THE social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, has been accused in a civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, The Guardian reported. The report accuses the social media firm of, among other things, disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities in July and December 2015 at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK, or Canada. The lawsuit was brought last May, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail. It centres on the events surrounding the infiltration of the California company by three Saudi agents, two who were posing as Twitter employees in 2014 and 2015, which ultimately led to the arrest of al-Sadhan\u2019s brother, Abdulrahman, and the exposure of the identity of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government\u2019s crackdown on dissent, the report said. Lawyers for Al-Sadhan updated their claim last week to include new allegations about how Twitter, under the leadership of then-chief executive Jack Dorsey, willfully ignored or had knowledge of the Saudi government\u2019s campaign to ferret out critics but \u2014 because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close ties to the Saudi government, a top investor in the company \u2014 provided assistance to the kingdom, The Guardian reported. The convicted man, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, 54, is the brother of a Saudi scholar and government critic living in exile in the UK. Saudi court records examined by HRW showed that al-Ghamdi was accused of having two accounts, which had a total of 10 followers combined. The Saudi crackdown can be traced back to December 2014, as Ahmad Abouammo \u2014 who was later convicted in the US for secretly acting as a Saudi agent and lying to the FBI \u2014 began accessing and sending confidential user data to Saudi Arabian officials. In the new lawsuit, it is claimed that he sent a message to Saud al-Qahtani, a close aide to Mohammed bin Salman, via the social media company\u2019s messaging system, saying \u201cproactively and reactively we will delete evil, my brother\u201d. It was a reference, the lawsuit claims, to the identification and harming of perceived Saudi dissidents who were using the platform. Al-Qahtani was later accused by the US of being a mastermind behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. \u201cTwitter was either aware of this message \u2014 brazenly sent on its own platform \u2014 or was deliberately ignorant to it,\u201d the revised lawsuit states. After Abouammo resigned in May 2015, he continued to contact Twitter to field requests he was receiving for the identity of confidential users. He made clear to the company, the lawsuit alleges, that the requests were on behalf of his \u201cold partners in the Saudi government\u201d. The lawsuit also alleges that Twitter had \u201cample notice\u201d of security risks to internal personal data, and that there was a threat of insiders illegally accessing it, based on public reporting at the time. Twitter \u201cdid not simply ignore all these red flags \u2026 it was aware of the malign campaign\u201d, the lawsuit claims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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