London - People connected to the government
of Saudi Arabia have run a network of fake accounts and pages on
Facebook to promote state propaganda and attack regional
rivals, the social media giant said on Thursday.
Facebook said it had suspended more than 350 accounts and
pages with about 1.4 million followers, the latest takedown in
an ongoing effort to combat "coordinated inauthentic behaviour"
on its platform, and the first such activity it has linked to
the Saudi government.
The Saudi government media office did not immediately
respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Countries in the Middle East have increasingly turned to
websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google's
YouTube to peddle covert political influence online.
Reuters detailed an expansive Iranian-backed campaign last
year and Riyadh has been accused of using the same tactics to
attack regional rival Qatar and spread disinformation following
the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any involvement in
Khashoggi's death. Along with allies, it maintains a trade and
diplomatic boycott of Qatar, accusing it of terrorism which
Qatar denies.
Facebook announces takedowns of "inauthentic behaviour" as
often as multiple times a month, but statements that directly
link such behaviour to a government are rare.
"For this operation, our investigators were able to confirm
that the individuals behind this are associated with the
government of Saudi Arabia," said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's
head of cybersecurity policy.
"Any time we have a link between an information operation
and a government, that's significant and people should be
aware."
Facebook also said on Thursday it had suspended a separate
network of more than 350 accounts linked to marketing firms in
Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. In that case it did not
directly link the activity to a government.
"WOUNDED SOLDIER"
Gleicher said the Saudi campaign operated on Facebook and
its Instagram photo-sharing platform, primarily targeting
countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Qatar,
the UAE, Egypt Palestine.
The operation used fake accounts posing as those countries'
citizens and pages designed to look like local news outlets.
More than $100,000 was spent on advertisements, Facebook said.
"They would typically post in Arabic about regional news and
political issues. They would talk about things like Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman - his internal and economic social reform
plan, the successes of the Saudi armed forces, particularly
during the conflict in Yemen," said Gleicher.
Andy Carvin, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital
Forensics Lab, which worked with Facebook to analyse the Saudi
campaign, said some of the accounts dated back to early 2014 but
the majority had been created in the last two years.
More than 90 percent of the content was in Arabic, Carvin
said, with some of the accounts "essentially operating as fan
pages for the Saudi government and military."
A copy of one of the Saudi posts released by Facebook on
Thursday showed the crown prince kissing the bandaged head of a
patient in a hospital bed. The Arabic caption reads: "His Royal
Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman kisses the head of a wounded
soldier."
ONLINE BATTLEGROUND
Social media companies are under mounting pressure to help
stop illicit political influence online.
U.S. intelligence officials have said that Russia used
Facebook and other platforms to interfere in the 2016 U.S.
Presidential Election and are concerned it will do so again in
2020. Moscow denies such allegations.
The Atlantic Council's Ben Nimmo said online information
operations were becoming increasingly visible as more
governments and political groups adopt the tactics and the
social media companies step up efforts to take them down.
Facebook has now made at least 14 public announcements about
takedowns of "inauthentic behaviour" stemming from 17 different
countries this year. The most recent announcement before
Thursday's included accounts run by people in Thailand, Russia,
Ukraine and Honduras.
The network based in the UAE and Egypt that was also
dismantled on Thursday was separate to the Saudi campaign,
Facebook said, although it targeted some of the same countries
in the Middle East and Africa with messages promoting the UAE.
"This shows how much social media has become a battleground,
particularly in the Gulf, where you've got very strong regional
rivalries and you've got a long tradition of working through
proxies," Nimmo said.
"This is almost becoming normalised," he added. "Where you
get geopolitical tensions, you get stuff like this going on, and
we're moving into a space where the platforms are dealing with
this almost as routine."