Twitter Pulls Down Bot Network That Pushed Pro-Saudi Talking Points about Khashoggi

Local Editor

Twitter suspended a network of suspected Twitter bots on Thursday that pushed pro-Saudi Arabia talking points about the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the past week.

Twitter became aware of some of the bots on Thursday when NBC News presented the company with a spreadsheet of hundreds of accounts that tweeted and retweeted the same pro-Saudi government tweets at the same time.

The list was compiled by Josh Russell, an Indiana-based information technology professional who has previously identified foreign influence campaigns on Twitter and Reddit.

Relatively, a Twitter employee who asked not to be identified because the employee was not authorized to speak publicly, said the company was aware of the influence operation and had already suspended even more pro-Saudi government accounts before they were caught by researchers.

The employee said the accounts are being pulled down for violating rules about spam, and referred to it as a routine spam operation takedown.

Twitter has moved to crack down on bot networks in recent months, claiming to have purged millions of fake accounts.

Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, which tracks online misinformation, said the way the bots operated allowed them to “fly under the radar,” highlighting how the groups behind Twitter bots have adapted to evade bans.

“They’re posting the same stuff at the same time repeatedly — that’s a botnet,” Nimmo said. “Looking at these accounts, they’re all posting the same content in the same order.”

But the bots did not flood Twitter constantly, instead picking and choosing when to engage.

“They’re not high-volume posters,” Nimmo said, with accounts tweeting sparingly — a strategy that may have helped avoid detection.

Some of the bot accounts tweeted using a hashtag in Arabic that became the top worldwide Twitter trend on Sunday. The hashtag roughly translated to “#We_all_trust_Mohammad_Bin_Salman,” the Crown Prince and putative leader of Saudi Arabia, who has come under international scrutiny following the disappearance of Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post.

Source: NBC News, Edited by website team