Facebook said it had suspended more than 350 accounts and pages with about 1.4 million followers, the latest takedown in an ongoing effort to combat “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” on its platform, and the first such activity it has linked to the Saudi government.

The Saudi’s are denying everything, of course. But then again it denied killing dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its embassies too and only Donald Trump thinks that did not happen.

Facebook announces takedowns of “inauthentic behaviour” as often as multiple times a month, but statements that link such behaviour to a government are rare.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy said that for this operation, our investigators were able to confirm that the individuals behind this are associated with the government of Saudi Arabia.

“Anytime we have a link between an information operation and a government, that’s significant, and people should be aware.”

Facebook said it had suspended a separate network of more than 350 accounts linked to marketing firms in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. In that case it did not directly link the activity to a government.

Gleicher said the Saudi campaign operated on Facebook and its Instagram photo-sharing platform, primarily targeting countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Qatar, the UAE, Egypt Palestine.

The operation used fake accounts posing as those countries’ citizens and pages designed to look like local news outlets. More than $100,000 was spent on advertisements, Facebook said.

“They would typically post in Arabic about regional news and political issues. They would talk about things like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - his internal and economic social reform plan, the successes of the Saudi armed forces, particularly during the conflict in Yemen”, said Gleicher.

Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab Senior fellow, Andy Carvin which worked with Facebook to analyse the Saudi campaign, said some of the accounts dated back to early 2014 but the majority  were created in the last two years.