Twitter has allowed a senior Saudi official and aide to Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to maintain a verified account with more than 2m followers, despite allegations that the official recruited and paid Twitter employees to secretly report on dissidents’ anonymous accounts, a new report by The Guardian has revealed.
Last week, a US jury convicted one of the former Twitter employees, a US-Lebanese national named Ahmad Abouammo on charges that he used his position at the social media company to spy on Twitter users on behalf of the Saudi government.
Two other named defendants, Saudi citizens Ali Alzabarah and Ahmed Almutairi, are on the FBI’s wanted list and are believed to be in Saudi Arabia. Both are accused of acting as unregistered agents of Saudi Arabia.
While Twitter has not responded to specific questions about Asaker’s account, a company spokesperson said in 2021 that it acted swiftly at the time of the incident when it learned there were malicious actors accessing Twitter user data.
The company also said it was committed to “protecting the public conversation” from abuse by state actors. Twitter announced in 2019 that it had permanently suspended nearly 6,000 accounts linked to Saudi Arabia which it said had violated its policies regarding platform manipulation.
In 2020, it said it removed 33 accounts that had ties to the Saudi government, because the accounts had been created to impersonate Qatari officials and make statements that were favourable to Saudi authorities.
Spies in Silicon Valley
In its report titled Spies in Silicon Valley, Bloomberg revealed that in internal breach at Twitter Inc. a half decade ago yielded data that was later used by Saudi Arabia to harass or arrest people critical of the government, according to lawsuits, human rights groups and the relative of a person apprehended in 2018.
In 2015, two Twitter employees allegedly accessed more than 6,000 accounts while acting as spies for the government of Saudi Arabia. Some details of the incident have been disclosed by U.S. prosecutors, who charged the two men last November, and in recent lawsuits by people who alleged their accounts were among those breached. But few other details have emerged about what the Saudi government may have done with the data.
Now, the sister of a Saudi man who ran an anonymous Twitter account said her brother’s disappearance resulted from the activities of the alleged Twitter spies. Abdulrahman al-Sadhan was working at his office in Riyadh on March 12, 2018 when Saudi Arabia’s secret police showed up and took him away, according to his sister, Areej al-Sadhan. His family hasn't seen him since, and until he was permitted to make a short phone call to a relative in February, they worried that he might have been killed.
Saudi Arabia kills dissidents ‘with British help'
For its part, The Times revealed that Saudi Arabia is using cybercrime laws to secure convictions and death sentences against protesters, raising questions about British co-operation on cybersecurity including training provided to Saudi police.
Saudi Arabia’s secretive terrorism court upheld a death sentence for Abdulkareem al-Hawaj on Monday. Last year he was convicted on cybercrime charges including spreading information on WhatsApp “as proscribed by the cybe rcrime bill” and sentenced to death. At the time of his alleged crimes he was aged 16.
Last year it emerged the College of Policing in Britain had trained Saudi police in intelligence gathering on protesters despite concerns that it could be used to identify people who would be “tortured or subjected to other human rights abuses”.
Saudi woman given 34-year prison sentence for using Twitter
A Saudi student at Leeds University who had returned home to the kingdom for a holiday has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists.
The sentencing by Saudi’s special terrorist court was handed down weeks after the US president Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia, which human rights activists had warned could embolden the kingdom to escalate its crackdown on dissidents and other pro-democracy activists.
#FreeSalma Campaign
#FreeSalma hashtag swept social media in demand for the immediate and unconditional release of Salma al-Shehab.
