"God says we are right!': The Interplay between Religion and Propaganda on Arabic Social Media

Religion is a main aspect of life in many parts of the world; hence, it acts as a powerful tool for influencing people’s views and actions. In the context of propaganda and misinformation, religion has been perceived as a factor that impacts people negatively leading them to be influenced by false or biased information. However, there are limited quantitative studies that explore the exact role of religion in this process. In this study, we investigate whether state-sponsored propaganda accounts share religious content in a different way than the typical norms reported in the literature and whether they mobilize this content to promote their agendas. We find by exploring 15 Middle Eastern propaganda Twitter datasets encompassing around 124 million tweets from 32.5K accounts that propagandists share religious texts according to patterns that reflect aspects of their state’s agenda. We also demonstrate examples where such texts were used to modulate political messages.