🌍 Today Twitter announced the removal of 5,350 accounts & 36 million tweets linked to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt. This takedown was a result of a tip the Stanford Internet Observatory shared with Twitter in December 2019. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/april-…
The Twitter network is linked to two social media management companies: DotDev and Smaat. Our team put out a 📝 on Twitter’s Smaat takedown at the end of last year:
We alerted Twitter to #السراج_خائن_ليبيا (Sarraj the traitor of Libya), a reference to the Libyan Prime Minister signing a maritime agreement with Turkey that angered many regional actors. It had a suspicious distribution pattern: 
The network focused on other countries too, always with the customary anti-Qatar/Turkey/Iran angle. They linked to a cluster of domains, created on the same day. These “news” sites were only nominally about these countries, mostly pushing narratives about geopolitical rivals.
While the Twitter accounts were suspended pre-pandemic, these linked domains leverage COVID-19 to push their agenda: (screenshots below translated)
Other prominent narratives included discrediting recent Libyan peace talks, criticizing the Syrian government, supporting anti-regime protesters in Iran, praising the Mauritanian government, and criticizing Huthi rebels in Yemen.
We saw *hashtag laundering* - politically aligned media outlets published stories about the inauthentic hashtag. They wanted it to seem like Libyans were so anti-Turkey that an anti-Turkey hashtag was trending. In fact all the showcased tweets were from now-suspended accounts.🤷♀️
Our full report on this dataset comes out later today. There will be something for everyone: accounts claiming to be based everywhere from Sudan to Yemen to Iraq, conspiracy theories about both Malaysia Airlines flights, and some pro-Somaliland hashtags.
