Qatar coup rumors leave trail to regional rivals
An apparently doctored video made the rounds on Twitter Monday suggesting a coup was under way in Qatar.
Experts say the rumors circulating on Twitter this week of a failed coup in Qatar bore the hallmarks of an online disinformation campaign linked to the oil-rich peninsula’s regional rivals.
On Monday, an apparently doctored video made the rounds on Twitter suggesting guns were fired in the coastal city of Wakrah amid a coup attempt aimed at the royal family. Fahd bin Mohammed Al-Attiyah, the Qatari ambassador to Russia, told the Tass News Agency the videos were “fabricated.”
Amplified by a prominent Saudi diplomat and Saudi television channel Al Arabiyah, the tweets — many of which have since been deleted — seemed to have spread with the help of a network of bots, wrote Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha.
He pointed out on Twitter that the names on the accounts pushing the rumors weren’t Arabic-sounding as one might expect, given that it was a primarily Arabic-language news story at the time. No major news outlets picked up the coup rumors at the time.
