The activity was linked to Smaat, a social network marketing company inside Saudi Arabia. It reportedly created, bought and ran the accounts on behalf of its clients, some of whom include "high-profile individuals" and Saudi government departments. Twitter has since banned both Smaat and some of its executives.

The accounts are part of a broader network of 88,000 that was involved in "spammy" activity across a range of subjects. They've also been permanently banned. Twitter isn't sharing info about the entire batch as researchers asked it to filter out "unrelated spam."

This certainly isn't the first instance of Twitter detailing large-scale attempts at manipulation. Many of those efforts originated in Iran and Russia, though, while earlier documented Saudi campaigns have been relatively small. If Twitter's research is accurate, that Saudi propaganda push is considerably larger than previously thought.