Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media

Abstract

With his highly engaging and painstakingly researched Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, Marc Owen Jones makes a much-needed addition to the field of post-truth and disinformation studies. The focus of the book on the MENA region—more specifically on the Gulf area—allows its author to provide a wealth of examples that demonstrate how sophisticated disinformation operations are not the prerogative of well-known purveyors of state-sponsored propaganda and deception such as Russia and China or of outlets operating within the populist and right-wing information ecosystems in the United States and in Europe. Deception as a tool of public opinion control and as an instrument of aggressive foreign policy has been embraced by a growing club of authoritarian or autocratic regimes in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Egypt, and Qatar, among others are also active contributors to the growing “deception order” (6) influencing both regional and global politics, which Owen details through a series of thoroughly analyzed case studies.The book’s focus on the Middle East, which a decade ago was the theater of a series of epochal popular uprisings fueled by the advent of digital technology, also offers the author the opportunity to present important caveats against the rhetoric of liberation technology, prominent during the Arab Spring. Owen Jones contends that the current rise of digital authoritarianism is inherently linked to the experience of the Arab Spring, which has prompted a backlash by many regimes in the region in the form of surveillance, censorship, and strict control of digital technology to prevent future uprisings. The author also vigorously debunks the somehow simplistic techno-utopianism prominent a decade ago by showing how the liberation paradigm hailed by progressive forces in the West and in the region has served, perhaps unwittingly, as a cover for the spread of neoliberal digital capitalism, eager to push a powerful and underregulated technology into problematic and politically volatile geographical contexts, regardless of the consequences.The field of disinformation, computational propaganda, and post-truth studies, which since 2016 has generated increased academic interest and research output, has clearly illustrated how digital media, especially social media platforms, are not necessarily liberating or emancipatory. Instead, they can be exploited to spread deceptive and manipulative communications in support of demagogic, populist, and authoritarian political actors. While there is now considerable literature on how the phenomenon is affecting Western democratic countries, as well as on how prominent autocratic or authoritarian regimes such as those ruling Russia and China use deception in both domestic affairs and foreign policy, still relatively few studies have extended their focus to include countries in the Middle East, a region with high digital technology adoption and very little safeguards to protect citizens from deception operations. Aware that a rapidly shifting global scenario, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, requires new perspectives and vantage points on international relations, Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East pushes the academic discourse and research on disinformation beyond the Cold War framework, which has traditionally pit Russia and China as the main forces undermining Western security. In the process, Owen Jones opens a plurality of fascinating and troubling perspectives on Middle East politics, to demonstrate how profoundly they have been influenced by authoritarian forces that have mastered the use of digital technology and how the fallout of such new forms of authoritarianism can have repercussions beyond the region.Owen Jones defines “digital authoritarianism” as “the use of digital information technology by authoritarian regimes to surveil, repress and manipulate domestic and foreign population” (2) through a plurality of different techniques such as cyberattacks, internet shutdowns, the use of bots and trolls to push or suppress narratives, and targeted persecution against journalists and users. While the book makes it clear that deception and disinformation are illiberal practices appearing in both democratic and authoritarian regimes; in the latter, such practices operate generally unfettered and unchallenged. The “truth decay” effect has been identified as one of the most problematic features of digital information ecosystems, where objective truths have been rendered plastic and slippery by a plurality of technological and cultural factors. In authoritarian countries, this phenomenon can be easily leveraged by powerful actors intent on misleading populations and strengthening their grip on political power. In the MENA region, and especially in the Gulf, deception via digital media—aided and abetted by loosely regulated communication technology—contributes to the perpetuation of political systems functioning through corruption, human rights abuse, and inequality.The harmful political effects of digital authoritarianism are not limited to the region but easily transcend borders and spill over into other world regions, with significant implications for foreign policy decision-making and global geopolitics. One of the book’s main arguments is that digital authoritarianism involves the “decoupling and despatialization of authoritarian practices” (11), which resonate beyond traditional state boundaries. Owen Jones discusses such practices as inherently transnational endeavors, due to the borderless nature of digital communications, through which new digital powers, nodes, and hubs can extend their influence globally. To understand why such deceptive practices are becoming so frequent and pervasive in the region, creating what the author calls a “Gulf post-truth moment” (13), the book examines the discursive, tactical, and strategic qualities of a significant body of deception operations that have emerged in the region since 2011.Specifically, Owen Jones identifies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the primary drivers of digital authoritarianism in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is presented in the book as a digital media superpower, launching deceptive and manipulative influence operations in a sustained manner on both a domestic and an international scale. The geopolitical context within which the Saudi Kingdom developed into a main player in the global field of deception operations is defined by two main elements: a new era of Gulf politics, jump-started by the Trump administration and characterized by renewed pressure on Iran and on the normalization of the relation between Israel and various Gulf countries. This, according to the author, has provided fertile ground for the seeding of disinformation and deceptive narratives into the media ecosystems of the region at the service of a new geopolitical vision spearheaded by autocratic and at times tyrannical leaders such as Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi. Both rulers seek to carve a place of prominence for their countries in Gulf politics, and to this end they have also fueled a rise in disinformation operations. The geopolitical vision pushed forth synergistically by these leaders, sometimes in coordination with right-wing sections of the American political spectrum, is predicated on a permanent state of mobilization of their public opinion against a perceived threat represented by hostile political actors such as Qatar, Turkey, Iran, and Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood.Before delving into some of the many examples that the author uses to support these claims, it is worth further probing the theoretical framework that Owen Jones lays out in the introductory chapters as a foundation for his empirical work. It is also worth appreciating his methodological approach to the study of disinformation and post-truth. The lack of an in-depth theorization of the notion of “post-truth” is probably the main weakness of an otherwise outstanding book. In his discussion of the concept, Owen Jones doesn’t acknowledge the existence of a recent body of literature that has discussed post-truth as a political and cultural phenomenon rooted in the decline of the Foucauldian “regime-of-truths” traditionally enforced by legacy media and cultural or scientific institutions in Western liberal democracies,1 in the emergence of fictional counter-narratives such as conspiracy theories by technologically empowered publics,2 in the epistemic relativism that some scholars trace back to the postmodern turn in politics and culture,3 and in the crisis of authority of Western democratic politics and values in the global geopolitical arena.4Neglecting such a multilayered cultural and political dimension of the term post-truth, which also gives publics and audiences a role in producing and participating in fictional narratives, Owen Jones takes a more traditional political economic approach in discussing the most salient aspects of the Gulf post-truth moment. The author seems particularly concerned with the alignment between authoritarian regimes and global technology companies. In Owen Jones’s engaging but ultimately bleak view, the Middle East appears as a “Wild West” for disinformation, dominated by despotic regimes and completely subjugated to the neoliberal logic that has fueled the rise of the data extractive business models underpinning commercial social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The extraction of self-disclosed data and personal information by platform users is not only profitable for the technology companies, but also necessary for authoritarian regimes seeking to maintain control of the population, since profiles of subjects can be used to monitor and control citizens’ behavior and opinions.The “datafication” of users, or their transformation into collections of data points that can be used for a plurality of manipulative and predictive ends, is thus of primary interests for both Western private corporations and Middle Eastern authoritarian rulers. Both resist attempts to protect users’ privacy, as they would hinder advertising revenues and the governments’ surveillance abilities. In Owen Jones’s reading, a capitalist model based on data mining and information extraction can lead to new forms of “techno-colonialism” (17) or the exploitation of a poorer country by a richer one through technology, as well as to the strengthening of existing authoritarian regimes.The analysis is correct, but perhaps laying part of the blame for the rise of deception and authoritarianism in the region at the feet of Western neoliberalism and Western technology companies might appear to be not only a Western-centric conclusion, but also a deterministic one, overly emphasizing the importance of technology and of its business models to the detriment of a more nuanced cultural analysis of people’s engagement with technology, which should also consider individual gratification, identify formation, and social-bonding that digital media provides to its users.While I agree with Owen Jones that the narrative of liberation technology prominent a decade ago in the region appears now anachronistic, as well as overly deterministic and dubiously instrumental to profit-seeking ventures, I also think it might be premature to dismiss the liberating element of digital networking technology, which has demonstrated the ability to empower and mobilize citizens in the past—in some cases leading them to previously unthinkable political outcomes—and to this day continues to provide outlets, albeit restricted and closely monitored, to express their views on culture, religion, sexuality and also politics.Where the author really excels and offers his most useful contribution to the field of disinformation research is the part in which he presents his sophisticated methodology to study deception operations and puts it at the service of a vast selection of studies and investigations on disinformation in the region. Combining a wide array of tools and skills, the author uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct the research showcased in the book, including “digital ethnography, open-source research, as well as computer-assisted analysis of datasets, including anomaly detection, corpus analysis, network analysis and, well, good old-fashioned investigative work” (19).The platform of choice for most of the case studies in the book was Twitter, which allows generous access to its data for research via the Application Programming Interface (API), and which has allowed the author to gather millions of tweets and hundreds of hashtags to study the function and reach of deception operations. What also impresses about the book, on top of the technological savvy demonstrated by the author, is the narrative flare with which Owen Jones recounts his investigation in the dark corners of social media, where he has spent a considerable amount of time chasing trolls, unmasking fake journalists, exposing sock puppet accounts, and detecting large-scale information operations by automated bots. Faithful to the academic approach of public impact scholarship, which seeks to “create social change through the translation and dissemination of research to non-academic audiences” (22), Owen Jones’s multiple investigations are narrated with rigorous analysis, political engagement, as well as with humor.Among the multiple case studies discussed in the book, I chose to focus on a couple discussing the role of Saudi Arabia’s growing digital media power in shaping the deception order in the Gulf. In Owen Jones’s definition, digital media power can be summarized “as an actor’s ability to use or co-opt digital media technologies in order to assert ideological influence and power over a community” (81). Owen Jones argues that the manipulation of social media to promote propagandistic narratives and to suppress criticism of the Saudi regime has become a key element of Mohammed bin Salman’s vision for Saudi Arabia. While Saudi Arabia attempts to dominate the Middle East and Arabic-language media industry date back to the 1990s, it was after the Arab Spring and especially with the spread of social media in the country that the Kingdom’s tactics and strategies to expand its media power, also through deception operations, have evolved in reach and sophistication.Saudi Arabia is one of countries in the world with the highest penetration of digital technology, with some of the highest numbers of social media users, and with a very young population that forms a potentially volatile “youth bulge” using social media as a space for discussion and information consumption. As argued by Owen Jones, managing and pacifying its youth is one of the cornerstones of the Kingdom’s security strategy to maintain a hold on power. The deployment of digital media power to praise the country’s leadership and to attack or silence critics of the ruling dynasty has been one of the central tenets of Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power.A technique used to boost Saudi popularity both regionally and globally, especially during the Kingdom’s UN-sanctioned war in Yemen was that of “astroturfing,” or manufacturing the illusion of a vox populi, through sock-puppet accounts (fake social media profiles) and bots (nonhuman automated accounts), which were instructed to support specific narratives or to censor sensitive topics through distracting content. For example, hashtags in Arabic carrying messages in support of Mohammed bin Salman during his visit to London in 2018 were made to trend, in order to give the illusion of international grassroots support, thanks to the coordinated work of hundreds of fake accounts with Western-sounding names. In his research of this deception operation, Owen Jones estimated that at least 30 percent of the accounts promoting such pro-Saudi hashtags were either sock-puppets or bots, known in the region as “electronic flies.”Still in the context of Saudi’s war in Yemen, the book discusses the controversial role of Mohammed bin Salman’s right hand, Saud Al-Qahtani, in orchestrating Saudi’s deceptive operations via social media. The book points to Al-Qahtani’s involvement in managing pro-regime “troll farms”—often drawing manpower from the unemployed and digitally active Saudi youth—to solicit services from international hackers to develop software that could either delete and promote social media posts about Saudi involvement in Yemen and to suspend and hack the Twitter account of Medicines Sans Frontier, a humanitarian organization that had exposed Saudi’s war crimes in Yemen.Another chapter discusses how the abundant disinformation circulating around the coronavirus was exploited, especially in the earlier phase of the pandemic, to further foreign policy objectives of some Gulf states. Specifically, the chapter examines how actors connected to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates used coronavirus disinformation to attack regional opponents. Among the multiple examples provided, it is worth recounting that of an information operation taken down by Twitter that revealed how accounts connected to Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt had targeted Qatar—specifically its national airline, Qatar Airways—accusing it of spreading the new virus around the world because of negligence and incompetence. Qatar was also the target of outlandish claims by a pro-UAE journalist, who accused the country of having financed China’s engineering of the virus and for deliberately spreading the virus in the region to damage the Emirati and Saudi economies. Owen Jones rightly points out that social media platforms took a tougher stance on combating health disinformation during the pandemic, often in coordination with the World Health Organization. However, less scrutiny was given by the platforms to the false information on the pandemic circulating in non-anglophone markets, which allowed, especially in 2020, such deceptive narratives to spread unfettered in the Gulf region.One last example appears in the chapter dedicated to the deceptive methods used by Saudi-linked entities to manipulate public opinion in the aftermath of the gruesome murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who, especially via his collaboration with The Washington Post, had expressed criticism of the reforms initiated by Mohammed bin Salman. The murder of Khashoggi inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul marked the most blatant and tragic episode of a Middle Eastern government silencing a critical journalist. However, the event had serious consequences for Mohamed bin Salman’s efforts to brand himself as a progressive reformer in the eyes of the world. The vast amount of international media coverage and the near-total condemnation that the murder elicited around the globe put the Saudi propaganda machine to the test, forcing it to go into damage-control mode in attempt to regain control of the narrative around the events that led to the murder of Khashoggi.In the aftermath of the murder, as hashtags started to circulate on Twitter implicating Saudi Arabia in the disappearance of the journalist, “electronic flies” at the service of the Saudi government started to manipulate the algorithm governing Twitter trends to promote narratives exonerating Saudi from Khashoggi’s death, to sideline those alleging a Saudi involvement, and to smear the memory of the journalist. Perhaps the most poignant observation offered by Owen Jones in recounting the case is the following: “Khashoggi was a real person . . . amidst a sea of unverified bots, trolls and hyper-partisan foot soldiers” (244) who was killed because he didn’t want to align with the hyper-nationalist propaganda pushed by millions of social media accounts and because he disrupted the media order desired by Mohammed bin Salman.Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East is a significant achievement in the study of disinformation and computational propaganda, providing a necessary and timely update in the field, not only because it expands the scope of the research beyond the Western world and its well-known foes Russia and China, but also because it provides a fascinating and in-depth look into the modus operandi of a scholar with an extensive knowledge of the Gulf region who can artfully combine critical abilities and impressive technological skills to expose deception operations.