ATIDE (in partnership with Democracy Reporting International), and Mourakiboun. The latter ran a project called Rasd1 to monitor social media (Elswah and Howard 2020, 3). INTERSTATE CONFLICTS AND FAKE NEWS The MENA region is characterized by interstate and intrastate conflicts (Arab Center Washington DC n.d.). These conflicts must be differentiated from the peaceful revolutions and protests mentioned in the previous section; however, researchers have found that in both cases fake news has been utilized for ideological purposes, especially during the 2017 Gulf crisis, which has been described as the Gulf information war (Allagui and Akdenizli 2019, 1287). In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain decided to boycott Qatar. This crisis resulted from fake news, as a statement expressing support for Iran was attributed to the Qatari Emir and published by Qatar News Agency. It was claimed that the Qatari Emir criticized other countries’ feelings of hostility towards Iran. Qatar announced that the news agency had been hacked and that the statement was fabricated (Al Najjar 2021, 61). Nonetheless, the crisis broke out and piqued the interest of researchers. Researchers have shed light on the social media accounts that were created immediately to republish the fabricated statement. These accounts claimed that Qatar was financing terrorism. In this crisis, the exploitation of Twitter bots was intensified. Bots are considered an effective propaganda tool that uses AI to automatically disseminate malicious messages. In Arabic, bots are described as dhabāb iliktrūniya (electronic flies) (Jones 2019, 1393). The flooding of fake news by the fake accounts elicited counter-campaigns that raised awareness of the risk of propaganda. The hashtag #Don’tParticipateInSuspiciousHashtags exemplifies this. However, the war soon extended to traditional media, which devoted considerable time to defending the government position and targeted foreign audiences in order to exert influence on foreign governments. Qatar sponsored campaigns abroad to lobby and improve its image. I N FO R M ATI O N D I SO R D ER IN THE GLOBA L SOUTH Qatar accused its opponents of violating international law. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for their part, financed TV stations targeting US citizens and other foreigners to persuade them that Qatar was supporting terrorism. Sky News broadcasted a documentary financed by the UAE about aid allegedly provided by Qatar to Al-Qaeda (Allagui and Akdenizli 2019, 1293). The Gulf crisis was characterized by another phenomenon: Citizens of each respective country expressed support for their government on social media. This can be attributed to fear, since the UAE threatened to punish citizens who sympathized with Qatar with imprisonment of up to fifteen years and a fine of at least 500,000 emirati dirham, while Bahrain threatened people who expressed support of Qatar on social media with imprisonment of up to five years (Allagui and Akdenizli 2019, 1295). In contrast, a study has found that the hashtags that indicated support of Saudi Arabia were authentic and did not result from propaganda bots (Abrahams and Leber 2021, 1192). INTRASTATE CONFLICT AND FAKE NEWS The absence of criticism on social media is normal in a homogeneous country which is tightly controlled by a centralized regime, but some Arab countries are fragmented, and each conflicting group finances media outlets and social media platforms to target others with biased campaigns containing fake news. Two prominent examples are Libya and Syria, whose circumstances are explored in various studies. In 2014, Libya was riven by a long-standing civil war in which many actors were involved, which created a conducive environment for the promotion of fake news and propaganda. Regional powers also intervened to fuel information disorder in the state (Portero Alférez 2019, 16). Portero Alférez (2019, 11) conducted a simple study by using the search term “Libya + News” on Facebook and Twitter, which led to chaotic and non-reliable news outputs which can be categorized as opinions, preferences, verified information, and unverified information. Portero Alférez realized that many obstacles face those who seek reliable information about Libya. She attributes these obstacles to the political divide that has caused the situation to deteriorate and which makes it so difficult to monitor and verify fake news. Democracy Reporting International also reported that the widespread propaganda in Libya stemmed from the conflicting groups in the country (Portero Alférez 2019, 9). Portero Alférez (2019, 17) monitored official accounts on Twitter and found that they utilize disinformation techniques to promote their biased stance towards the conflict. Middle East and North Africa – 6 4