A smoke plume erupts during Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern of Gaza Strip on October 19, 2023.
AFP via Getty ImagesIn 2020, social media giants Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter confronted a problem: state-run news outlets were racking up hundreds of millions of views on their platforms from users who didn’t realize that they were consuming foreign government propaganda.
Within months of each other, the platforms announced parallel actions: They would label posts made by state media outlets, so that people would know where their information was coming from.
In 2022, TikTok followed suit, rushing out an “expedited” version of a labeling policy for Russian and Ukrainian outlets after Russia invaded Ukraine. “An extra layer of context can be helpful to viewers, especially in times of war and conflict zones,” said a company blog post. It would subsequently extend labeling to nearly 100 countries worldwide, including many (like the U.S. and countries in Western Europe) that do not have any state media outlets.
But this labeling is not happening for outlets in the Middle East amidst one of the most fraught geopolitical conflagrations of the day: the conflict in Israel and Gaza.
Unlabeled state media entities from countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are accruing hundreds of millions of views on social media platforms as they report on the war, selectively highlighting facts and shaping narratives — because TikTok, Meta and Twitter have not labeled them as such.
A Forbes analysis showed that unlabeled TikTok videos about the conflict from just two such outlets, Al Arabiya and The National News, have been viewed more than 100 million times. One features Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman “demand[ing] a ‘serious’ peace process for a Palestinian state.” Another, featuring interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, bears the caption: “If the army enters Rafah, there will be massacres.”
Video views for the accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, now called X, were lower, but into the millions. Facebook and Instagram do not show view counts for non-video posts. (Disclosure: in a previous life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)
Twitter abolished its labeling policy after billionaire Elon Musk bought the company. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a longtime investor in Twitter, rolled over his $1.89 billion worth of shares in the company after Musk bought it to become the platform’s second-largest shareholder.
Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy and Advocacy Director for the nonprofit Access Now, told Forbes that educated news consumers in the Middle East know not to see certain outlets like Al Arabiya and The National News as independent from their government owners: “You’d never follow these outlets on Palestine-Israel reporting because it’s very obvious that they do push for a certain narrative, obfuscate facts, use different terminology to describe the events on the ground — they’re just mouthpieces of the government, there to spread propaganda or specific ideologies.”
Fatafta noted that press freedom in the Middle East is nuanced — outlets are allowed substantial independence on some subjects, but almost none on others. But at the end of the day, she said, all media are state-controlled in countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where criticizing the government is a crime.
The Middle East has been a strategic market for the social giants in recent years. In 2022, Meta partnered with the Saudi government’s Ministry of Communications to launch a training program for Saudi businesses on the platform, and in February, TikTok launched a similar initiative with the Qatari government. In March, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told a Saudi TV station that the company plans to expand its investments in the country and use it as a testing ground for new products and features.
TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza said the company is “transparent about our approach to state-affiliated media,” but declined to answer questions about any plans to label Middle Eastern outlets in the future. Meta declined to comment. An auto-reply sent from the Twitter press email account said, “Busy now, check back later.”
Research conducted at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere has shown that these labels do work; when people know that a post came from a state media outlet, they are “less likely to believe, like, read, share, and comment on the posts.”
Unlike TikTok and Meta, Google-owned YouTube currently labels Al Arabiya, The National, and other state-funded Middle Eastern outlets.
Cathryn Grothe, a Middle East media expert at Freedom House, told Forbes that state control extends beyond just Saudi Arabia and the UAE. She described a WhatsApp group through which Egyptian authorities disseminate talking points and directives to newspaper editors. Of the directives, she said, “It doesn’t necessarily mean the information itself is inaccurate, it just may mean that it’s lacking context, or that there’s a whole half of the story that is being left out.”
One of the most prominent state media outlets that is currently unlabeled by TikTok and Meta is Al Jazeera, which is owned by the Qatari government. In 2019, before Meta launched its state media labels, it notified Al Jazeera that it would be applying a label to their accounts. The outlet issued a strongly worded response threatening to sue Meta, insisting that it was editorially independent from the government and that a label would cause irreparable harm to its business. Meta did not ultimately label Al Jazeera.
Fatafta said that Al Jazeera demonstrates the complexity of labeling state media in the region.
“Its coverage on Israel-Palestine is perceived to be very accurate in the region. If people want access to credible news on what’s happening in Gaza, that’s where they would go,” she said.
“But from a non-regional perspective, one would say that, yeah, it’s obviously a state-run, state-owned outlet. You can also go as far as to say that it serves as a soft power arm of the Qatari government.”
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