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Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
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27 Feb, 4 tweets, 2 min read
In the wake of the CIA release of Khasoggi report dozens of identical tweets per second saying "I am Saudi and proud of this great country and trust and have faith in the wise leadership". So much for Twitter's spam and platform manipulation policy...
The influencers are on board, all repeating the same generic message. Enjoying this healthy debate
For more context on how this is being done - exploiting a marketing function from twitter
And here's a tweet on the loophole that highlights why this kind of 'advertising' propaganda is permitted by Twitter ....

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Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
28 Feb
[Thread on Saudi bots] 1/ On 25th February, a day before the release of the CIA report on MBS's ordering of #JamalKhashoggi 's murder, the trend 'the people of the kingdom (Saudi) support the crown prince'. No doubt the purpose was to rally support around MBS before bad publicity Image
2/ Such trends lionizing the Crown Prince are very common. This one demonstrated some interesting inauthentic activity. The following analysis show how the tweet screenshotted below (which says MBS will overcome his enemies), was retweeted by hundreds of fake accounts Image
3/ How do we know? A network analysis of the hashtag reveals an unusual cluster of accounts in the bottom left. Here's the edges (relationships between accounts) have been coloured according to device used to send the tweet. The orange shows that activity around this account ImageImage
Read 8 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
14 Feb
Ten years ago I started my PhD about #Bahrain. I started it at the beginning of Bahrain's Uprising, and it profoundly changed my life. Seeing your home, and the place you grew up in, gripped by a moment of sheer political optimism, followed by crushing police brutality, is an
experience that changes you as a person. I was fortunate to meet so many wonderful people; academics, activists, artists, writers and politicians either from or passionate about Bahrain. I have not been allowed back since 2012 and of course miss it. My thoughts as always
today are never about Valentines, but the first day where people marched to the Pearl roundabout (that was then destroyed by the regime) in 2011 . Bahrain will always be in my heart, especially those who sacrificed their life and freedom to try and improve their lot. The struggle
Read 5 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
23 Dec 20
Really happy to see this article I published on citizenship and belonging in the Arabian Peninsula with a great group of scholars | Digital De-Citizenship: The Rise of the Digital Denizen in Bahrain cup.org/3mERQvi #IJMES
"Perhaps the most striking notion of this is the dystopian potential of a civil society simulacrum, one in which online performances of citizenship are neatly orchestrated by
autonomous accounts to give the illusion of a functioning and healthy public sphere. "
"For the Al Khalifa, who wish to market Bahrain as a neoliberal hub, a place attractive to direct
foreign investment, stability, or rather the illusion of stability, is critical. Therefore the only acceptable
modalities of citizenship are those
Read 9 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
21 Dec 20
Dozens of Al Jazeera journalists allegedly hacked using Israeli firm’s spyware
theguardian.com/media/2020/dec…
"Citizen Lab researchers say cyber-attack using NSO Group software likely ordered by Saudia Arabia and UAE"
"Citizen Lab said it identified 36 personal phones inside Al Jazeera that it claims were hacked by four distinct “clusters”, which the researchers attributed to NSO Group operators."
Read 4 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
10 Dec 20
The full list of defendants in the Ghada Oueiss lawsuit makes an interesting read. From Saudi and Emirate outlets, entities and news outlets, to a random collection of pro-Saudi trolls. It's essentially a cross section of the players in Gulf info war.
The complaint is broken down into three phases, a recruitment stage, a hacking stage, and a defamation stage. Of course the trolls come in more in the defamation stage...
One of the complaints is against Abdullatif al Shaikh - who is accused of issuing an implicit death threat via Twitter. (Incidentally al Shaikh is a regular feature on disinfo campaigns). An interesting aspect of the case is that it states that this could not have been done
Read 14 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
24 Nov 20
[Thread]1/ Here is a table of how many suspended accounts per country have been published on Twitter's public state-backed information operation. With the case of Saudi, Egypt and UAE, Twitter sometimes combined their results, so I have included calculations (in orange) showing
2/ this. China comes on top, with a Saudi specific takedown combined with a Saudi/UAE/Egypt combined takedown in second. Third place is a UAE specific takedown combined with the Saudi/UAE/Egypt takedown. Attached here is a list of the MENA specific accounts
3/ Some separate calculations have been to, as we know that 88000 accounts linked to the Saudi company SMAAT were suspended, but not included in the archive (we also know this was the case for China).So some takeaways, according to official Twitter takedown data Saudi and the UAE
Read 5 tweets

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