In late March 2023, three YouTubers received prison sentences ranging from three months to six years for content deemed inappropriate by the Houthi government in Yemen. A court in Sanaa, the capital city of Yemen, found that the YouTubers were guilty of “inciting chaos, disrupting public peace and insulting the Houthis,” according to their lawyer. One of the YouTubers, Ahmed Hajar, posted a video on December 22, 2022, that alleged corruption and oppression by the Iran-backed Houthi regime. Hajar was violently detained by armed rebels the same day the video was uploaded; the other two YouTubers involved in the case were subjected to similarly terrifying and unjust detainments. The recent crackdown on YouTubers is emblematic of the Houthi government’s continuing crusade against free speech. Since its takeover of Sanaa in 2014, the Houthi rebel group has clamped down hard on both the free press and political dissent on social media. “Sanaa has become the heart of a republic of fear,” writes exiled Yemeni journalist Afrah Nasser. Problems around social media and free speech are not unique to Yemen, though. Social media has become an increasingly important tool for activists and youth across the Middle East, but those using it face challenges like the rampant spread of misinformation and propaganda, as well as the ongoing threat of government repression. This article will examine the complex role of social media in the Middle East—both as a platform for connectivity and change and as a battleground for geopolitical conflicts.
Social Media Trends in the Middle East
The people of the Middle East region are some of the most avid social media users in the world. According to the New Media Academy, the average social media user in the Middle East spends over 3.5 hours on social networks per day, which is significantly higher than the global average of approximately 2.5 hours per day. Users in the Middle East also have an average of 8.4 social media accounts each, with those in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) having 10.5 accounts. This is “the highest number of social media accounts per person globally,” according to Forbes. The most popular apps in the region are Whatsapp, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, with TikTok and Snapchat seeing explosive growth in recent years. Twitter is the only app that has seen a recent decline in usage as social media users move to newer platforms and the platform’s functionality declines.
The benefits of social media in the Middle East are readily apparent: the region has seen massive growth in e-commerce, and social media platforms like Snapchat were useful tools for facilitating the dissemination of essential public health information during the COVID-19 pandemic. But while the ubiquity of social media in the Middle East has positive implications for connectivity and commerce, it has also facilitated the spread of dangerous misinformation in recent years. In 2020, Facebook removed two networks of fake accounts linked to digital marketing firms in Egypt and India because they were pushing false narratives that pitted the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt against Qatar. Twitter has similarly removed hundreds of fake accounts of so-called “experts” that were actually fake personas pushing propaganda.
Although the problem of misinformation is not unique to social media platforms in the Middle East, it can pose a heightened threat when it is weaponized to tip the delicate balance of one of the many ongoing conflicts in the region. For instance, journalists in the United Kingdom found that the Iraqi terrorist group Kata'ib Hezbollah has established a large social media network and paid vast sums of money to Facebook to boost engagement with its fake news posts. According to the nonprofit Journalismfund Europe, “failure to clamp down on these networks is hugely damaging to efforts to stabilise Iraq and negatively impacts the lives of millions of Iraqis.” While many governments in the Middle East have made legitimate attempts to crack down on misinformation from groups like Kata'ib Hezbollah, some states have merely used misinformation as an excuse to crack down on free speech by citizens, as was seen in the case of the Yemeni YouTubers. The following section will examine the ways that these governments have used social media to advance their interests—often harming their own people along the way.
A New Kind of State-Sponsored Militia
Saudi Arabia has spent the last several years building a bot army—a coordinated network of fake social media accounts used to spread pro-state information. This army has seen action on multiple occasions. For instance, after the arrest of seven prominent women’s rights defenders in May 2015, concerned Saudi citizens started an Arabic hashtag “Where are the activists?” on Twitter to raise awareness about the detainments. Almost immediately after this hashtag began to trend, hashtags labeling the activists as “Agents of the Embassies” and “traitors” were circulated by state-backed news organizations and countless additional Twitter accounts. These hashtags were “pushed” in a highly coordinated way, according to John Kelly, CEO of social media intelligence firm Graphika. Researcher Marc Owen Jones of Exeter University says tactics like this amount to “digital authoritarianism,” a fad that is spreading rapidly in the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. Other nations, like Bahrain, have been experimenting with bot armies for more than a decade. An Institute for the Future report found that government-backed Twitter accounts were engaged in “mass identity-revealing and doxing” of critics during the 2011 uprising against the Bahrain monarchy.
Bot armies are not confined to a nation’s borders, though, and they are not the only tactic used by Middle Eastern governments. Some nations have mounted much more complex disinformation campaigns to influence public opinion on global conflicts. Iran, for example, barrages both its neighbors and its own population with propaganda on multiple fronts. A report by ClearSky Cyber Security found that Iran created many fake websites in multiple languages to impersonate legitimate news organizations in surrounding nations. Examples of these include the phony “Yemen Press News Agency” and “Tel Aviv Times”. Iran also steals propaganda from other authoritarian governments, such as Russia, to promote on its pro-state social media accounts and websites. In 2018, an Iranian news source that targets American and European audiences published an article titled "Idlib to become Syria’s final battle with terrorists… if the West stays out of it,” an article that was first published on a website that is a known source of Russian propaganda.
While tactics like these are incredibly frightening, there is still some good news. “Fortunately,” writes Brookings’ Daniel L. Byman, “Middle Eastern regimes are not at the level of Russia when it comes to disinformation” (hence their need to plagiarize Russian propaganda). Middle Eastern regimes’ efforts to spread misinformation are often “hasty in execution” and easy to spot, especially in unstable nations like Iran. Another piece of good news is that there is already an incredibly strong safeguard in place against authoritarian misinformation campaigns: the youth of the Middle East.
Young Voices of Resistance
The young people of the Middle East are extremely engaged with social media, and many of them use it as a tool for political mobilization. For instance, in the aftermath of the 2020 Beirut explosion, Lebanese activists and youth used social media to share the aftermath of the disaster and appeal to the international community for aid. They later used it to hold their government accountable after it was discovered that it was the government’s failures that had caused the blast. These efforts were successful—millions of dollars of aid poured into Lebanon and multiple government officials resigned in recognition of their role in the tragedy. Youth in Lebanon and across the Middle East are aware of the failures of their governments and remain a consistent driving force for change.
When it comes to social media misinformation campaigns by their governments, young people in the Middle East remain incredibly vigilant. Although their heavy reliance on social media for news puts them at risk—some 79% of Arab youth say they get their news from social media—81% of teens are aware of the prevalence of internet hoaxes. Many young activists use their platforms to bravely call out government misinformation, despite the risk of punishment from their authoritarian regimes. But the burden of taking on authoritarian regimes on social media cannot fall solely on youth. As Daniel L. Byman writes, “The United States and other democratic governments must improve their technical capacity and, with it, their ability to detect these [misinformation] campaigns.” Social media platforms must also improve their ability to both protect the accounts of activists and to take down accounts spreading false information. Further, these platforms should increase the availability of their data so that independent researchers can study and monitor potentially dangerous activities. Social media has taken on a complex role in the Middle East, and the entire international community must unite to ensure that it remains a largely positive one.