POMEPS STUDIES 43 Digital Activism and Authoritarian Adaptation in the Middle East August 2021 Contents Preface . 3 Larry Diamond and Eileen Donahoe, Stanford University Digital Activism and Authoritarian Adaptation in the Middle East . 4 Marc Lynch, Project on Middle East Political Science Binary Threat: How Governments’ Cyber Laws and Practice Undermine Human Rights in the MENA Region . 8 Ahmed Shaheed, University of Essex, & Benjamin Greenacre, City University of New York The Implementation of Digital Surveillance Infrastructures in the Gulf . 16 James Shires, Leiden University The web (in)security of MENA civil society and media . 22 Alexei Abrahams, Harvard University Beyond Liberation Technology? The Recent Uses of Social Media by Pro-Democracy Activists . 29 Joshua A. Tucker, New York University Chinese Digital Authoritarianism and Its Global Impact . 35 Xiao Qiang, University of California at Berkeley Transnational Digital Repression in the MENA Region .. 41 Marwa Fatafta, Access Now Social media manipulation in the MENA: Inauthenticity, Inequality, and Insecurity . 48 Andrew Leber, Harvard University and Alexei Abrahams, Harvard University Tracking Adversaries and First Responding to Disinfo Ops: The Evolution of Deception and Manipulation Tactics on Gulf Twitter . 56 Marc Owen Jones, Hamid Bin Khalifa University Follow the Money for Better Digital Rights in the Arab Region . 63 Afef Abrougui, Independent Consultant and Researcher and Mohamad Najem, Executive Director, SMEX Digital Orientalism: #SaveSheikhJarrah and Arabic Content Moderation . 69 Mahsa Alimardani and Mona Elswah, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford Official Foreign Influence Operations: International Broadcasters in the Arab Online Sphere . 76 Alexandra A. Siegel, University of Colorado - Boulder Russian Digital Influence Operations in Turkey 2015-2020 . 83 Akin Unver, Ozyegin University and Ahmet Kurnaz, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University Middle East Influence Operations: Observations Across Social Media Takedowns . 91 M.A.; Renée DiResta, Stanford University; Josh A. Goldstein, Stanford University; and Shelby Grossman, Stanford University Changing Sources: Social Media Activity During Civil War . 103 Anita Gohdes, Hertie School, Berlin and Zachary C. Steinert Threlkeld, University of California, Los Angeles The Project on Middle East Political Science The Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) is a collaborative network that aims to increase the impact of political scientists specializing in the study of the Middle East in the public sphere and in the academic community . POMEPS, directed by Marc Lynch, is based at the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University and is supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Henry Luce Foundation . For more information, see http://www .pomeps .org . The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University is an interdisciplinary center for research on development in all of its dimensions: political, economic, social, and legal, and the ways in which these different dimensions interact with one another . CDDRL does not simply seek to study democracy, development and the rule of law; we think these phenomena embed critical values that we believe in and want to promote . CDDRL was launched in 2002 . Its first director was Coit Blacker, followed by Stephen Krasner, Michael McFaul, Larry Diamond, and Francis Fukuyama . For more information, see https://cddrl .fsi .stanford .edu/ . The Global Digital Policy Incubator at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center The mission of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center is to inspire policy and governance innovations that reinforce democratic values, universal human rights, and the rule of law in the digital realm . Its purpose is to serve as a collaboration hub for the development of norms, guidelines, and laws that enhance freedom, security, and trust in the global digital ecosystem . The Global Digital Policy Incubator provides a vehicle for global multi-stakeholder collaboration between technologists, governments, private sector companies, diplomats, international organizations, academics, and civil society in a shared purpose: to develop norms and policies that enhance security, promote economic development, and reinforce respect for human rights in or our global trans-border digital ecosystem . For more information, see https://cyber .fsi .stanford .edu/gdpi . 2 Preface Preface The essays in this collection are the fruit of a collaboration between the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) and two Stanford University research programs: the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPI, based at the Cyber Policy Center) and the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD, based at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law) . As leaders of the latter two programs, we would like to express our appreciation to Marc Lynch and his colleagues in POMEPS, especially Tessa Talebi, and to our own program colleagues, Hesham Sallam of ARD and Tracy Navichoque of GDPI . Most of all we want to thank the authors for their papers, their insights, and their patient commitment to this project, which was delayed by the onset of the COVID pandemic . This project is coming to fruition at an increasingly troubling time for freedom and democracy, both in the Arab world and globally . Over the last decade, the bright political hopes of the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings have given way to political polarization, violence, coups, and in a few cases, state breakdown . As we publish these essays, an authoritarian executive coup is unfolding in the one Arab country that was able to move from protest to democracy—Tunisia . The wealthy and technologically sophisticated Gulf states have not only set the regional standard for digital surveillance, repression, and control, they have also lent generous political, financial, and technical support and encouragement to their embattled or unstable authoritarian peers in the region . And they have intensified repression of their own citizens through digital technologies of censorship and information control . China is the world’s leader in materializing George Orwell’s nightmarish vision of omniscient totalitarian monitoring of individuals and pervasive state control and manipulation of information . But Gulf states like the UAE and Saudi Arabia are coming up fast in these capacities . As our papers make clear, the trend toward digital authoritarianism in the Middle East also draws crucial support from outside the region, not only through the technology exports and cross-border information operations of authoritarian mega-powers like China and Russia, but through the promiscuous transfer of spyware and other digital surveillance tools and expertise by private companies based in Western democracies and especially notably of late, in Israel . Yet our essays caution against overly gloomy or deterministic forecasts . As in other regions, civil society activists adapt and innovate to use and widen available spaces . As we see from the recent protests in Lebanon, Algeria, and Sudan, from the substantial boycott of Iran’s recent presidential “election”, and from new and ongoing forms of activism elsewhere in the region, as well as from multiple rounds of the Arab Barometer, people in the Middle East still aspire for the same basic political ideals that drove the Arab uprisings: dignity, voice, accountability, and self-determination . Thus, the public sphere remains contested, even embattled, in cyberspace, as it periodically does in the streets as well . And just as authoritarian powers and amoral corporations have aided Middle Eastern states in their ambitions to extend control, there remains considerable scope for the world’s democracies to help tip the balance toward freedom and accountability through financial and technical assistance and diplomatic support for the region’s creative, courageous, and tenacious netizens . They are not going away . Larry Diamond and Eileen Donahoe Stanford University July 29, 2021 3 Digital Activism and Authoritarian Adaptation in the Middle East Marc Lynch, Project on Middle East Political Science Social media platforms and digital technologies played novel have become ubiquitous, with internet use now a decisive role in political mobilization, before, during nearly universal across most of the region and with no and after the 2011 Arab uprisings; inspiring academic easy separation between the virtual and the real . Media and popular discussions of the internet as a “liberation ecosystems, as Ethan Zuckerman reminds us, cannot in technology” inevitably undermining the foundations any useful way be understood as a set of discrete online of authoritarian states .1 But it is no longer 2011 . The and offline platforms .6 What could it mean to say “Twitter naïve assumption that “the internet” necessarily would caused X” or “Clubhouse could lead to Y” when those serve as a liberation technology has been dislodged by platforms are fully integrated into dense, richly interwoven overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as authoritarians communication networks? Broadcast media stream over have discovered creative ways to capitalize on digital mobile devices and maintain popular websites and social technologies for repression and control .2 The ubiquity of media feeds, while videos and ideas from social media online infrastructures has facilitated new forms