The incompetent Arab regimes: Opinion by Arezki DaoudArab governments have perfected the science of fake news and deceptive propaganda. Twitter and Facebook have long been inundated with tweets and posts that have been praising regimes in the Arab world, in particular Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and others from authors with questionable origins, but who turned out to be bots and fake persons. The same accounts were also used to attack pro-democracy activists in Sudan, Algeria, and many other places. There is a lot of evidence that those launching these attacks are ntworks based in Egypt, UAE, and other places, far from the reach of the real justice system. They ar apparently well organized and likely funded by autocratic regimes to fend off calls for democracy.But governments do not just use online tools to spread lies. Consider the government of Algeria. Two incidents last week reminded us how sinister government operatives working in the communications field can but also how utterly incompetent they are. In the first instance, the Algerian state-owned news agency APS reported that German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent a letter to the hospitalized Algerian president Tebboune to express her “happiness for having recovered” from Covid-19. Tebboune has been in Germany for weeks with no photo or video footage of him, and because there is a complete information blockade on his situation, we can fairly assume that his state of health is rather drastic. APS obviously lied to bring some positive news to a concerned population…Still several German sources inside the government denied that Ms. Merkel said what Algeria reported. Instead, she wished him “speedy recovery.”The second instance is when the United Arab Emirates issued an executive order banning the entry of citizens of Algeria and 12 other nations in its territory. Algeria’s reaction? Denying it. The UAE tells its embassy in Algeria not to issue visas to Algerians, which was first reported by Reuters, then Algeria’s foreign ministry denies it as if it served any good purpose in lying about such thing.You see, if there is something we should learn about with these episodes is not just that Algerian officials are liars, but that they are bad liars. They do not even have the skill to fabricate a narrative, let alone put forward solid foreign policies that would really benefit the country. I am not picking on the Algerian political leaders frivolously or just to make fun of them, but this is as a way to convey the extent of the trouble facing the Arab world with its incompetent leaders and the West defending these leaders at any cost just to presumably maintain some status quo.There is no need to maintain a status-quo that just does not exist. With these leaders, Arabs no longer believe there is a hopeful future. Partly because their leaders do not want that, but even if they did, they do not have the prerequisite skills needed to drive a country forward. They are not even good at being bad. |
The Arab uprisings a decade ago were supercharged by online calls to join the protests — but the internet was soon flooded with misinformation, weakening the region’s cyber-activists. When Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country in January 2011, rumours and uncertainty created “panic and hysteria”, said ex-activist and entrepreneur Houeida Anouar. “January 14 was a horrible night, so traumatic,” she said. “We heard gunfire, and a neighbour shouted ‘hide yourselves, they’re raping women’.” As pro-regime media pumped out misinformation, the flood of bogus news also spread to the internet, a space activists had long seen as a refuge from censorship and propaganda.
Journalist and researcher Hakim Beltifa said the ground was ripe for “the spreading of fake news”. “Fake news fed off people’s mistrust” of traditional, state-owned media outlets which “obscured the reality and kept the people in ignorance,” he wrote for online magazine The Conversation. When Egyptian state TV accused American fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken of giving free meals to pro-democracy protesters at Cairo’s emblematic Tahrir Square, the rumours were repeated online, amid a string of reports of foreign powers allegedly infiltrating the protest movement. But activists and journalists on the ground found little evidence of fried chicken. Most demonstrators were getting by on pita bread and kushari, a popular, ultra-cheap street dish of rice, pasta and lentils.
Ghost bloggers
Soon, a slew of fake stories originating online was undermining trust in internet sources. One example was the infamous case of the “Gay Girl of Damascus”. Amina Abdallah Arraf was a young Syrian-American lesbian, anti-regime activist and author of a blog widely followed by observers of the Syrian uprising. Except she never existed. When Amina was reported “kidnapped” in Damascus, her worried followers mobilised to rescue her from the hands of the Assad regime. But they discovered that the blogger, who had been an icon of Syria’s pro-democracy movement, was in fact Tom MacMaster — a bearded American in his 40s living in Scotland and hoping to achieve some literary fame. “That seems fairly bland today as we’ve learned to be more suspicious of this type of fabrication, but at the time, suspicion was far less prevalent,” researcher Yves Gonzalez Quijano said. Another invented personality was Liliane Khalil, supposedly a US journalist covering the “Arab Spring” for a number of media outlets, and who had indirectly expressed support for the Bahraini government. Despite a mass of public information about Khalil, who was accused by many activists and researchers of being a fake, her true identity has never been revealed.
Online mistrust
The two cases, with their carefully-crafted back stories and manipulated images, were early examples of what soon became a trend of misinformation online. Researcher Romain Lecomte said that regimes were soon able to “infiltrate discussions” online, spread doubt about reported abuses and “sow confusion and misinformation”. “Mass political use of the internet” was a game-changer, said Lecomte. Many online activists began to question the democratic power of the internet. That has sparked the phenomenon of fact-checking services, along with dilemmas about whether to allow “fake news” to flourish or to censor it and risk compromising democratic freedoms. In the early years of the Arab uprisings, chat rooms and sites such as Lina Ben Mhenni’s blog “A Tunisian Girl” had fuelled growing protest movements and side-stepped censorship. But the flood of misinformation took away much of the credibility of cyber-activism, said Gonzalez Quijano. It “has never recovered from being used, or rather manipulated, by political powers that are better organised than activists on the ground,” he said.
