In Saudi Arabia, Twitter Becomes More Useful To the Repressors than the Repressed

By Staff, Washington Post

Omar Abdulaziz is only one person, but his story offers a way to better understand 9.9 million more. That's the number of Saudis on Twitter, a platform that has been at the center of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's [MBS] efforts to stamp out dissent and promote the misleading story that it's doing just the opposite.

Abdulaziz wrote in The Post this week that more than 30 Saudi citizens influential on the social media site told him they were blackmailed with material gained from hacking their phones – just as Abdulaziz's own phone was breached using spyware sold by the “Israeli” company NSO Group. These efforts were payback not only for speaking out against the regime generally but also for speaking out against the regime on Twitter in particular. Of the three most influential Saudis on Twitter, Abdulaziz wrote, one has been arrested, a second has disappeared, and he is in exile.

The ultimate aim of the blackmail Abdulaziz identifies was focused on the platform once again. The targets were ordered to tweet propaganda, or else the government would release their private communications and pictures. Complying would align them with the virtual army assembled by Saud al-Qahtani, the former royal court adviser known by activists as the "minister of flies." Abdulaziz had been amassing a counterforce called the "electronic bees" with the aid of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi, when he learned regime officials had discovered their attempt, wrote to Abdulaziz: "God help us." He was murdered by the regime two months later.

Twitter is popular among Saudis as a public square because protesting in a physical public square has rarely been an option. Abdulaziz's experience first of "living democratically" online and then watching that democracy get strangled – while all the government-aligned trolls spam the platform with praise for the regime – is a window into the society-wide crackdown that MBS has attempted to obscure with his worldwide PR campaign.

Abdulaziz's experience is also a window onto a question plaguing observers of technology around the globe who are watching as governments such as China's harness artificial intelligence to scan 500,000 faces of Uighur Muslims in a single month, and governments such as Myanmar's co-opt Facebook's viral mechanics to incite genocide. What happens when a service becomes more useful to the repressors than the repressed?