homophobic harassment from an account supposedly run by Dr Ebrahim Al-Dossary, an adviser to Bahrain’s prime minister, and a series of cartoons criticizing Dooley. Doxing Revealing an individual’s identity and personal details online, known as ‘doxing’, is a common tactic for harassing journalists, protestors, and activists in Bahrain. One of the most infamous accounts, ‘Hareghum’ (@7areghum, created February 2011) disclosed information such as photos of people at anti-government rallies, their addresses, employment information, and contact details. The account was used to report and find information about suspected ‘traitors’ (Owen Jones, 2013). It allegedly advertised a Ministry of the Interior hotline where individuals could report protesters engaging in anti-government activity directly to the government (Nyst & Monaco, 2018). Pro-regime supporters have even used Twitter to report suspected ‘traitors’ to the Ministry of the Interior’s official Twitter account (@moi_bahrain). Sectarianism Automated bots have been found to stoke sectarian tensions. In June 2016, Marc Owen Jones, a researcher of platform manipulation, found that trolls defended the decision to revoke the nationality of the Shiite cleric Isa Qasim (‘de-nationalization’ is a common tactic in Bahrain), with 50% of tweets in the subsequent period featuring #Bahrain coming from bots (Freedom House, 2018). Owen Jones (2016) identified 5,000 sectarian tweets related to this hashtag, originating from 1,800 bot accounts—later suspended by Twitter. Most accounts identified were created between February and July 2014 and condemned the ‘terrorist’ acts by the Shi’a opposition in Iran, using derogatory sectarian terms such as ‘rawafid’ (meaning ‘rejectionists’ of the true Islamic faith). A sample of this automated sectarian activity can be seen in Figure 2. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights (2011) noted that hundreds of accounts on social networks, particularly Twitter, misrepresented the peaceful protests in February 2011 by calling them sectarian and broadcasting misattributed violent videos. The accounts appear to have originated from the Ministry of the Interior, and a report published by former chancellor of the minister’s council Dr Salah Al-Bander had previously documented that the government was funding groups to incite sectarian divisions online. 36