Twitter said it has removed large numbers of accounts for breaching its terms of use over the last two weeks, many of them originating from the Gulf region.
"Targeted platform manipulation and coordinated spam are a violation of the Twitter Rules and we will continue to enforce our policies vigorously," a Twitter spokesman said.
Reuters has found such bot accounts and influential Saudi users repeatedly posting hashtags on Twitter including "Qatari intelligence kills Khashoggi" and "Saudi Arabia the greatest," although it found no evidence Qahtani or the Saudi government controlled or directed those accounts.
Saudi Arabia's biggest online newspaper Sabq has also accused the international media, including Reuters, of using Khashoggi's disappearance to try to undermine the government, and released a statement on Oct. 21 saying a fake news story was being circulated under its name.
The websites identified by Reuters as spreading false news about the Saudi government have operated as part of the same network since 2017, said ClearSky analyst Ohad Zaidenberg.
All bar three of the websites have been taken down, although it is not clear who dismantled the network, when or why, said Zaidenberg, who previously tracked online influence campaigns for Israel's elite 8200 intelligence unit.
But the sites which are still online, as well as archived copies of those which are now disabled, provide an insight into the network's operations and aims -- to undermine the official Saudi version of events and spread confusion around its government.
"Saudi Arabia is considered to be one of the main powers in the Middle East. Accordingly, many operators of fake news infrastructure target the Saudi Arabian audience with increasing frequency," Zaidenberg said, adding that a perpetrator could not be identified at this stage.
Web-hosting and support companies Hetzner, GoDaddy and Cloudflare all declined to give any information about the websites' operator, citing client confidentiality.
