Close hundreds of accounts .. Facebook dismantles two Saudi and Egyptian networks

Facebook said on Thursday it had dismantled two networks, one linked to the Saudi government, and ran a network of fake accounts and pages on its platform to promote state propaganda and attack opponents in the region, while the latter is linked to the UAE and Egypt and is active for the same purpose.

The company added that it closed more than 350 accounts and a page of about 1.4 million followers in the latest campaign to combat "fake counterfeit behavior" on its platform and in the first activity of its kind linked to the Saudi government.

Countries in the Middle East are increasingly turning to sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for secret campaigns of political influence over the Internet.

Reuters revealed the details of an expanded campaign backed by Iran last year. Riyadh also faces charges of using the same tactics to attack its rival Qatar and publishing false information following the killing of opposition journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied involvement in Khashoggi's death and has not responded to previous allegations about its activities on social networking sites. The kingdom, along with its allies, has imposed a trade and diplomatic boycott on Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism, which Doha denies.

Facebook has launched campaigns for "fake behavior" several times, but data on such activities rarely link directly to a government.

"For this process, our investigators were able to make sure that the people behind them were linked to the Saudi government," said Nathaniel Gleicher, director of Facebook's e-security policy.

"Any time there is a link between an information process and a government, that is important and people should know," he said.

Facebook also said it had closed a separate network of more than 350 accounts linked to marketing organizations in the UAE and Egypt. But did not link this activity directly to the government in this case.

Glitscher said the Saudi campaign was active on Facebook and Intgram and targeted mainly countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Qatar and Palestine.

The campaign used fake accounts pretending to be nationals of those countries, and designed pages to look like local news sites. Facebook said more than $ 100,000 was spent on advertising.

"They usually talk in Arabic about regional news and political issues and talk about things like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his plan for economic and social reform and the successes of the Saudi armed forces, especially in the war in Yemen," he said.

Battlefield
Social media companies are under increasing pressure to help stop illegal political influence on the Internet.

US intelligence officials said Russia had used Facebook and other platforms to intervene in the 2016 US presidential election and were concerned that it would do so again in 2020, while Moscow denies it.

Ben Nemo of the Atlantic Criminal Court's digital forensics laboratory, which works with Facebook to analyze impact campaigns, said Internet information operations were becoming increasingly visible as more governments and political groups embraced those methods and social media companies intensified efforts to address them.

Facebook has announced 11 counterfeiting operations from 13 different countries so far this year. The latest announcement last week included accounts run by people in Thailand, Russia, Ukraine and Honduras.

The network, based in the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, which was also dismantled Thursday, was separate from the Saudi campaign, although it targeted some of the same countries in the Middle East and Africa with messages promoting the UAE, the company said.

"This shows how social media are turning into a battlefield, especially in the Gulf, where there are strong regional discounts and a long tradition of working through proxies," Nemo said.

"It becomes very natural," he said. "Where geopolitical tensions escalate, things like that happen, and we move into a space where the platforms are almost routinely handled."