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Qatar's government communication office has filed a lawsuit in the United States against people who launched a social media campaign to spread false lies about the Gulf state to harm its interests.

In its complaint before a court in the state of New York, the office said its defendants used social media accounts since October 2017 to spread fake information about Qatar and that it harbours "terrorism".

the adverts accusing Qatar of funding "terrorism" and mistreating foreign workers were paid for by "secretive campaign groups" - Qatar Exposed and Kick Qatar Out, neither of which own websites on the Internet.

The two Twitter accounts were created within minutes of each other last October.

According to analysts, the two campaigns are funded by groups linked to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – which, along with Bahrain and Egypt, have severed diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar.

I’ve seen soldiers grab crying children and shoving them into military vehicles, pushing aside their screaming mothers.

I’ve seen soldiers grab a young woman by her arms and drag her like a sack of potatoes for several meters along an asphalt road so hot that it melted the rubber soles of my running shoes, before tossing her into a military vehicle and driving away.

I’ve had my ankles singed black when a security officer looked me straight in the eyes and threw a stun grenade at my legs.

Israeli army sharp-shooters regularly shoot unarmed demonstrators in Nabi Saleh with both rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition. They break into houses and drag people out, arresting them on the claim that they allowed demonstrators to hide in their garden.

And then I would go back to Tel Aviv and be told by my friends that I could not have seen what I saw, because “our soldiers” do not behave that way. Soon, I had to distance myself from those friends in order to keep my own emotions in check.

By the time I began going to Nabi Saleh, I had spent about four years reporting on what I saw in Gaza and the West Bank, and watching detachedly as my politics moved ever leftward from the liberal place in which they started, as a consequence of what I saw on the ground. But it was in Nabi Saleh that I lost the last remnants of what I would call — for lack of a word to describe my nostalgia for the idea of a state for the Jews — my Zionism.

My radicalization was not only a consequence of witnessing brutal violence perpetrated right in front of my eyes, by soldiers of the army that was supposed to protect me. It was also a result of my seeing the Tamimi family endure that violence week after week, seeing their relatives injured, arrested and killed, and still not coming to the conclusion that the price of resistance is too high. They simply refuse to submit.

Facebook's detailed metrics for advertisers helps the government campaign reach its targets - people who might be groomed online by militants.

"Using Facebook ads, I can go within Facebook, I can grab an audience. I can pick country X, I need age group 13 to 34, I need people who liked Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or any other set, and I can shoot and hit them directly with messages," he said.

"In some places in the world, it's literally pennies a click to do it," he said.  

Facebook, he noted, offers the government access to affordable amassed and collated user data for singling out target groups and individuals for anti-militant ads the US government runs.

"The best I can do right now is to have access to big data and to use the analytics tools on the social media platforms, the Facebooks and the others,"

The rare and unusually direct Twitter diplomacy between Iranian leaders and western policy observers “will go down in history,” one Hill staffer, speaking not for attribution, said Thursday, expressing the wider sense of amazement heard from many veteran Iran watchers at the display of tolerance and public diplomacy initiative coming from Tehran.

The welcome change in atmospherics has added to hopes for a diplomatic opening created by Rouhani’s election. But it must be accompanied by substantive progress in nuclear negotiations to lead to a broader easing of ties, western analysts and officials said.