{"id":259741,"date":"2021-08-01T11:00:41","date_gmt":"2021-08-01T11:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=365157"},"modified":"2021-08-01T11:00:41","modified_gmt":"2021-08-01T11:00:41","slug":"a-government-that-has-killed-people-for-less-pro-saudi-social-media-swarms-leave-critics-in-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/08\/01\/a-government-that-has-killed-people-for-less-pro-saudi-social-media-swarms-leave-critics-in-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"“A Government That Has Killed People for Less”: Pro-Saudi Social Media Swarms Leave Critics in Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"
Geoff Golberg watched<\/u> his own face flicker across the screen in disbelief. A short video clip posted to YouTube and Twitter this March characterized him as a mortal enemy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The narrator, Hussain al-Ghawi, alleged Golberg\u2019s \u201centire work aims at smearing Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE\u201d \u2014 the United Arab Emirates \u2014 \u201cby publishing fake analytics banning patriotic accounts and foreign sympathizers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Posted in Arabic with English subtitles, the eight-minute video, overlaid with fiery graphics and sound effects, was part of a regular series posted by al-Ghawi, a self-proclaimed Saudi journalist. A clip showed a photo of Golberg\u2019s face, incorrectly describing him as a CNN journalist. Al-Ghawi said that Golberg\u2019s work mapping state-directed social media manipulation had put Golberg in league with the kingdom\u2019s top adversaries \u2014 namely the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. It was an accusation that Golberg found shocking, as well as frightening.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt made me feel like it\u2019s not safe for me to be doing the type of work that I do, even in the United States.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n\u201cSeeing that video, with those types of accusations against me, it made me feel like my life might be in danger,\u201d said Golberg, an expert on tracking social media manipulation and the founder of Social Forensics, an online analytics firm. \u201cAt the very least it made me feel like it\u2019s not safe for me to be doing the type of work that I do, even in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the hands of an authoritarian state, social media can indeed be deadly. No more harrowing example of this\u00a0was seen in the campaign of Saudi state-directed online attacks that preceded the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. In the months before he was killed inside Istanbul\u2019s Saudi consulate, Khashoggi was the subject of an intense campaign of online harassment orchestrated by a Saudi government-backed network of political influencers and bots.<\/p>\n
Referred to inside the kingdom as \u201cthe flies,\u201d the network swarmed Khashoggi with threats and defamation, an effort that was documented in the 2020 documentary \u201cThe Dissident.\u201d They painted him on social media as a treasonous enemy of the Saudi state \u2014 no small matter in a country where public discourse is tightly controlled and Twitter is the primary outlet<\/a> for political conversation. Al-Ghawi\u00a0himself has been accused of helping instigate the online campaign that marked Khashoggi as an enemy of the state.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\nThe avalanche of attacks online culminated with Khashoggi\u2019s murder at the consulate by an assassination squad believed to have been dispatched directly by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.<\/p>\n
Golberg was well aware of the history. So when he showed up in al-Ghawi\u2019s video, he was deeply alarmed: The threatening manner of the message felt not so different from the way Khashoggi was discussed before his death. Coming from a state where all media is tightly controlled, Golberg thought al-Ghawi\u2019s video seemed calculated to send a message on behalf of the Saudi government to its perceived enemies in the United States.<\/p>\n
Golberg said, \u201cCharacterizing my work as defending Hezbollah or Qatar \u2014 these are the types of baseless accusations from a government that has killed people for less, that make me want to look over my shoulder when I\u2019m walking.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\nGolberg wasn\u2019t the<\/u> only one to come in for al-Ghawi\u2019s ire. The same clip characterized several Saudi activists with ties to the West as traitors and denounced a number of American activists and think-tank experts. Sarah Leah Whitson,\u00a0the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, also known as DAWN, a Washington think tank focused on democratic norms in the Middle East, made an appearance, as did Ariane Tabatabai, a State Department official and American academic of Iranian descent who had worked for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit that does frequent research work for the U.S. government.<\/p>\n
Online harassment and disinformation have become political issues in the U.S., but in authoritarian countries the threat can be more immediately grave. Under the control of ruling regimes, the public sphere, including social media, can be completely weaponized. Saudi Arabia, ruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has in particular demonstrated a willingness to go the distance and back up its online threats and intimidation by actually abducting and killing its perceived critics, even those living abroad.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn important thing to keep in mind is that free expression in Saudi Arabia has been totally crushed under MBS,\u201d DAWN\u2019s Whitson said, referring to the crown prince by his initials. \u201cThese online messages are not coming from independent actors inside Saudi Arabia. There are no independent voices left coming out of that country today.\u201d (Neither al-Ghawi nor the Saudi embassy in Washington responded to requests for comment.)<\/p>\n
\u201cThese online messages are not coming from independent actors inside Saudi Arabia. There are no independent voices left coming out of that country today.\u201d<\/blockquote>\nFor Whitson, the burden is particularly heavy: DAWN was Khashoggi\u2019s brainchild and created in the wake of his assassination<\/a> to carry the deceased dissident\u2019s banner.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere had been on a campaign to harass me for a long time even before the murder of Jamal, but it is has only escalated since then,\u201d said Whitson. \u201cThere have been very coordinated attacks against our organization and against individual staff members.\u201d<\/p>\n
In many cases, such attacks start with al-Ghawi, one of a number of major pro-government Saudi influencers whose messages are amplified and shared by a network of pro-Saudi nationalists, bots, and other inauthentic accounts online.<\/p>\n
Al-Ghawi\u2019s video<\/u> denouncing the likes of Golberg, Whitson, and others is part of a regular series posted on Twitter and YouTube called \u201cJamra,\u201d or \u201cthe hot coal.\u201d The short-form show, narrated as a monologue, is focused entirely on naming lists of enemies of the Saudi regime around the world.<\/p>\n
There is little information online about al-Ghawi himself, whose bio on Twitter identifies him simply as a \u201cSaudi Journalist.\u201d The Jamra program, broadcast in Arabic with English subtitles, is published on al-Ghawi\u2019s YouTube channel<\/a>. Boasting over 120,000 subscribers, Jamra describes itself as \u201ca political program that connects you with hidden information.\u201d Al-Ghawi promotes the videos from the series on his verified Twitter account, where he has over a quarter of a million followers.<\/p>\n
For Golberg, who says he does not have any interest in Middle Eastern politics, his appearance in a Jamra video indicated that he had provoked the anger of powerful people in Saudi Arabia. These actors, he suspected, were upset about his work tracking social media activity in support of the kingdom. Golberg had found analytic data showing widespread manipulation<\/a> by bots and other inauthentic accounts on Twitter promoting pro-Saudi government messages.<\/p>\n