Thread by @bellingcat

Today, Facebook announced that it removed accounts, pages and groups associated with two covert influence operations -- one originating in the UAE and Egypt and the other in Saudi Arabia.
newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/08/c…

Facebook benefited from our recent report (written by @al_b33lz3bub) on Saud al-Qahtani, MBS's right hand man and Saudi Arabia's cybersecurity chief.
bellingcat.com/news/mena/2019…

In its press release, Facebook didn't tell us how @b33lz3bub's report tipped them off, but our report did identify a fake Facebook account used by al-Qahtani.

al-Qahtani has been actively, and publicly (under pseudonyms), sought to produce waves of inauthentic interactions on Facebook since at least 2011.

al-Qahtani is also a very, very petty man with way too much money to spend. On a message board, he was asking around how he could kick players from a Facebook game called "War Commander". He was offering $500 to boot people he didn't like from the game. He's MBS's right-hand man!

(Oops, we meant @al_b33lz3bub, not @b33lz3bub. Sorry!)

In his report, @al_b33lz3bub identified more than two dozen domains registered by al-Qahtani. One of them, saudqq[.]com, was used for malware and other malicious activity. It also had subdomains referencing Facebook and other social media platforms.

Facebook is not the only place that al-Qahtani has created fake accounts. On LinkedIn, he goes by "saud a" and describes himself as, grotesquely, a "headhunter".

So what's al-Qahtani up to these days? He's supposedly under house arrest for the Khashoggi murder, but he's more likely continuing in his old role as Saudi's cyber security chief (or something)