Saudi officials used Twitter trolls to go after Khashoggi, critics

The details: Saudi operatives began harassing critics on Twitter after the platform became popular in 2010 during the Arab Spring uprisings.

• The effort was organized by Saud al-Qahtani, the Times reports, who was one of Salman's top advisors before being fired on Saturday after the country confirmed Khashoggi's death.

Officials developed a "troll farm" in homes and offices around Riyadh, where hundreds of young men discussed and searched for dissenting voices to silence on Twitter. They compiled names into lists of people to "threaten, insult and intimate," the Times reports.

• Employees were sent memes they could use to mock dissenters "akin to the cartoons of Pepe the Frog that supporters of President Trump used to undermine opponents," the Times writes.

• They at times reported posts from dissenting users as "sensitive material" to Twitter in an effort to silence critics.

Khashoggi had come up with a strategy to combat trolls before he was killed. He formed a volunteer army of Twitter users, called "Electronic Bees," to push back against trolls.

One key quote: "The mornings were the worst for him because he would wake up to the equivalent of sustained gunfire online," Maggie Mitchell Salem, a friend of Khashoggi's for more than 15 years, told the Times.