1/ Thread. Kind of curious to see this piece about Saudi Al Qahtani edging back to power in the Guardian. There's been a sense his return to the front has been imminent for a while, but I'm not convinced social media activity is an indicator of his return theguardian.com/world/2021/oct…
2/ If you look at the Arabic hashtag of Saud al Qahtani you will see it peaked in December 2019 and May 2021. It also maintains a general level of activity between those spikes in interest, indicating there is a general bubbling of praise about him. I certainly see it a lot 
3/ Recently on 9th October monther72, a prolific Saudi political influencer, tweeted his name. As usual it got a lot of traction. What's interesting is that if you analysis all the tweets with the hashtag of Sultan al Qahtani (from day 1), monther72 is the account that
4/ that receives the most likes. As you can see from this graph, monther72 has the highest number of favourite tweets about al Qahtani. A number of the other accounts have, interestingly, been highly active in Saudi/UAE disinfo campaigns. What this indicates is an overlap
5/ between those who continue to sing his praises, and those who have also been fairly active in promoting Saudi foreign policy, whether disinformation or otherwise.
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