Review of Marc OWEN JONES (2022): Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East Deception, Disinformation and Social Media, Hurst publishers, London.
Keywords:
Digital Authoritarianism, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Gulf, Middle East and North AfricaCopyright (c) 2022 Álvaro de Argüelles Lugo
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Although the Arab Spring gave rise to the illusion that social networks would serve to achieve the spread of democracy in the Arab world, practice has shown that digital technology is one of the many tools at the service of authoritarian regimes to control their populations. In the Middle East, the debate in the virtual world is today dominated by censorship, propaganda, disinformation and deception, a trend that is not exclusive to the region but that is especially aggravated because there is no independent journalistic sector that can counter the advance of the "post-truth era".
Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East is the first systematic attempt to understand how platforms such as Twitter can be used to control and manipulate the public. The book focuses on the Arab Gulf, in particular Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and in practices that involve the deliberate dissemination of false content through accounts with fake identities, trolls and bots.