
Saudis’ Image Makers: A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider - jumelles
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/us/politics/saudi-image-campaign-twitter.html
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jumelles
From the article: "The vigorous push also appears to include the grooming —
not previously reported — of a Saudi employee at Twitter whom Western
intelligence officials suspected of spying on user accounts to help the Saudi
leadership."

Seems like potentially a big deal.

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ryanlol
Is it? There are tons of people on forums like OGUsers selling social media
services provided by their insider contacts.

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nickcotter
This too seems like potentially a big deal.

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candiodari
You would think this would be a huge problem for the "fake news" crowd. This
is a government attacking the image of a person that criticizes, not
government policies, but the attitudes and character of people in government.

And if the Saudis are doing it, well, they're not known for innovation. This
means

1) governments are doing this

2) they're "putting their own version of reality" forward. In other words:
fake news.

3) ... when they're not doing it to just protect the personal public image of
important politicians

That does mean that fake news ... just cannot be policed by governments. Those
simply want their own, equally fake, version of reality given precedence.

A cynic might say that's exactly why we have the fake news debacle in the
first place. That the main problem anti-"fake news" efforts are fighting is
not the fake part of the news, but that real news was actually available, even
if not easily, at all.

