Israel too utilizes such virtual discursive strategies for the advancement of its foreign policy agendas. An investigationpublished by The Guardian and the Queensland University of Technology in December 2019, revealed that a coordinated campaign was launched by accounts based in Israel in the attempt to gain administrative access to some of Facebook’s largest and most popular far-right pages.
Administrators of large, pre-existing pages were approached by the accounts “promising content that would grow their audiences.” These accounts – which are now able to mobilize a network of 21 different Facebook pages with over 1 million followers – stoke “deep hatred of Islam across the western world,” most commonly via attacking Muslim politicians.
For example, these pages have often attacked Australia’s first female Muslim senator, Mehreen Faruqi, by posting material with comments such as “put your burka on – and shut the [expletive] up!”, “deport the whining [expletive]” and “revoke citizenship and deport.”
Another example is U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is the most frequent politician targeted by the network: “in the past two years, the Israeli group has pushed out more than 1,400 posts targeting Omar across the 21-page network which in turn have been ‘shared’ more than 30,000 times.”
Creating such virtual atmospheres of hate create the potential for serious real-world repercussions, as evidenced by a phone call placed to Omar’s Washington D.C. office in April 2019, stating “do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she’s a (expletive) terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her (expletive) skull.” Much of this material produced by this network is then, according to the report, often shared organically by other far-right Facebook pages, such as the one run by the rightwing UK Independence Party (Ukip).
The targeting of individuals such as Faruqi and Omar – who are both vocal critics of Israel’s policies and western unconditional support for the Zionist state – represents an attempt to undermine these counter-narratives and uphold the status quo.
These virtual discursive strategies are also designed to serve the domestic political agendas of these regimes in their efforts to squash intrastate counter-narratives and project a sense of legitimacy. For example, accounts linked to Saudi Arabia have continuously championed Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, his economic and social reform plan “Vision 2030,” and the love of the Saudi people for their ruler.
These same accounts were also mobilized in the wake of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, promoting hashtags such as “#We_all_trust_Mohammad_Bin_Salman.” In Israel, social media accounts – both automated and human-directed – were deployed to promote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party ahead of the 2019 elections and smear opponents. The accounts were used to spread content critical of Netanyahu’s opponent, Benjamin Gantz, arguing that he was a rapist, mentally ill, homosexual, and had a mistress.
Regardless of whether these accounts are used for the advancement of interstate or intrastate policies, their overbearing raison d’etre is the advancement of regime narratives and policies. It is through the mass dissemination of these narratives online that these governments seek to shape and control public discourse in their ultimate pursuits of regime preservation and power projection.
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Jon Hoffman | Radio Free (2020-03-11T23:00:00+00:00) ‘Bots’ and bans: social media and regime propaganda in the Middle East. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/11/bots-and-bans-social-media-and-regime-propaganda-in-the-middle-east/
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