Turkey’s info op against Saudi Arabia is masterful.
10 A powerful (but vague) opening gambit: “JK murdered in Saudi consulate”
20 🇸🇦 is caught off guard, reacts clumsily
30 🇹🇷 allows time for outrage & jeers
40 Then riposte! More details, new evidence. Touché
50 GOTO 20

Turkey, no bastion for dissidents or freedom of the press, looks moral and good. Saudi can’t catch a break, they’re totally out maneuvered and out classed. I don’t know what Turkey’s end game is, but they’re definitely winning. What they hope to win, I have no idea.
In an era where almost all press coverage is in someway about Trump, and nothing lasts longer than a day in news cycle, Turkey has made one horrific event stay front and center for almost 3 weeks. That is amazing.
DPRK manipulated sex workers into murdering a VIP with nerve gas in an airport, in public, on camera... and that story got less play than this.
Another interesting dimension to this info op — all the info war experts frantically churning out analysis of the tiny Saudi Twitter bot army have totally missed Turkey using the media as an information delivery channel. The BBC is a more powerful weapon than a few Twitter bots
Information operations are about getting information to the target audience to persuade them to act in a manner that benefits the ppl conducting the info op. Info ops aren’t restricted to social media.
Turkey’s exploitation of Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal torture and murder in no way diminishes the horrific tragedy. Would that all state sanctioned torture and murder were covered so extensively.

That said, this is an info op and Turkey has some reason for conducting it.
The info war experts are off counting Twitter bots and the media is oblivious (or at least pretending to be) to their role as information delivery weapon. They still haven’t reckoned with their complicity in l’affaires Russe of 2016. Upton Sinclair definitely nailed that one.

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