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Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, a Retweet Will Get You Jailed for 10 Years

A Saudi man was locked up for 10 years for “engaging in following, saving, and resending inciting tweets on the social networking site."
Photo via Getty

Someone should tell Saudi authorities that retweets do not equal endorsement.

Earlier this month, a man was sentenced to 10 years in prison and a $26,600 fine for “engaging in following, saving, and resending inciting tweets on the social networking site.”

The hefty March 10 sentence followed a massive wave of repression of critical voices in Saudi Arabia. This culminated last month with the kingdom issuing new terrorism laws and related royal decrees, which crack down hard on all sorts of dissent by criminalizing pretty much any form of expression that authorities don’t like.

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Saudi authorities turned the definition of “terrorism” on its head, by extending the charge to any non-violent act intended to “insult the reputation of the state,” “sow discord,” “harm public order,” or “shake the stability of society.” Basically anything that could even remotely come close to the expression of an opinion can qualify you as a terrorist.

“Saudi authorities have never tolerated criticism of their policies,” Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “But these recent laws and regulations turn almost any critical expression or independent association into crimes of terrorism.”

But the list of terrorist “acts” under the new set of laws doesn’t stop at Twitter. You are also a terrorist if you promote atheism, “throw away” your loyalty to the country’s rulers (whatever that means), help out actual terrorist groups (or those deemed such by Saudi authorities, quite a catch-22), attend conferences, and contact or correspond “with any groups, currents of thought, or individuals hostile to the kingdom.”

'They want to roll back every thing to the pre-Arab Spring era. They started with activists, but now they target everyone.'

Saudi Arabia being Saudi Arabia, this last group includes a lot of people, including several Saudis.

As a Saudi activist told Human Rights Watch researchers: “Just talking to you now is considered terrorism — I could be prosecuted as a terrorist for this conversation.”

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The sweeping attack on Twitter, however, shocked many, both for the severity of the sentence and because, let's face it, who really thinks about the possibility of a decade in jail when hitting retweet?

Saudi Arabia’s Twitter usage rates are the world’s highest in relation to the population that is active online. Different studies found that up to 41 percent of the country’s internet users are active on the site. And 4 percent of the entire Twitter population lives in the kingdom — a staggering 4.8 million people at the end of last year. With 29.6 million people in 2012, Saudi Arabia represents just 0.41 percent of the world's actual population.

Twitter users in Saudi Arabia had enjoyed relative freedom — igniting what some commentators called a “virtual Saudi spring.” Saudi activists turned to social media to demand greater freedom and political reforms. The online campaign “Women2Drive,” for instance, calling for women’s right to drive, went viral.

The video below, by Human Rights Watch, features Saudi activists talking about social media’s threat to Saudi authorities.

Social media challenging the status quo in Saudi Arabia.

But social media users demanding greater freedom in return received the effective criminalization of Twitter, Facebook, and other sites where their dissent found a space.

"During the Arab Spring, the ceiling of freedom of expression was very high because they could not go against the regional trend and thought they would be able to control it if they let people vent some steam," Waleed Abualkhair, a Jeddah-based human rights lawyer, told Al-Monitor, a news and analysis website focused on the Middle East. "But now they want to be in total control. They want to roll back every thing to the pre-Arab Spring era. They started with human rights activists, but now they target everyone."

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Authorities quickly caught up to the social media game, and have been harassing and prosecuting social media users for at least a year now. Last June, seven people critical of the government were given five to ten year prison terms for posting about protests on Facebook.

Religious authorities also condemned the service, with the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, calling Twitter “a threat to national unity” and the Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz ibn Abdullah al-Sheikh, the country’s most senior religious authority, billing it “a platform for trading accusations and for promoting lies.” He added that its users are “fools” who “lack modesty and faith.”

Activists tweeting their dissent to large followings have been intimidated, and a lawyer was forced to flee the country after tweeting about his clients’ conditions in prison.

Iman al-Qahtani, an outspoken human rights activist and prolific tweeter, was intimidated by authorities to leave Twitter. In a last, brief tweet, last summer, she told her 73,000 followers that she was shutting down her account for her mother.

“Twitter has been cited as evidence in numerous prosecutions and activists called in for questioning are regularly asked about their social media activities,” Human Rights Watch Middle East researcher Adam Coogle told VICE News. “There is this notion that the government was leaving Twitter alone, but that really hasn’t been the case for a year.”

But even though the 10-year sentence for a retweet might scare some away, many more users are refusing to let authorities intimidate them.

“Conversations you have on Twitter you could never have elsewhere in the country; it’s really an outlet for doing things that Saudis could never do before,” Coogle said. “Many activists are already facing criminal investigations and procedures. They are not scaling back.”

Follow Alice Speri on Twitter: @alicesperi