Thread by @rhizomyx

A lot of people have been referencing this thread to claim that most Twitter activity in relation to the events in #Tunisia is the work of Emirati, Egyptian and Saudi bots. This provides valuable data but it suffers from selection bias. Let me explain 🧵

https://twitter.com/marcowenjones/status/1420429579144110081

Marc did a great job mapping and analysing Twitter disinformation and propaganda, inauthentic coordinated behaviour originating in the UAE-Egypt-KSA axis. The way this study is presented suggests that these countries are behind most disinfo/propaganda about Tunisia.

Marc himself acknowledges that the scope of this study was narrow and not "agnostic," and he is preparing a wider upcoming study which looks at Tunisia-related activity by diverse actors. But his data is being used by Ennahdha, and Qatari and Turkish actors to support a narrative

according to which enthusiasm for Saied's decisions is fake, and that Tunisians do not support him, and that support for Saied is a foreign-engineered fallacy. This narrative seems to be contracted by the first post-25 July poll

https://twitter.com/rhizomyx/status/1420479079929851904

This poll's results should be interpreted with caution though.

So what's the problem with Marc's data? Selection bias. Marc has only mapped accounts which use a specific hashtag: "Tunisians revolt against the Brotherhood"

Hashtags are not neutral. Each cluster or faction uses its own hashtags. There are separate conversations about Tunisia across the public sphere. These are siloed under partisan/factional hashtags.

The hashtag Marc studied happens to be a very factional hashtag which seems to

have been created as part of a joint UAE-KSA-Egy influence operation. The opposing faction - the Turkey-Qatari axis - obviously uses different hashtags. They're unlikely to tweet that Tunisians are revolting against their Muslim Brotherhood proxies/allies.

Most Tunisians are also unlikely to use this hashtag. Apart from a minority who's obsessed with Ennahdha and unable to see that the whole system is rotten, most Tunisians understand that the 25th July protest and Saied's subsequent power grab were aimed at

the entire power structure and the political system that's built on top of it. Many Muslim Tunisians, including very conservative ones oppose Ennahdha (due to corruption, political opportunism, incompetence) while having no problem with Islam or conservative politics.

President Saied himself is quite conservative and claims inspiration from Islamic values. So Tunisians are unlikely to see the current conflict as a struggle for/against (political) Islam. Most ordinary people are beyond that now. Even some Ennahdha current and former leaders

such as Lotfi Zitoun (former advisor to Ghannouchi), Zied Laadhari (former Minister of Labour and Development), Samir Dilou (former Minister of Human Rights) recognise that Ennahdha has failed and approve, to a certain extent, of Saied's decision.

In sum, this is not about political Islam.

To return to Marc's data: When you map social media accounts which use a heavily-loaded anti-Brotherhood hashtag don't be surprised if you only find Emirati bots and no Qatari or Turkish propagandists.

Did Qatar and Turkey abstain from engaging in propaganda and disinformation sine the 25th of July? Well, they obviously don't appear in Marc's data because he indirectly excluded them from the scope. But the answer is: Hell yeah!

The truth is that Tunisia has been the theatre of a multi-layered propaganda war. There's the disinformation war between local actors who hire big-name PR agencies to mobilise troll farms. On top of that, there's the UAE-Egypt-KSA vs Qatar-Turkey conflict which is playing out

in the Tunisian information space. Western proxies for UAE and Qatar have also been involved (think tanks, journalists). Russia occasionally makes irruptions into this space. From time to time Sputnik and Russia Today amplify the voice of Tunisian anti-Qatar/Turkey/US influencers

Russians are also believed to have helped a Tunisian set up a local version of Sputnik, an online website which promoted pro-Russian and anti-Qatar narratives as well as Tunisian nationalism.

Algeria doesn't seem to have done anything in this space recently, but between 2011 and

2013 there were a lot of Algerian information ops going on targeting Tunisia. Algerian narratives focused on al-Qa'eda presence+/activities in Tunisia and seemed to amplify perceptions of that threat (which, by the way was real). During that period, lots of false information

about AQIM leaders and operations in Tunisian news media, citing "anonymous high-ranking Algerian security officials", and Algerian news articles in the same vein.

So, back to 25th of July! What did the other side do? I wish we had more data about coordinated inauthentic

behaviour from the Qatari-Turkey-Ennahdha axis. But there's still some visible activity.

For one, Tunisians have observed that in recent months Ennahdha leaders' social media posts were massively liked and commented (positively) by Bengladeshi and Philipino dudes. Troll farms.

By the way, recently @AtlanticCouncil published an investigation into the activities of UReputation, a "disinformation as a service" firm owned by Lotfi Bel Hadj who has close ties to Ennahdha's Ghannouchi. He worked a lot with Ennahdha's ally Qalb Tounes as well which

is also very well versed in disinformation and spreads it via Nabil Karoui's Nessma TV.

Qatari-aligned/funded media such as the Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera have also spread disinformation. See my thread on MEE's claims that PM Mechichi was beaten by Egyptians in

the Carthage presidential palace on the night of the coup - allegations which have been denied by Mechichi himself earlier today.

This story serves the narrative that what's happening in Tunisia has no roots in popular discontent

https://twitter.com/rhizomyx/status/1420495934845333506

and was entirely engineered by the Egyptians and Emiratis, and that Kais Saied is merely MBZ's puppet. They all conspire to crush the democratic regime offered by Ennahdha to the Tunisians, and like Ennahdha's Noureddine Bhiri recently Said "thanks to Ennahdha life in Tunisia is

like paradise" (barely paraphrasing). These narratives deny Tunisians agency, discard their grievances, and exclusively frame the events as a regional conspiracy while Tunisians are portrayed as naive and powerless.

But as @CrisisGroup noted:

https://twitter.com/rhizomyx/status/1420497419649826824

Turkey has also been very active - arguably the most active and with the most sophisticated methods. Indeed, the Turks don't seem to bother with ragtag bot armies which scream "I'm inauthentic". These UAE/Egy/KSA methods seem ineffective. Just a band of ostensibly fake profiles

screaming at each other, bots interacting with bots and a few gullible Gulf social media users. They're not fooling anybody, they're not influencing Tunisians or any public opinion that matters.

So the Turks are more sophisticated. In addition to propaganda served via their

own media outlets such as TRT (which has built propaganda on Marc's own data), they have two things:
- Turkish online media posing as local Tunisian media;
- Turkish social media profiles posing as Tunisians.

https://twitter.com/rulajebreal/status/1420121799413600256

Their favourite narrative portrays Tunisia as a helpless country whose dreams and hopes are being crushed by their former colonial power France and its heretic allies KSA, Sisi's Egypt and UAE. In these narratives, Turkey has failed the Tunisians when the Ottoman empire lost

this colony to the French in 1881 and now Erdogan wants to rectify this historical wrong and bring Tunisia under its traditional protector.

They portray any popular resistance to Ennahdha - their ally - as a foreign-engineered hoax/manipulation.

One example of the first category is Nahdhat Tounes (Tunisian Renaissance, which is a direct reference to Ennahdha party), an online media pretending to be Tunisian but which is managed from Turkey and promotes pro-Turkish views.

They notably implied that the January 2021

youth protests against the Tunisian government were manipulated by foreign powers (UAE).

There's also Amel Zarrouk, a social media profile who poses as a Tunisian women, a law professor at the Faculty of Tunis. Problem is, this Amel Zarrouk doesn't exist. Behind this account which has been signalled on many occasions to @TwitterSafety there's a dude in Turkey.

Here's an example of tweet by Professor Zarrouk, framing the January youth protests as an Emirati conspiracy. I find this the most hurtful aspect of these disinformation campaigns: denying Tunisian young people agency, despite all their suffering and marginalisation and injustice

The latest hoax spread by a Tunisian DC think-tanker affiliated with Ennahdha: "The US orders Saied to expel Egyptian security officers" (remember the ones who supposedly beat the crap out of PM Mechichi in Carthage?)

The pro-Saied side is not innocent of disinformation either. I haven't seen anything on the scale of Emirati and Turkish/Qatari propaganda from pro-Saied Tunisian actors, but they have generated a proliferation of rumours. These usually portray Saied as taking action against the

corrupt. Rumours of arrests of corrupt politicians from diverse parties, judges etc. These rumours seem to address the Tunisian public's anxiety and impatience: many, from both political sides, feel that Saied has been slow in taking decisions. People want to know what action

he's willing to take against his opponents. Rumours have been filling this vacuum, energising the pro-Saied groups and scaring the pro-parties groups.