In Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media, Marc Owen Jones brings together more than a decade of research to document how authoritarian rulers, corporate hacks, and foreign governments have corrupted and constrained the MENA region's digital spaces. The author's critical approach to the production of online discourses, keen sense of regional political dynamics, and mastery of a wide range of data analysis tools ensure that this pathbreaking book will inspire no shortage of future research. Furthermore, Jones's reflections on the process of exploring this new frontier in Middle East Studies provide a valuable guide for those wishing to follow in his footsteps.
The bulk of Digital Authoritarianism consists of episodic investigations into the scale and origins of MENA-region deception. Jones employs “deception” as a catch-all term encompassing the “willful manipulation of the information space” to manufacture, suppress, inflate, or obscure politically and socially relevant discourses (p. 40), a useful alternative to the more clinical concept of “information operations.” “Disinformation” constitutes a particular subset of deception efforts, namely an intentional effort to spread false or distorted information. Across several widely ranging vignettes, Jones makes the case that the Persian Gulf has entered a “post-truth moment” in which state efforts at deception have undermined citizens’ ability to organize in online spaces, or perhaps even to think about dissent on or offline.
The centerpiece of Jones's investigation is chapter 6, “The Gulf Crisis Never Happened,” which discusses how the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sought to marshal domestic and global public opinion against the Qatari monarchy as part of a broader geopolitical struggle. Set against the backdrop of the two countries’ economic blockade of Qatar, which Egypt and Bahrain joined, the resulting campaigns show how Saudi and Emirati networks sought to shape perceptions of the standoff among their own publics and foreign media, while attmepting to stir up destabilizing dissent within Qatar. A hack of Qatar's state news agency attributed pro-Iranian comments to the country's leader, Emir Hamad bin Khalifah Al Thani, providing domestic audiences in the UAE and Saudi Arabia with a ready justification for targeting their neighbor. Saudi officials with a prominent Twitter presence, backed by a host of automated bot accounts, followed up the hack by stoking popular Saudi and Emirati outrage against Qatar, while reminding their citizens of the consequences of going against the official narrative. At the same time, Western and home-grown PR firms made half-hearted efforts to advance narratives critical of Qatar among American and British publics and political leaders. Finally, some manufactured narratives targeted Qatari audiences, such as Twitter discussions that purported to reveal widespread discontent within Qatar, some of which managed to hoodwink resource-constrained news agencies in the West. With many of these efforts ultimately enjoying limited success, future research involving digital and in-person ethnographies promises to build on Jones's findings by determining the extent to which such narratives resonate with broader publics and elite circles in and outside of the Middle East.
Beyond individual vignettes, Jones's major contribution in this volume is to place specific state efforts within the political economy of a transnational “deception order” (p. 43). These overlapping entities and their interests comprise MENA-region authoritarian regimes, largely U.S. and European social-media and surveillance firms, white-shoe public-relations and strategic-communications consultancies headquartered in London or Washington, D.C., and freelance “hackers for hire” willing to sell their services to the highest bidder. Western governments, namely the United States, feature as well, either looking the other way as Western surveillance firms profit from repression abroad or joining in efforts to spread disinformation about Iranian politics.
At a minimum, Jones's book brings MENA-region area studies squarely into academic debates about social media, disinformation, and authoritarianism that, at least in political science and media studies, tend to center around polarization and democratic backsliding in Western countries, or propaganda, information manipulation, and censorship in Russian and Chinese online spaces. MENA regimes face a quite different online political landscape; many regional leaders have far more ability to engage in offline repression than would-be autocrats in Europe or the Americas, yet remain far more reliant on technology platforms developed and headquartered in Western democracies than their counterparts in Beijing or Moscow.
Jones's work, in turn, highlights the role of Western technology firms and consultants as crucial actors in ongoing processes of repression and manipulation. Jones documents time and again how social-media firms, such as Twitter and Facebook, can be hesitant to tackle deception campaigns that do not attract public outcry in the United States and Europe. Even eventual efforts to tackle Saudi, Emirati, and Iranian bot networks arguably occurred only after considerable effort by activists and researchers based in the MENA region, including Jones, to document and publicize this deception. Thinking about Western firms as part of the regional deception order provides further evidence of U.S. and European rhetoric on democracy promotion being undercut by profit motives, while content-moderation decisions can reflect the priorities of Western publics. Still, the prominent role of Western firms is also a constraint on MENA autocrats: influence operations that run afoul of Western firms and publics risk being terminated by those firms themselves, a situation about which Chinese state officials rarely have to worry.
An unexpected, but very helpful, facet of this volume is Jones's willingness to open up about his own experiences and research approaches in tackling the shifting, opaque landscape of online discourses. His behind-the-scenes accounts of tracking down botmasters or uncovering ersatz journalists point to the research skills and assets necessary for scholars who seek to follow his lead: data analysis tools, area knowledge, and language skills to contextualize online discussions, and partnerships with researchers spanning a wide range of disciplines, to consider only a few things. Jones clearly demonstrates that quantitative approaches can go hand-in-hand with broader storytelling about the region, while being quite candid about the emotional toll exacted by extensive immersion in deceptive and often abusive online spaces.
By contrast, the one clear disappointment with this volume is a general lack of data visualization accompanying the text. Jones has generated insightful visualizations of Twitter deception campaigns and other manipulation efforts, including network graphs of Twitter interactions, word clouds of Twitter content, and time-series graphs of anomalous activity. I can only assume this exclusion results from limitations on the part of the publisher. This is unfortunate, as network diagrams have been a crucial tool for summarizing and communicating the structure of online conversations, and even a simple bar or line chart could have helped convey numeric data. If Middle East studies scholarship is to continue making contributions to broader debates about social media and society, it is imperative that publishers of both manuscripts and journal articles incorporate appropriate visuals in online and print formats to reach a wider readership.
In all, Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East will be a foundational text in understanding how states and citizens in the MENA region engage and organize across evolving media platforms. The rapid evolution of these digital spaces presents both a challenge and considerable opportunity for students of the region to track the richness of online discourses. At the time of writing this review, Elon Musk's unsteady takeover of Twitter stands to accelerate a digital migration to new platforms that may take longer for autocrats to manipulate but that may likewise be harder for researchers to access. Students and scholars at all levels will find this book an insightful, readable, and entertaining access point for this growing field of study.
