial-scale misogynistic attacks. Ghada Oueiss, an Al Jazeera anchor, faced doxing, sexualized insults, and death threats after criticizing Saudi policies, with high-profile Saudi and Emirati figures amplifying the abuse. This reflects patriarchal norms weaponized digitally to shame and silence women.
Surveillance and control. Digital authoritarianism extends to everyday life, as seen with Saudi Arabia's Absher app. While offering government services, it institutionalizes male guardianship by allowing men to control women's travel digitally. An astroturfing campaign on app stores attempted to whitewash criticism, demonstrating how technology reinforces existing repressive structures.
8. Conspiracy Theories as Statecraft: Demonizing External Foes
Often conspiracy theories are a means to construct counterfactual claims that, if believed, serve the purpose of protecting the state.
Manufacturing enemies. A defining feature of the Gulf's post-truth moment is the strategic creation of external bogeymen: Qatar, Turkey, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Influential public figures who oppose KUBE foreign policy are routinely smeared as terrorist agitators or agents of this "axis of evil."
Weaponizing context. Campaigns against figures like Nobel laureate Tawakkol Karman, who criticized Saudi's Yemen war, illustrate this. Despite her nuanced stance, she was relentlessly attacked as a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist, with bots and fake accounts amplifying animalistic caricatures and baseless accusations. This tactic warps genuine information to fit a predetermined narrative.
Disinformation synergies. The US right-wing and Arabian Peninsula regimes often share and exploit each other's conspiracies. The "Hillary's emails" hashtag in Saudi Arabia, for instance, repurposed old information to:
- Attack Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.
- Link them to a fabricated Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy against Saudi Arabia.
- Demonize internal rivals like Mohammed bin Nayef and Saad al-Jabri.
This creates a complex "meta-narrative" that rationalizes alliances and discredits opponents.
9. Sportswashing and Foreign Interference: Manipulating Global Audiences
Crucially, it highlights how football fans in general are being targeted by the deception order, which is monetising deception to either engage in sportswashing or negative campaigning.
Football as a battleground. Gulf-led deception operations extend into professional football, leveraging the sport for "sportswashing" and negative campaigning. Qatar's 2022 World Cup bid faced extensive disinformation, with PR firms like CTF Partners proposing multi-million-pound campaigns to delegitimize it, often exploiting human rights concerns while ignoring their own.
The Newcastle takeover. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) bid for Newcastle United Football Club became a prime example. When the bid faced scrutiny over human rights and the illegal "beoutQ" piracy operation (which stole content from Qatar's beIN SPORTS), a digital campaign emerged to:
- Blame Qatar for scuppering the deal due to a "feud."
- Smear Jamal Khashoggi's fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, for opposing the takeover.
- Co-opt Newcastle fans into supporting MBS and Saudi Arabia, even using local slang like "radgie."
Official disinformation. The Saudi government itself engaged in blatant disinformation, misrepresenting a WTO ruling that condemned its piracy of beIN SPORTS. State-owned media falsely claimed victory, and official accounts spread misleading narratives, demonstrating a direct state complicity in deception to influence international perceptions and policy.
10. Tech Complicity: Neoliberation and Digital Orientalism
Social media companies are very much part of the disinformation delivery business and the deception order – an outcome of neoliberation technology.
Profit over principles. Social media companies, driven by profit and a "neoliberation" ideology, often fail to effectively police their platforms, especially in non-Anglophone markets. Their business models, reliant on user engagement and data monetization, inadvertently facilitate digital authoritarianism by allowing malign actors to spread disinformation at scale.
Regulatory blackspots. Despite rampant human rights abuses and platform manipulation, companies like Twitter continue to operate in countries like Saudi Arabia. The slow response to suspending high-level officials like Saud al-Qahtani, or the continued presence of thousands of crude bot accounts, highlights:
- Apathy or indifference to abuses in non-Western markets.
- A lack of robust regulatory oversight.
- Potential political influence from wealthy autocratic investors.
Digital orientalism. This selective enforcement and perceived apathy reflect a "digital orientalism," where human rights violations in the Gulf are viewed as less significant than domestic affairs. The argument that censoring deception accounts infringes on free speech is disingenuous when defending bots and trolls, who are programmed to parrot authoritarian policies, not express genuine opinions.
