LONDON: In the era of mass social media and a hunger for money-earning clicks, it takes only moments for a dangerous piece of misinformation to circle the globe, becoming transformed into “fact” by the simple act of reckless, unquestioning repetition. That was the case this week when an extraordinary article in The Wall Street Journal presented as fact an anonymous claim that the Iran-backed Houthi militia had demanded a payment of $51 billion from Saudi Arabia as their price for ending hostilities in Yemen. Now an investigation by Arab News has discovered the likely source of the claim and the $51 billion figure: a Saudi dissident. If this is the case, not disclosing this fact alone carries implications for The Journal’s reporting credibility, and highlights how someone with an agenda can so easily take advantage of a global platform. In the hours and days after the Journal’s story was posted online, it was picked up and repeated countless times on social media and on mainstream media websites around the world. Most repeated the allegation as fact — very few chose to qualify their parroting of the Journal’s story with the word “claim.” Setting aside the ludicrous size of the suggested sum — about five times Yemen’s nominal gross domestic product, according to the International Monetary Fund — there was the small matter of attribution. Another unsubstantiated claim in the article, also presented as fact, was that Saudi Arabia had “reached out to the group to see what it would take to arrive at a negotiated halt to the hostilities.” This, and the figure of $51 billion, was attributed to anonymous “people briefed on the discussions.” It is normal for news organizations to quote anonymous sources (although, for the sake of credibility, it is also common practice for journalists to disclose the identity of those sources to their editors. The Journal did not respond to a question seeking confirmation that this procedure had been followed in this case). But readers were offered no clue as to the allegiance of these “people,” or the nature of their agendas. Furthermore, no attempt seemed to have been made to approach Saudi authorities to comment on the claims. The article appeared first in the print edition of The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 5, under the headline “Saudis struggle to end hostilities with Houthis.” Only when it was posted online did it carry a comment from a Saudi official, and even then, it had not been sought but was taken from a short post on X. On Thursday, Dr. Rayed Krimly, Saudi deputy minister for public diplomacy, “categorically” denied the claims. “All of this is pure fabrication by the writers or their alleged sources,” he wrote. He added: “These militias turned against the Yemeni government, caused famine among the Yemeni people, and dragged Yemen into conflicts and agendas that do not serve Yemen and its people. “They attacked commercial vessels in the Red Sea waterways, civilian and economic targets, and rejected all peace efforts. “We also remind the writers that Yemen has a recognized government.” What readers of The Wall Street Journal article were not told was the story behind the story. The Journal article comes amid a sustained propaganda campaign targeting Saudi Arabia and its support for the internationally recognized government of Yemen. A steady stream of misinformation has been generated by various organizations and individuals, including Israeli media and social media accounts, outlets affiliated with Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah, and assorted opposition activists and journalists. For months, social media has been awash with dubious, unconfirmed claims that Saudi Arabia has either offered, or been asked for, various sums to be paid in “compensation” to the Houthis. On Aug. 3, for example, a Lebanese newspaper aligned with Hezbollah reported the claim that the Houthis were demanding $1.1 trillion in compensation. On Oct. 26, the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom ran a story, attributed to unnamed “diplomatic sources in the Gulf,” that Saudi Arabia’s Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman had flown to Tehran on board a military aircraft to negotiate a ceasefire with the Houthis. The story included the detail that, “according to one source,” Prince Khalid had flown to Tehran with $1 billion in cash. No attempt appeared to have been made to contact the Saudi government for comment. Not to be outdone, on Nov. 2 — just three days before The Wall Street Journal’s article — an outlet called Al-Jarida Post published a story claiming that Saudi Arabia had offered to pay the Houthis $200 billion. Most intriguing of all, however, is the revelation that the figure of $51 billion had first surfaced in an online video 11 days before The Wall Street Journal published its article, in which the same, oddly precise figure was repeated. In the video, which was posted on Instagram on Oct. 24, Omar Abdulaziz Al-Zahrani, a Saudi-born dissident living in Canada, says: “I asked someone from the group in Sanaa (the capital of Yemen, held by the Houthis since September 2014): ‘How much compensation are you demanding?’ “He told me: ‘We want 51 billion, 750 million, 644 thousand and 15 riyals. And we want those 15 riyals before the millions and the billions. I need those 15 riyals to buy my qat.’” Al-Zahrani added: “They are demanding 51 billion dollars in Sanaa. Do you understand? The Saudis need to understand the sheer scale of this disaster. It is an enormous catastrophe … 51 billion! I swear, I can’t even remember whether he said riyals or dollars.” Three bylines appeared under the article in The Wall Street Journal, including those of Jon Gambrell, deputy chief of the paper’s Middle East bureau, based in Dubai, and Summer Said, a senior Middle East correspondent, also based in Dubai. At the time of going to press, neither has responded to questions about the article put to them by Arab News.