Facebook takes down hundreds of accounts connected to Saudi government

People connected to the government of Saudi Arabia have run a network of fake accounts and pages on Facebook to promote state propaganda and attack regional rivals, the social media giant said on Thursday.

Facebook said it had suspended more than 350 accounts and pages with about 1.4 million followers, the latest takedown in an ongoing effort to combat "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" on its platform, and the first such activity it has linked to the Saudi government.

Countries in the Middle East have increasingly turned to websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube to peddle covert political influence online.

Reuters detailed an expansive Iranian-backed campaign last year and Riyadh has been accused of using the same tactics to attack regional rival Qatar and spread disinformation following the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any involvement in Khashoggi's death and not responded to previous allegations about its activity on social media. Along with allies, it has imposed a trade and diplomatic boycott on Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism, which Qatar denies.

Facebook announces takedowns of "inauthentic behaviour" as often as multiple times a month, but statements that directly link such behaviour to a government are rare.

"For this operation, our investigators were able to confirm that the individuals behind this are associated with the government of Saudi Arabia," said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy.

"Any time we have a link between an information operation and a government, that's significant and people should be aware."

Facebook also said on Thursday it had suspended a separate network of more than 350 accounts linked to marketing firms in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

In that case it did not directly link the activity to a government.

Gleicher said the Saudi campaign operated on Facebook and its Instagram photo-sharing platform, primarily targeting countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Qatar, the UAE, Egypt and Palestine.

The operation used fake accounts posing as those countries' citizens and pages designed to look like local news outlets. More than $100,000 was spent on advertisements, Facebook said.

"They would typically post in Arabic about regional news and political issues. They would talk about things like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - his internal and economic social reform plan, the successes of the Saudi armed forces, particularly during the conflict in Yemen," said Gleicher.

Normalised battleground

Social media companies are under increasing pressure to help stop illicit political influence online.

US intelligence officials have said that Russia used Facebook and other platforms to interfere in the 2016 US Presidential Election and are concerned it will do so again in 2020. Moscow denies such allegations.

Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab, which works with Facebook to analyse influence campaigns, said online information operations were becoming increasingly visible as more governments and political groups adopt the tactics and the social media companies step up efforts to take them down.

Facebook has publicly announced 11 takedowns of "inauthentic behaviour" stemming from 13 different countries so far this year. The most recent announcement last week included accounts run by people in Thailand, Russia, Ukraine and Honduras.

The network based in the UAE and Egypt that was also dismantled on Thursday was separate to the Saudi campaign, Facebook said, although it targeted some of the same countries in the Middle East and Africa with messages promoting the UAE.

"This shows how much social media has become a battleground, particularly in the Gulf, where you've got very strong regional rivalries and you've got a long tradition of working through proxies," Nimmo said.

"This is almost becoming normalised," he added.

"Where you get geopolitical tensions, you get stuff like this going on, and we're moving into a space where the platforms are dealing with this almost as routine."