Saudi Arabia is suspected of having groomed a Saudi employee at Twitter to help the country's leadership by spying on the accounts of dissidents, according to a new report.
Saud al-Qahtani, a top adviser to the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was “Saudi Arabia’s Steve Bannon” #CyberPolitics #InfoWarfare
The New York Times reported Saturday that Western officials told Twitter in 2015 that one of their employees, Ali Alzabarah, was being groomed to spy on the accounts.
“Mr. Alzabarah had joined Twitter in 2013 and had risen through the ranks to an engineering position that gave him access to the personal information and account activity of Twitter’s users, including phone numbers and I.P. addresses, unique identifiers for devices connected to the internet.”
Twitter was reportedly unable to find evidence that the employee gave company data to Saudi Arabia, but fired him in December 2015.
The Times reported that the alleged efforts appeared to be part of a larger push by the Saudi royal family to use hundreds of people to flood social media with pro-Saudi messaging and smother the voices of dissenters.
Saudi Arabia has its own troll farm #CyberWarfare
Saudi operatives have been reportedly mobilized to harass dissenters on Twitter since the 2010 Arab Spring, according to multiple American and Saudi officials who spoke to the Times.
Saud al-Qahtani, a top adviser to the crown prince who was fired on Friday after the kingdom acknowledged Khashoggi's death, was the strategist behind the operation, according to the Times, citing U.S. and Saudi officials.
Twitter has reportedly struggled to combat the trolls on its platform because they are actual people hired by the Saudi government rather than bots, which are more detectable.
The Times reports that specialists in the matter found the job listings through ads on Twitter itself saying that an employer sought young men willing to tweet for about 10,000 Saudi riyals a month, equivalent to about $3,000.
From the NYTimes
The specialists heard directors speak often of Mr. Qahtani. Labeled by activists and writers as the “troll master,” “Saudi Arabia’s Steve Bannon” and “lord of the flies” — for the bots and online attackers sometimes called “flies” by their victims — Mr. Qahtani had gained influence since the young crown prince consolidated power.
He ran media operations inside the royal court, which involved directing the country’s local media, arranging interviews for foreign journalists with the crown prince, and using his Twitter following of 1.35 million to marshal the kingdom’s online defenders against enemies including Qatar, Iran and Canada, as well as dissident Saudi voices like Mr. Khashoggi’s.
For a while, he tweeted using the hashtag #The_Black_List, calling on his followers to suggest perceived enemies of the kingdom.
