Kingdom of Trolls? Influence Operations in the Saudi Twittersphere

“We also color sets of nodes and edges by modularity score, following the community-detection technique proposed by Blondel et al. (2008).”

“This would be consistent with previous published findings that false news stories diffuse more rapidly than verifiable news stories (Vosoughi et al., 2018).”

“To that end, we take inspiration from recent research quantifying the likelihood of exposure to false, misleading or actively malicious forms of information (Allen et al., 2020; Guess et al., 2019).”

“A key finding is that the objective of IOs inside China’s “Great Firewall” is, more than anything, to distort the online information environment through sheer volume (King et al., 2017; Roberts, 2018).”

“Recent research on the Twitter sampling API reveals that it is vulnerable to artificial distortion and may not represent an actual 1% random sample (Morstatter et al., 2013; Pfeffer et al., 2018).”

“Our goal is to contribute to recent efforts aimed at providing descriptive analysis of the scale of online disinformation (Allen et al., 2020; Allcott et al., 2019).”

“First, information is consumed across multiple platforms, meaning that even if inaccurate or malicious forms of information proliferate on one medium, it may yet constitute a small proportion of overall information diets when assessed across multiple media—at the level of the “information ecosystem” (Allen et al., 202…”

“Third, much of the information shared online remains proprietary, inaccessible to the public, and subject to unpredictable changes in terms of use (Freelon, 2018; Pasquetto et al., 2020).”

“Researchers have identified evidence of Saudi Arabia using computational propaganda to spread pro-government messages and discredit opposition since 2013 (Woolley, 2016).”

“A first cause for skepticism is that engagement with false or unreliable information promoted by coordinated IO campaigns may not actually affect behaviour or attitudes (Guess et al., 2020; Bail et al., 2020).”

“Given the brutality of the Saudi regime offline, its history of repressing online critics (Pan and Siegel, 2020), and the apparent extent of its reach online, this conclusion is understandable.”

“Recent research on the Twitter sampling API reveals that it is vulnerable to artificial distortion and may not represent an actual 1% random sample (Morstatter et al., 2013; Pfeffer et al., 2018).”

“2 Some have argued that consumption of false or malicious information affected voting outcomes in both the US and UK (Gorodnichenko et al., 2018; Gunther et al., 2019).”

“2Fake news is a phenomenon distinct from IO activity, but IO campaigns have also participated in the dissemination of fake news (Badawy et al., 2019; Martin et al., 2020).”

“It is worth noting, however, that findings from China may be unlikely to generalize to other authoritarian contexts given that China’s ability to shape domestic social media is—at least in part—a function of the dominance of domestic firms in China’s market for Internet content (Pan, 2017).”

“3For an exception see Alizadeh et al. 2020.”

“Third, much of the information shared online remains proprietary, inaccessible to the public, and subject to unpredictable changes in terms of use (Freelon, 2018; Pasquetto et al., 2020).”

“A first cause for skepticism is that engagement with false or unreliable information promoted by coordinated IO campaigns may not actually affect behaviour or attitudes (Guess et al., 2020; Bail et al., 2020).”

“2 Some have argued that consumption of false or malicious information affected voting outcomes in both the US and UK (Gorodnichenko et al., 2018; Gunther et al., 2019).”

“Second, we lack good measures of human attention on the Internet (Lazer, 2020), meaning that we do not know whether and how individuals actually engage with particular forms of information.”

“AlQahtani had been leading an organized effort aimed at distorting the information environment to the benefit of the Saudi regime (Leber and Abrahams, 2019).”

“These accounts nonetheless receive often only limited engagement in the form of likes and retweets (Ackland et al., 2019).”

“These coalitional con fl icts can stretch out across multiple political systems, as we see in the case of pro-Saudi “ in fl uencers ” in the Middle East (Abrahams and Leber 2021; Barrie and Siegel 2021).”

“The use of inauthentic accounts by domestic actors to influence domestic politics is particularly understudied (though see [15] for an exception).”

“Addressing this limitation, the term “influence operations” is gaining ground as an alternative (e.g., Alizadeh et al. 2020; Barrie and Siegel 2021; Bergh 2020; Bradshaw 2020; Gaw et al. 2023), referring more broadly to coordinated campaigns to influence public opinion.”

“Most of the ground truth data studies relied on datasets released by Twitter (e.g., Barrie and Siegel, 2021; Linvill and Warren, 2020; Luceri et al., 2024; Schoch et al., 2022).”

“For example, two Twitter employees were charged with spying for Saudi Arabia on U.S. soil in November 2019 (Barrie & Siegel, 2021), and hashtags such as “Agents of the Embassies” have been used by the Saudi state on social media to resist influence from the Western world (Abrahams & Leber, 2021a).”

“Governments can leverage social media for various geopolitical purposes, such as conducting foreign surveillance (Gray, 2021), promoting their own narratives (Barrie & Siegel, 2021; Stukal et al., 2022; Golovchenko et al., 2020), and suppressing opposing viewpoints (Golovchenko, 2022).”

“Interestingly enough, exposure to and engagement with CSMM content is typically minimal (Barrie & Siegel, 2021; Eady et al., 2023; Urman & Makhortykh, 2025).”