Twitter in the Middle East changed from a tool for transparency to a platform overrun by bots and propaganda.
In 2015, on an Arabic-language website, three advertisements appeared in the “Twitter marketing services” section. According to the ads, Diavolo was a program to “automate repetitive tasks such as opening certain web pages or copying and pasting data”. In short, Diavolo was a quick-and-easy way to manipulate Twitter, the social media platform that was once hailed as a tool of liberation and transparency for the oppressed during the 2011 Arab Spring.
According to Aljazeera, dozens of websites, in English, Arabic and Russian languages, offer products to artificially increase the number of followers on the page.
Al Jazeera contacted one of the sellers and was able to buy 1,000 fake followers for $16 in a process that took a couple of hours to complete.
“I can create up to 2,000 followers per day, followers, retweets, website views. I sell all of it,” the vendor, who identified himself as Othmane, a 26-year-old man from Morocco, told Al Jazeera.
While bot-makers such as Othmane can still trick Twitter’s systems, he acknowledges it has become harder recently.
“Twitter has made it more difficult [to make fake accounts]. Every time we change our methods of verification for fake accounts to be compatible with Twitter policies,” he said.
Tricking those safeguards, even if only briefly, is still easy, Othmane proved.