As an Assistant Professor at Hamad bin Khalifa University, Qatar, Marc Owen Jones researches disinformation and digital media. His most recent book, Digital Authoritarianism, is a comprehensive study of different methods Middle Eastern authoritarian rulers use in the digital space. The book investigates the tactics some rulers, such as Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia and Mohammed bin Zaid of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), use to intimidate their opponents abroad through the use of disinformation on social media.
The book argues that authoritarian rulers in the Middle East fund nefarious activities online to silence their opponents abroad, to polish their own image (or their countries’ image) in Western countries and change the narrative about their persistent abuse of human rights.
The author claims that these activities have broader implications beyond the region.
The book consists of six major parts and fifteen chapters in total. The first two chapters cover the conceptual framework of the book and lay the groundwork for the more empirical parts. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on domestic authoritarian practices in the digital space. These chapters specifically follow developments in Saudi media since the 1990s and the rise of digital media in the country. They also discuss the increasing use of automation, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Saudi Arabia and beyond.
The disinformation campaigns organized by the Gulf’s autocrats not only resonate with their own citizens (or mostly bots), but also find supporters in other countries. For instance, in Chapter 5, Jones shows the connection between Saudi accounts and right-wing Trump supporters in the US in their hatred of and spreading of disinformation about Iran. These accounts at times invent events to attack.
The seventh chapter discusses the export of authoritarianism via social media by Saudi Arabia, Iran, or UAE to the fragile democracies in the Arab world, including Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Chapter 8 shows that even a pseudo-journalist who has published in several prestigious outlets can find avenues to spread anti-Qatar propaganda in online publications. Jones writes that
It soon became clear that almost all of the journalists did not exist. Many had extremely sparse LinkedIn profiles, and reverse image searches revealed that some of them also had photos stolen from social media accounts. (p.187)
The next chapter investigates the tactics used in the proposed takeover of Newcastle Football Club by the Saudi’s Public Investment Fund. The main theme of this chapter is the targeting of football fans with sportswashing and negative campaigning by the Saudi authorities. In chapter 10, Owen Jones in turn argues that COVID-19 was instrumentalized as a weapon to attack political rivals. Chapter 11 traces the Saudi deception methods in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul Consulate in October 2018. The online attack against Khashoggi had in fact started already before his killing. As is shown here, Saudi tactics aimed to distract the Saudi public from the actual killing and those campaigns successfully deflected blame from the Saudi government.
Women were not exempt from deception campaigns. Chapter 12 evaluates how Ghada Oueiss, a female journalist at Al Jazeera Arabic, had been targeted by abusive messages and then by doxing – her photos were stolen and shared by a Twitter account. Chapter 13 explores the conspiracy theories targeting Qatar, Turkey, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood. These alleged conspiracies are shared by influential people in social media and legacy media to give them ‘depth.’ The next chapter traces examples of the hijacking of verified accounts on X (previously Twitter) and how the company has failed to intervene to prevent such propagandistic activities. Lastly, chapter 15 delves into fake social media accounts that try to obtain private and sensitive information. The author explains his own experience with one of the accounts and documents his conversations with Magnus Callaghan who has often criticized his opinions regarding the Middle East. This shows that the tactics of trolls include personal engagement with the account holders whom they think harmful to their narratives.
Besides one of the trolls’ own experiences, the book mostly relies on metadata collected from Twitter and traces the tactics of the accounts, real or fake, in an attempt to change the main narrative to the benefit of authoritarian rulers.
It argues that when it comes to combating disinformation in the MENA region, big social media companies, especially what was once Twitter, tend to ignore rules and regulations in place in the US.
Instead, they become complicit in disinformation campaigns organized by authoritarian leaders, not least because of increasing investments by such rulers. Some companies, such as McKinsey, even collaborate with authoritarian regimes and help them build their narratives.
The book extensively documents the complex network behind social media operations in critical times. Its main contribution lies in its analysis of the complex relations of users (real or pseudo) in the online sphere and how their interactions aim to change (or build) a narrative against their opponents. These relations show that the nefarious campaigns against opponents inside and outside of these countries are orchestrated by the Gulf rulers or by senior officials close to the monarchies.
Their more sophisticated tactics include the hacking of phones (as in the case of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), appropriating Twitter accounts, doctoring photos, and even publishing articles online in magazines and newspapers with large audiences.
The spread of authoritarian practices into the digital space has clearly expanded the tools at the disposal of authoritarian rulers in the Middle East. Relatedly, digital authoritarianism has grown into a transnational campaign to influence other countries’ citizens via online methods. The book’s originality indeed comes from its innovative approach to foreign policy as the playground for autocratic practices online. How these digital practices are framed in the West and among the countries targeted also reveals a worrying trend.
Some caveats are worth mentioning. First, the book relies heavily on Twitter for its data – other social media companies could have been additionally investigated. The research might also have further benefitted from semi-structured interviews with Twitter employees and Saudi officials (if available). This might have been able to uncover how officials were directly or indirectly involved in disinformation campaigns.
Secondly, in some cases the precise connection between disinformation campaigns and authoritarian rule is not clear.
To take an example, the analysis of Magnus Callaghan’s online engagement with the author, who was an internet troll trying to steal some information from the author and attempted to disseminate his own conspiracy theories, does not fully convince. It is not even clear whether he was supposed to serve Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates when disseminating disinformation; he might just have been a “lone wolf” obsessed with specific countries and personalities.
In addition, the cases covered in the book would be enriched by giving examples of prosecutions based on social media posts critical of the Saudi or Emirati regimes. For instance, in Chapter 11, it is argued that rumormongering and spreading fake news online would be punished by five years of imprisonment in Saudi Arabia, but no actual trials are mentioned. Part III titled “Trump and the War on Reality in the Gulf” might be considered slightly misleading as it seems to overemphasize Trump’s role in the hostilities between the Gulf monarchies and Iran.
Although Trump’s reversal of the US’s Iran policy clearly had negative ramifications on the relations between the two countries, his presidency might still have played no more than a secondary role in the increase of disinformation campaigns organized by Gulf countries.
The most problematic aspect of the book, however, is its hyperbolic use of concepts and terms. Such terms include digital populism, digital orientalism, journoganda, sportswashing, techno-optimism and techno-utopianism, to name just a few. Especially the broad use of populism to define many different political attitudes ends up confusing rather than clarifying issues. Concept-stretching is certainly not a brand-new fashion in political science, nor in populism studies per se. Since populism is a highly slippery term, political scientists tend to use this concept interchangeably with authoritarianism, nationalism, and even racism. This book provides another example of such practices. The book conflates the term with different concepts and ends up branding almost every leader in the Middle East a populist – from MBS and MBZ to Muqtada El Sadr of Iraq. This is misleading since populism has two core elements: people-centrism and anti-elitism. In my assessment, the book could have used fewer concepts and it should have conducted a more parsimonious job in using specific ones.
The book’s contribution to digital authoritarianism literature remains substantial and it should attract the attention of readers interested in studies of authoritarianism, in Middle East politics, methodologies of internet research, and students of foreign policy.
Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation, and Social Media, 392 pp, Hardback £30, London: Hurst Publishers, 2022, ISBN: 9781787384798.
