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 that it had suspended more than 350 accounts and pages with about 1.4 million followers, the latest take-down in an ongoing effort to combat "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on its platform, and the first such activity it has linked to the Saudi government.
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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 take-downs of "inauthentic behavior" as often as multiple times a month, but statements that directly link such behavior 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 the Palestinian Authority.
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.
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.
