Lawsuit says network discloses user data at request of Saudi authorities at much higher rate than for US, UK and Canada

https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2023%2Fsep%2F04%2Ftwitter-saudi-arabia-human-rights-abuses%3FCMP%3DShare_iOSApp_Other

“The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail.”

This article goes into much more detail, but it shows Twitter (now X) has shown somewhat of a disregard for the Saudi links to the killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi and seems to only respond once the FBI gets involved.

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The new legal filing comes days after Human Rights Watch condemned a Saudi court for sentencing a man to death based solely on his Twitter and YouTube activity, which it called an “escalation” of the government’s crackdown on freedom of expression.

After Abouammo resigned in May 2015, he continued to contact Twitter to field requests he was receiving from Bader al-Asaker, a senior aide of Mohammed bin Salman, for the identity of confidential users.

The lawsuit also alleges that Twitter had “ample notice” 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.

Between July and December 2015, Twitter granted the kingdom information requests “significantly more often” than most other countries at that time, including Canada, the UK, Australia, and Spain, the lawsuit alleges.

Twitter would later notify users who had been exposed, telling them their data “may” have been targeted, but did not provide more specific information about the scale or certainty that the breach had, in fact, occurred.

Dorsey met with bin Salman about six months after the company was made aware of the issue by the FBI, and the two discussed how to “train and qualify Saudi cadres”.


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