Money talks: the deep ties between Twitter and Saudi Arabia

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/09/twitter-saudi-arabia-deep-ties-elon-musk-prince-mohammed

Money talks: the deep ties between Twitter and Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia’s investment in Twitter increased its influence in Silicon Valley while being used at home to shut down critics of the regime

By Jacob Silverman
Thu 9 Oct 2025 00.00 EDT

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Ahmed was a Saudi journalist and analyst living in the Washington DC area. He was a founder of the Institute for Gulf Affairs (formerly the Saudi Institute), a Saudi-focused thinktank with an emphasis on human rights reporting, and was the kind of expert – passionate, principled, always glad to hop on the phone – that journalists loved having in their digital Rolodex.

For Ahmed, who over the years had many family members imprisoned by the Saudi royal family, the pursuit of human rights was a solemn task. But he also had a kind of garrulousness – breaking into asides about his children or the talking gadget he’d invented to remind them to wash their hands – that reminded one of the deeper human stakes. “Twitter is no different from Boeing or those military companies,” Ahmed told me. “They care about making money. Twitter and Facebook are not champions or models for human rights. These people are nothing but money-grubbers.” Twitter had banned Ahmed’s Arabic-language Twitter account, which had 36,000 followers (although he was allowed to keep his English-language account).

I first spoke to Ahmed in 2021, when reporting on the Saudi government’s use of Twitter to unmask and arrest people posting critically about the regime. For Saudi authorities, Twitter was an asset in every sense. The billionaire Saudi businessman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was Twitter’s largest outside shareholder, and the site had become a key tool in the government’s apparatus of surveillance and control.

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