While Saudi officials (speaking on condition of anonymity) apparently believe the on-going, state-backed campaign targeting @Ali_H_Soufan is "nothing more than a baseless conspiracy theory," the facts tell a different story entirely... https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/records-shed-light-on-online-harassment-of-jamal-khashoggi-before-his-killing/2020/09/07/1811c100-eed5-11ea-b4bc-3a2098fc73d4_story.html">https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-...

1. Many of the same accounts participated in the 2017 attack targeting Jamal Khashoggi and the 2020 attack targeting Ali Soufan... along with campaigns targeting  @oamaz7,  @ghadaoueiss and other Saudi dissidents.

2. Employees of the Saudi government were involved in the campaign... some even creating original videos in an attempt to validate @halgawi& #39;s easily debunked claims.

3. Given the relatively lackadaisical effort behind the various attacks over the past 3+ years...

it took us about 15 minutes to reverse engineer the KSA playbook - target dissidents with a bunch of bogus claims, amplify the claims with an army of bots, then reference the content to justify / shift blame if KSA successfully eliminates the target  at some point in the future.

4. Oh, and Twitter removed 5,929 accounts 12/19 after "rigorous investigations attributed the accounts to a significant state-based information operation on Twitter originating in Saudi Arabia."

Over 100 of these accounts participated in attacks targeting Jamal Khashoggi and Ali Soufan. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/new-disclosures-to-our-archive-of-state-backed-information-operations.html

It">https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/top... appears as if #جمال_خاشقجي was not available for comment.