The Middle East has experienced rapid, albeit asymmetrical, digitalization over the past twenty years. Despite the benefits of technology, there is increasing evidence that it is being used to engage in new practices that fundamentally alter the repressive capacity and reach of the state. Here authoritarian states are shifting to emergent totalitarian states.
Despite significant disparities in access to and utilization of digital technology across the region, the past decade has seen a rapid increase in smartphone prevalence, social media usage, and internet adoption in the Middle East. Although countries such as Yemen have the slowest internet speeds globally, wealthier governments in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have embraced 5G technology and are among the world’s pioneers in its adoption, highlighting a pronounced digital divide. Mobile cellular subscription rates in 2021 in Yemen were about 51 per 100 people, while for Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE, rates were 144, 131, and 195 respectively (suggesting that many people have more than one cellular subscription) (see figure 1). In terms of the internet, Egypt has a 70 percent adoption rate, while GCC countries frequently hover around 100 percent. Indeed, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE have among the highest rates of internet adoption in the world. In terms of the political environment, Arab media and information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure operate in comparable authoritarian ecosystems, but their digital capacities vary significantly.
Liberating Potential of Technology
From Bahrain to Egypt, new technologies have been seen as a key tool in the struggle against decades of autocratic rule. Mobile phone cameras, combined with the internet as a means of broadcasting, have subverted state-controlled media and challenged the dominant, centralized information ecosystem. Even though there is debate about whether digital technologies are effective at sparking and maintaining political mobilization, their sociopolitical impact on the region has been significant. The years 2010 and 2011 were turning points in the Middle East’s use of mobile digital technology. The early stages of the Arab uprisings that began in 2010 were filled with optimism, in small part due to technical utopianism. This occurred after the 2009 Green Movement in Iran, during which bloggers and activists leveraged technology such as Twitter to orchestrate demonstrations and document the regime’s abuses for global audiences.
The capacity to record heinous state actions against their populations has been one of digital technology’s most significant effects on mobilization. The killing of twenty-six-year-old Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan was recorded on a mobile phone, making it perhaps one of the most widely viewed instances of a state-sanctioned killing in human history. Agha-Soltan’s tragic death showed that a novel form of citizen-led, bottom-up regime accountability had been brought about by digital technology. That previously concealed acts of governmental cruelty were now broadcast around the world gave credence to the notion of “liberation technology.”
On a very fundamental level, new technologies mediated and became the basis for transnational solidarities. Images of protesters in Cairo and Tunisia waving signs bearing the Facebook or Twitter logos reified the optimism of social media in the various uprisings. Many believed that platforms were crucial in igniting the hope and the drive required for social change. This was particularly relevant for the region’s large youth population. The role of the youth has been and will be a fundamental driver of change in the region. As much as 40 percent of the population in some Arab countries is under the age of fifteen, with Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, and Palestine having the largest numbers of youth as a proportion of total population.
Arab youth are growing up as digital natives through the use of mobile phones, the internet, and digital media. In Egypt, for instance, around a third of the population was under the age of fifteen in 2010. Despite the country having a relatively low internet penetration rate, the “young of the internet” were and are adept users of social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, spreading footage of government brutality both domestically and overseas. This is not to say digital technology, used by young people, is the key driver of social change. It is more likely that the coordinated protests were primarily driven by the deteriorating economic situation, which was further fueled by the persistent efforts of a central group of devoted attorneys, human rights champions, and other civil society organizers.
Indeed, digital technology is just one element within a preexisting ecosystem that itself contains functioning power nodes. Knowledge and understanding of Middle Eastern and North African politics is also shaped by an assemblage of established media networks, including Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya. These networks can serve as both catalysts and obstacles of revolution and/or counterrevolution. For example, while Al Jazeera has been viewed as a supporter of most Arab uprisings, media outlets with ties to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, such Al Arabiya, have protested against what they regard as the democratic empowerment of Islamists in Egypt. These networks, which are amplified across their multiple digital platforms, whether on Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, are very much part of a state’s digital clout, even if many such media struggle to gain traction among the region’s youth.
The Dark Side: Digital Authoritarianism
Despite this liberating potential of technology, the Arab uprisings have failed to achieve Western-style liberal democracy. The role of technology in this so-called failure is perhaps a result of unrealistic expectations. The excessive veneration of technology is, to some extent, a result of a post-industrial era in which technology has become synonymous with progress. Technology has created a myriad of benefits in domains like healthcare and transport. However, while there are times when technological developments seem utilitarian in their benefits, contextual elements like political economy, regime type, and socioeconomic peculiarities serve as a reminder that technological determinism does not always lead to untrammeled benefits to humanity. Social constructivism—that is, the interaction of technology with particularistic social and political contexts—is also a key driver of technological outcomes.
In authoritarian settings such as the Middle East, the interplay between social constructivism and technological determinism often yields particular results. Resources, methods, and technologies are frequently employed in manners that uphold the existing power structures. Technologies that were initially presented as means for social interaction and connecting with others have been repurposed as means of surveillance, propaganda, and intimidation by governing bodies. Indeed, digital authoritarianism is the term used to describe how states engage digital technology for political repression and control, whether through intrusive surveillance or the mass distribution of pro-regime propaganda via networks of robot accounts (bots) on social media. So while the liberating potential of technology in the Arab Spring was partially realized, it also drew government attention to a pressing new priority—the use of digital technology for protest.
Digital technology and its despatializing powers have created new functionalities for dominant regional powers. The digital revolution in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has also ushered in digital superpowers. Digital superpowers are states that can project digital media power domestically, regionally, and internationally. Whereas traditional media power emanates from institutions such as radio, television, and newspapers, digital media power is the symbolic force that is channeled through digital platforms and resources. As I have argued elsewhere, “social media power is the ability of entities or regimes to utilize those platforms to extend their hegemony domestically and internationally. To be effective in this use of power through digital resources, ownership of infrastructure, whether directly or through investment, is critical.” For example, large media conglomerates like MBC GROUP are owned by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia was already a “media superpower,” but it, along with the UAE, has become a digital superpower whose media outlets have the largest followings in the Arabic-speaking world.
Combined with authoritarian tendencies, this extensive power results in the ability to engage in digital repression. Even in a global setting, several Middle Eastern countries stand out for their repressiveness in the digital ecosystem. The Digital Repression Index ranks around 180 countries for their use of digital technology as a form of political repression. Of the twenty lowest-ranked countries, five of them are in the Middle East, including the UAE, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. In Freedom House’s Freedom of the Net 2021 index, seven MENA countries are ranked among the worst twenty countries for freedom on the internet. These include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Türkiye. Twitter also published the number of accounts suspended by the company between 2018 and 2021 for links to state-backed information operations. Second only to China in terms of accounts suspended for state-backed manipulation are the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Again, this reflects that Middle East digital superpowers are hardly minnows in their pursuit of manipulating the digital space.
Global Politics and Authoritarian Alliances
Deterministic arguments about the liberating potential of technology are also modulated by global geopolitics. In the MENA region, where authoritarian regimes’ stability relies on external patronage, international media attention is essential to create the necessary political pressure for challenging regime resilience. Depending on the government in question, this could manifest in various ways: In Syria, Russia and Iran supported Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship, leading to a prolonged and tragic conflict. But in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s popularity in the West declined, and the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi was promptly followed by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who is sometimes called Mubarak 3.0. While the use of social and digital media has increased under Sisi, it has not brought about fundamental changes to the authoritarian rule, as evidenced by continued repression.
The context in which the Arab uprisings took place also reflected a more conducive political environment to challenging authoritarianism in the Middle East. While former U.S. president Barack Obama’s administration avoided overt attempts at democratization, as had occurred under his predecessor George Bush, it did emphasize advancing human rights as a foreign policy objective—much to the chagrin of the United States’ authoritarian MENA allies. The increasingly brittle relationship between many MENA states and the Obama administration was soured further by the numerous viral videos and accounts of brutality committed by U.S.-allied Middle Eastern states. Such videos, often broadcast or shared on U.S.-based social media platforms and Western media outlets, were received in a U.S.-Middle East political environment that seemed conducive to progressive change, even if only superficially.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 marked a sharp reversal of authoritarian fortunes. Under Trump’s transactional style of presidency, Middle Eastern states quickly demonstrated less inhibition in their willingness to violate human rights. For example, shortly after Trump was elected, Bahrain executed political prisoners for the first time in six years despite issuing a number of death sentences to protesters arrested as a result of the 2011 Uprising. Trump also indulged domestic hawks, as well as more reactionary forces in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel, by tearing up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal). He brought the region nearer to conflict by greenlighting the four-year blockade of Qatar by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Indeed, this changing dynamic revealed the limitations around the liberation paradigm of technology; that is, activists often require a sympathetic and attentive political environment for their activism to gain traction. While Obama never threatened to challenge support for autocratic alliances in the region, his administration offered far more than Trump in at least moderating the worst excesses of authoritarianism.
Trump’s newly discovered alliance with the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was believed to be one of the key factors that encouraged them to proceed with their isolation of Qatar in 2017. This action gave rise to unparalleled digital disinformation campaigns. Due to the dramatic geopolitical changes, massive amounts of money were (and still are) spent on propaganda and astroturfing to sway public opinion in favor of possibly controversial or radical policies.
The United States also leveraged digital resources to intervene in the digital disinformation space. Under Trump, the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center came under fire for funding information campaigns that targeted U.S. journalists and activists for not being harsh enough in their criticism of Iran. On the other hand, journalists reporting on Iran have also frequently been targeted by large, anonymous Twitter mobs that assail them whenever they express any form of criticism. Iran has also created its own extensive disinformation networks to advance its goals, reflecting the problem called “upward equalization” in information warfare, where disinformation begets disinformation.
Having said this, a solely state-centric strategy is problematic in the globalized and despatialized era of technology. Authoritarianism should be seen as an assemblage of actors with aligned interests that transcend national and political boundaries. Big tech firms are becoming an important hub for the expression of authoritarian policies. The fact that private enterprises outside the MENA region are responsible for moderating the public sphere introduces new transnational elements to the articulation of dissent or other forms of expression. Whistleblowers have revealed how social media companies such as Facebook demonstrate less vigilance in monitoring (dis)information in countries where they are less likely to encounter negative publicity. This has been evident in how major tech firms have dealt with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Curation algorithms on social media have tended to suppress pro-Palestinian content, which reduces the exposure of Palestinians online. The fact that social media corporations are supporting an occupying state poses severe ethical concerns but also reflects how U.S. big tech policies often mirror (whether intentionally or not) U.S. foreign policy.
Strategies of Narrative Control
Trump’s election, and the corresponding decline in regard for human rights or political reform, also came six years after the Arab uprisings. Regimes take time to adjust to new mobilization strategies, putting them on the back foot when it comes to fresh political challenges. This lag between the uptake of new technologies and effective policing strategies can be termed a “honeymoon period.” The organizational ability of movements can be efficiently built and maintained in this way, as was partially the case in Bahrain, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia in 2010 and 2011. But by 2016, the honeymoon period had already come to an end, and regimes had begun to get a handle on digital repression.
Power over digital resources has also given certain Gulf states a regional advantage in asserting hegemony in the Arabic language social media sphere. The social media power of Gulf nations and the widespread use of Arabic in a vast, multistate region have given rise to a predominance of Saudi and Emirati policy perspectives. This has been evident from Lebanon to Tunisia. Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s foreign policy narrative was the prevailing framing in Arabic on Twitter when Tunisian President Kais Saied overthrew the government in a self-coup in 2021, an action that Arab Twitter users, especially from the Gulf, justified as necessary to confront increasing Islamism. As a result of Gulf states’ domination over social media discourse, those seeking information about Tunisia in Arabic would likely encounter a foreign policy narrative that centers on the Gulf, raising concerns over informational autonomy in countries with limited social media influence.
Similar concerns were raised in Algeria, where bots appeared to be trying to encourage people to participate in elections widely seen as illegitimate. Two of the most explicit hashtags in this regard were #Algeriavotes and #notinmyname, which sought to denounce the protests and urge people to head to the ballot box. In 2020, when an explosion rocked Beirut, Twitter was dominated by narratives from the Gulf, which promptly blamed Hezbollah and Iran (although the actual cause was likely a combination of corruption and mismanagement in the port where the ammonium nitrate was being stored). The porous nature of the digital public sphere meant those with resources could attempt to sway public opinion through interventions in the supposedly grassroots digital square.
On the domestic front, when faced with their own political scandals, regimes mobilize their digital resources to find a way to militate against the liberating potential of social media. At the time of Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination in October 2018, the dominant narrative on Arabic Twitter was the false Saudi version of events that had been prevalent since the month’s start. Paradoxically, Khashoggi’s name trended the least in Saudi Arabia of all Arabic-speaking countries at the time.
Silencing Critics
Other countries resort to cruder methods. Iran and Türkiye, for example, have shown a willingness to block access to social media and even the internet during political instability. The nature of specific digital infrastructure can also facilitate more bespoke solutions to censorship. States are able to localize internet shutdowns around “problem zones” depending on the state and ICT infrastructure, as Bahrain did in 2016 when one small town saw an online curfew for a full year. So while states generally are willing to engage in internet censorship, they do not necessarily all do it in the same way, pointing to shades of digital repression.
Social media has also played a significant role in the spread of censorship, harassment, and hate speech. Human rights activists, academics, and journalists in the region have been the focus of vicious digital disinformation campaigns. Many individuals have either been doxed, threatened, or targeted by various prominent people in the region. Thirty-six journalists from Al Jazeera alone were targeted with Pegasus spyware, which is made by the Israeli company NSO Group. Currently, this is the single largest-known attack on one news organization. The very real threat of incarceration or death, as shown by Khashoggi’s killing, adds a potent legitimacy to these online threats, contributing to a chilling effect. After all, for many journalists or netizens in the region, nothing is off-limits if the murder of a U.S.-based journalist could be carried out in such a bold manner with seemingly no substantial consequences for those involved.
This chilling effect creates a dissent vacuum on and offline, which is then filled by progovernment or apolitical influencers praising the establishment and, in many cases, warning potential critics of the repercussions of dissent. All of this occurs in a legal context where vague laws that prohibit bringing the state into disrepute can be used to silence critics, whether online or on legacy media. With alarming frequency, critics appear to be periodically scapegoated with a chilling effect on free speech. In 2022, Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi student studying in the UK, was sentenced to thirty-four years in prison for tweeting criticism of the Saudi regime. This case also raised concerns that al-Shehab was reported using a mobile phone application designed to facilitate reporting crimes in Saudi Arabia. This crowdsourced surveillance also highlights the kind of endemic monitoring and reporting evident in totalitarian regimes.
Automating Propaganda and Populism
While the merits of artificial intelligence and automation are widely known, they have also been deployed for purposes of narrative control and censorship. The growth of bots, which swamp the digital public sphere with proregime content, is also threatening to undermine the potential for a deliberative democratic change. Millions of automated accounts throughout the Gulf region have commandeered online conversations, quashing authentic discourse and creating the impression of public debate. This practice, known as astroturfing, aims to supplant genuine public discussions with artificial, regime-sanctioned, and ideologically sanitized messaging, manipulated from the top down. Bad actors can also exploit such technologies for spreading harmful agendas. Thousands of bots affiliated with state-sanctioned news outlets (such as Saudi 24) have tweeted anti-Shia sectarian language and hate speech, often amplifying existing sectarian television programming.
Personalism and authoritarian populism are powerful dynamics in the Middle East, more so than single-party rule as seen in other authoritarian contexts such as China. Hypernationalism, often demonstrated through symbolic displays of loyalty to leaders, has resulted in a lot of Twitter content. While very real, these new nationalisms, especially in the Gulf, have been spurred on by thousands of fake accounts. Hundreds of thousands of bots and trolls have been used over the past five years to glorify Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed, to support Trump’s anti-Iran tweets, and to cover up the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. In 2018, for example, thousands of accounts falsely claiming to be Saudis were deployed to demand maximum pressure and even war with Iran, using hashtags such as “Trump Will Destroy Iran.”
Despite being very simple computer programs, bots are useful for amplifying pro-authoritarian propaganda because of their capacity to raise the popularity of URLs and other types of information. Of even greater concern is the rapid advancement of natural language processing technology, exemplified by tools such as ChatGPT, which can already generate highly convincing and credible-sounding content. The same trend can be observed with deepfake images and videos, which have already been utilized to deceive editors worldwide into publishing anti-Iranian and pro-Emirati content.
Surveillance and Emergent Totalitarianism
The process of authoritarian adaptation to digital technology has spawned the term “digital authoritarianism.” While the term “authoritarianism” has displaced terms like “totalitarianism,” which fell out of fashion after the demise of the Soviet Union, there is a renewed conceptual relevance due to the functionalities permitted by digital technology. As Hannah Arendt described in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a key aspect of a totalitarian society was the absence of privacy. Under totalitarianism, whether through passive or active surveillance, personal privacy and therefore liberty is subsumed under broad securitization projects enabled by ever more insidious and expansive forms of surveillance. In fact, the abuse of digital technology may itself be a fundamental aspect of changing regime type. Totalitarianism invades and asphyxiates private life, promotes deistic-like qualities to the leadership, stifles pluralism, limits corruption, and prompts an increased presence on the international stage.
Totalitarianism also requires leaders with messianic visions and a desire to establish themselves on the international scene and invoke a permanent state of mobilization of their citizenries against perceived or constructed external and internal enemies. One doesn’t have to look far for examples. Mohammed bin Salman (colloquially known as MBS) and Mohamed bin Zayed (called MBZ) reflect this new generation of leaders. MBS in particular has shown a totalitarian proclivity to invade the personal space of his subjects or enemies: Recently, a U.S. jury found former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo, an American and Lebanese citizen, guilty of spying for a foreign state (Saudi Arabia). He was found to have received gifts, including money and a luxury watch, in exchange for passing private Twitter data about Saudi critics directly to members of the Saudi royal family and close advisers to the crown prince. A file sent from a WhatsApp account belonging to MBS was also reported to be the vector in a hack of Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’s phone. Leading up to the hack, the Washington Post, owned by Bezos, had been a fierce critic of MBS following Khashoggi’s murder.
In and of itself, this shows how important Riyadh and the new leadership under MBS see the threat and utility posed by these digital platforms. Their willingness to devote resources and stake international reputational capital for the purposes of espionage on the soil of a close ally indicates a bold new approach to repression. The most profound consequence of infiltrating Twitter was perhaps the fact that the spying sent a message to activists anywhere, but especially in Saudi Arabia, that they were never safe. Digital totalitarianism makes possible an almost permanent sense of anxiety induced by the omniscience of technological surveillance.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are also customers of Pegasus. Morocco is also reported to use the software. The spyware, which essentially turns infected targets’ mobile phones into advanced listening devices, has been deployed against politicians, activists, and journalists spanning the globe. Along with very drastic shifts in the established order, these new digital forms of monitoring are also serving as a crucial foundation for new digital authoritarian coalitions in the region. Israel’s advanced capabilities in the fields of cybersecurity and disinformation have fostered a novel form of explicit collaboration in this domain. By selling invasive surveillance software to states that broadly support Israel’s foreign policy objectives, Israel increases its influence and power in the region through the use of proxy policing. This spyware diplomacy serves as a reminder of how control technologies are fostering regional alliances and bolstering a regional order that is supported by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, two of the Gulf’s most powerful nations on the outside. More recent revelations have also shed light on how a growing number of companies run by former Israeli military officials, including Percepto International and Team Jorge, specialize in social media operations designed to influence elections or smear humanitarian not-for-profits.
In this regard, selling the most invasive forms of surveillance technology to states with a demonstrable disregard for privacy laws or freedom of speech highlights the importance of seeing emergent totalitarian governments as an assemblage of actors bound together by mutual security interests. The potential for totalitarianism is not unique to the Middle East. The operations of Cambridge Analytica as well as the Edward Snowden revelations about extensive eavesdropping by the U.S. National Security Agency highlight how greater government intrusion into personal lives is a universal problem. Terms like “authoritarian” and “hybrid” regimes sometimes conceal the fact that all governments, whether monarchical, theological, autocratic, or democratic, participate in behaviors that might be viewed as essential elements of totalitarian societies. However, in totalitarian or emergent totalitarian regimes, there is very little recourse for holding regimes responsible for ever-growing surveillance.
Naturally, citizens and members of civil society have limited ability to resist such incursions. There are few safeguards against the state’s arbitrary use of power in the Middle East’s current political systems, most of which involve one-party dominance, co-opted judiciaries, and an absence of rule of law. An essential component of an effective democracy is the safeguards that citizens have against an arbitrary state. Privacy mechanisms (like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation) are not available, nor are they even conceivably possible in the near term, given the absence of robust or accountable democratic federalist structures. Indeed, totalitarianism can only be achieved through a near absence of accountability.
Conclusion
Citizens and activists attempting to resist and push back against digital authoritarianism have encountered a number of crucial obstacles, including extant authoritarian structures, authoritarian learning, and changing geopolitics. In the context of authoritarian political systems, digital technology is frequently repurposed to facilitate surveillance, regulation, and oppression. In effect, the political structures of many MENA regimes have changed very little over the past few decades, merely changed form. Even Tunisia, widely considered a success story of the Arab uprisings, has fallen back to autocracy, a fact cheered on by some of the Gulf states, who continue to exert their influence over the wider Middle East.
In light of this, the digital shift in the MENA area is more likely to support authoritarianism than to confront it. However, technology also provides new functions that broaden repressive methods and even change the very essence of a regime type. As digital technologies become increasingly pervasive, the authoritarian governments of the region face the danger of descending into totalitarianism as they pursue absolute security. This situation is exacerbated by political structures that prioritize regime security over individual privacy. As things stand, wealthy Gulf states with high digital penetration rates are becoming digital superpowers—states able to project their influence or control domestically, regionally, and internationally. The transition from digital authoritarianism to emergent totalitarianism will be facilitated by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, especially if they continue a strategic shift to other digital authoritarian superpowers such as China, Israel, and Russia.