All conflicts are shaped to varying extents by the competing interests of neighbouring states or big powers. The war in Syria is no exception, and numerous states have devoted resources to attempting to secure their interests through manipulating the information space. Since 2011, social media has been a key site of meaning making in terms of attempting to shape narratives, mobilise support, and eliminate counter narratives. However, it has become increasingly clear that the liberation technology paradigm in which social media was viewed as a democratising force has been challenged by increasing evidence of its use as a tool of authoritarian control and manipulation. The use of disinformation, and manipulation has reached such a pitch that social media companies are even being accused of facilitating genocide. Despite this, many studies on disinformation focus reflect US foreign policy concerns, focusing on states such as Russia, China or Iran. While understandable given the size and influence of such actors, they are far from alone. Intra-Middle East propaganda and disinformation remains relatively underexplored. Through examining over 100,000 Arabic language tweets from 2017 using novel anomaly detection methods, this paper reveals how thousands of automated bot accounts from Saudi Arabia on Twitter were attempting to dominate Twitter narratives about Syria. The paper reveals how state-aligned media utilised thousands of fake accounts and automation to try and megaphone/or ‘swamp’ conversations occurring about Syria with Saudi-aligned, and to an extent, US right-wing narratives. These discursive efforts centred around trying to promote and emphasise discourses about Iranian and Russian involvement in Syria. This paper argues that astroturfing (creating artificial grassroots campaigns), demonstrates the ability of actors to use automation and social media to disrupt organic online civil society, and promote state messaging in place of legitimate public discourse. It also problematizes disinformation definitions, which are content-centric, and argues that paradigms of ‘deception’ are more suitable. Deception encompasses misleading means of distributing information, as well as content. The paper also reveals the extent to which manipulation was endemic before Twitter publicly took action in 2018. By doing so, it expands on the issue of ‘digital orientalism’, which posits that Silicon Valley exploits the global south with little regard for the consequences or responsibilities of its monetisation.