What do the American baseball player Joey Krehbiel, the Norwegian skier Kjetil Jansrud and the South African journalist Siyabonga Sesant have in common? Their Twitter accounts have been hacked in recent weeks by prosaudi netizens, who have used them to spread propaganda, pro-kingdom and hostile to Qatar, including false claims about a coup in Doha.
Three years after the start of the embargo decreed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain against the gas principality – an event whose anniversary falls on Friday June 5, 2020 – the electronic war between the two camps does more than never rage. On social networks, an armada of “bots” (automated accounts), more or less contracted influencers and media figures acquired at the pro-Riyadh camp continue to feed the mill of anti “fake news” (false information) -Qatar.
The Doha pseudo-putsch is emblematic of this renewed disinformation. Introduced on Twitter on May 4, this allegation was peddled over the next few days by tens of thousands of accounts, often linked to Arabia and the Emirates. Among the so-called "evidence" provided by these messages was the video of an explosion, presented as having occurred in Doha but actually filmed in China, in 2015. Another video suggesting cracklings in the Qatari capital, was proven to have been filmed during a fireworks display and not during an alleged shooting…
“Deliberate destabilization campaign”
The coronavirus crisis has also given rise to an avalanche of anti-Qatar rumors. In March, the little emirate was accused on Twitter, again without any evidence, of having financed the spread of the epidemic, to harm Vision 2030, the reform plan of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman.
A few days ago, an audio tape on which former US President Barack Obama is referred to as" slave ", attributed to former Qatari emir Hamad Ben Khalifa Al Thani, has been published on the Internet. This recording, whose authenticity is not proven, made all the more talk that it fell in the middle of George Floyd business – of the name of this African-American asphyxiated by a member of the police force in Minneapolis , in the USA.
According to academic Marc Owen Jones, a social media specialist who teaches in Qatar, this electronic boil is not spontaneous. "We are dealing with a deliberate destabilization campaign in Doha, he believes. Spreading false information is prohibited in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The fact that prominent journalists can do this without legal consequences suggests that all of this is orchestrated in high places. "
You have 47.74% of this article to read. The suite is reserved for subscribers.
