Twitter, now X, in hot water over Saudi Arabia activist hack claims

The social media platform Twitter, now called X, was on Monday accused in a US civil lawsuit of allowing Saudi Arabia to use its platform to identify and punish government critics.

The social media platform was infamously infiltrated by two Saudi government spies, passing on insider information which was eventually used in human rights abuses against activists.

A new claim against the social media giant has been made by Areej al-Sadhan, whose brother, Abdulrahman, was sentenced to 20 years in jail following a trial "marred by violations, including possible torture used to extract a 'confession'", according to Amnesty International.

The two Saudi spies working for Twitter were key to the aid worker's arrest, according to some reports.

In an updated claim, Twitter allegedly ignored or knew that the Saudi government was pursuing critics but did nothing due to financial considerations.

Saudi Arabia's estimated $1.89 billion stake in X - mostly held by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal - has been flagged by US politicians as a potential security risk. Alwaleed's Kingdom Holding is 16.9 percent owned by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, which is chaired by the Crown Prince and de facto ruler of the country Mohammed bin Salman (MbS).

"We should be concerned that the Saudis, who have a clear interest in repressing political speech and impacting US politics, are now the second-largest owner of a major social media platform," Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who first raised the concerns, wrote at the time of Elon Musk's takeover of the company on Twitter.

Complicity or 'deliberate ignorance'

The new lawsuit details how Twitter had initially been seen as a key platform for democratic movements during the Arab spring, which became a source of concern for Riyadh in 2013. 

The following year, the kingdom began an extensive crackdown on Saudi dissidents using the platform. In December 2014, as Ahmad Abouammo, who was convicted in the US for acting as a Saudi agent, began collating and sending confidential user data to security officials in Riyadh. 

In the new lawsuit, it is claimed that he sent a message to Saud al-Qahtani, a close aide to MbS, via Twitter's direct messaging system, saying “proactively and reactively we will delete evil, my brother”.

Al-Qahtani was later accused by the US of being a mastermind behind the brutal murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. 

“Twitter was either aware of this message – brazenly sent on its own platform – or was deliberately ignorant to it,” according to the revised lawsuit, as stated by The Guardian. 

The new legal filing comes days after Human Rights Watch condemned a Saudi court for sentencing Muhammad al-Ghamdi to death based solely on his Twitter and YouTube activity, as part of what it describes as an 'escalation' of the kingdom's crackdown on freedom of speech and dissent. 

X does not respond to questions from the media.