1/ Today my Stanford Internet Observatory team is releasing a report on a Twitter and Facebook takedown of accounts linked to Egypt , Saudi Arabia , and the UAE . https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/20200402_blame_it_on_iran_qatar_and_turkey_v2_0.pdf Highlights from the Twitter takedown here: https://twitter.com/shelbygrossman/status/1245685222491828225

2/ The suspended Facebook Pages originated in Egypt, and are attributed to Maat, a social media marketing firm. They had some visually striking COVID-19 disinfo, criticizing how Europe and Qatar are handling the pandemic

3/ …and claiming the Iranian government is not giving correct information about COVID-19 to its citizens (left), and that Iran is the source of the pandemic (right)

4/ Here’s a video they made about “Corona camps in Qatar”

5/ A common theme was “Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with hacking Jeff Bezos’ phone.”

6/ Many posts praised the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE. And some claimed that Ilhan Omar is a Qatari asset:

7/ And, as always, a frequent narrative was denigrating Turkish involvement in Libya, with the special hashtag #Libya_graveyard_for_the_Ottomans (translated).

8/ Videos on the Pages were branded with logos from Maat Group and PostPro (another digital marketing firm). Neither has much of a web presence.

9/ Most of the Pages claimed to be an Arab news or information Page. The Pages virtually never linked out to websites. Posts had generally low engagement, and the biggest Pages had ~200,000 followers. Many Pages had ~6 admins in Egypt, and 1 admin in .

10/ Thanks to co-authors Khadija H., @noupside, @tarmanderr, @carlymil, and an anonymous additional author. Thanks to @secpolice and @elegant_wallaby for helping us to wrangle these huge datasets . And thanks to Twitter and Facebook for sharing the data.

And here is the link to Facebook's report on the takedown: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/march-cib-report/