Alex Jones and Infowars gets 'disappeared' - are we headed in the right direction?

[Angrboda]

Saudi Arabia’s information war to bury news of Jamal Khashoggi

For the past several days, the Saudi Twittersphere has been awash with patriotism. Saudi accounts have tweeted, in Arabic, a “#message of love for Mohammed bin Salman” and encouraged one another to “#unfollow enemies of the nation.” The latter hashtag started trending at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, peaked at about 5 p.m., and by Wednesday had been mentioned 103,000 times.

This might have been because Saudi citizens, consumed by national indignation, took to their smartphones to show their support for the crown prince in his moment of difficulty: The disappearance and presumed murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Post columnist, under exceptionally grisly circumstances, has not been good for the international reputation of the royal family. But it’s equally possible that those hashtags were pushed by bots — fake, computerized accounts — as well as by paid, professional Internet trolls. After President Trump visited Riyadh in 2017, Marc Owen Jones, a Persian Gulf expert at the University of Exeter, tracked the accounts enthusiastically welcoming the U.S. president to Saudi Arabia. “Eighty to ninety percent of them were bots,” he told me.

---

None of this is secret, not in Saudi Arabia, and not anywhere else. Censorship, in its 21st-century form, isn’t carried out by old men in hidden offices, marking up newspaper articles with red ink. It is carried out by young men with mobile phones, working in the open, whose “patriotic” assaults on the “unpatriotic” are there for everyone to see. It’s also evolving constantly, as regimes observe one another’s methods. On Wednesday, Twitter released data on thousands of recently banned Russian and Iranian accounts; according to the analyst Ben Nimmo, it appears that the latter were learning from the former.

The question is why Twitter isn’t interested in their Saudi equivalent. Or, more to the point, why fake accounts and false identities are tolerated at all. We aren’t that far away from a time when it will become too dangerous for many people to risk the use of social media — and we’ve already reached the point where social media reveals very little of what people really think and believe. Maybe tens of thousands of Saudis really do want to pass on a #message of love for Mohammed bin Salman. But if they don’t, how would we know?