A US activist has filed a racketeering lawsuit against Twitter and senior Saudi officials on behalf of her brother, a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared – and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail – for using a satirical and anonymous Twitter account to mock the Riyadh government.
The lawsuit by Areej al-Sadhan alleges that Twitter has become a “participant tool” in a campaign of transnational repression by Saudi authorities as part of the company’s effort to monetise its relationship with the kingdom. Saudi Arabia is Twitter’s second-largest investor, after Elon Musk.
At the heart of the case lies the story of Areej’s brother, Abdulrahman, a former aid worker with the Red Crescent who has not been seen or heard from since 2021, when a Saudi court sentenced him to 20 years in prison and a 20-year travel ban for his use of Twitter.
The lawsuit, which was filed at the US district court in the northern district of California on Tuesday, contains critical new details about Abdulrahman’s story, including that the former aid worker created his anonymous Twitter account while living in the US.
He did so, the complaint alleges, “in order to call out hypocrisy” in the kingdom’s ruling family. He then returned to Saudi in 2014, before being “kidnapped” by the kingdom’s “secret police” in March 2018.
The lawsuit accuses Twitter of turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s systematic and documented repression of critics even though reports began to circulate about the kingdom’s “malign activities” using Twitter as early as 2018.
US prosecutors have separately established that Saudi authorities illegally obtained confidential data about Twitter users between 2014 and 2015 from two covert Saudi government agents who were working for the company. The so-called Twitter spies targeted individuals like Abdulrahman, the suit alleges, who were posted critical or embarrassing information about Saudi Arabia and its royal family.
The lawsuit alleges that, even as Twitter’s two Saudi employees – Ali Alzabarah and Ahmed Almutairi, who are now wanted by the FBI and are believed to be living in Saudi Arabia – were illegally obtaining confidential user data, Saudi Arabia was simultaneously increasing its equity stake in Twitter. The information submitted to Saudi authorities included the names, birthdates, device identifiers, phone numbers, IP addresses and IP session histories of the anonymous users.
A jury in a federal court in California last year found that a third Twitter employee, Ahmad Abouammo, a dual US-Lebanese national who worked with the other spies, had acted as an unregistered agent of the Saudi government.
The suit alleges that Abdulrahman’s family have learned new details about what had happened to the former aid worker, who was 38 years old when he was arrested at his office. According to the lawsuit, Abdulrahman’s sister Areej learned from informal sources that her brother had been tortured and held in solitary confinement for years. The suit also says she was told that the secret police “broke Plaintiff Abdulrahmam’s hand and smashed his fingers, taunting him that ‘this is the hand you write and tweet with”.
The lawsuit also alleges that Areej has been targeted with online harassment and threats. The family spoke to Abdulrahman in 2020, the suit claims, two years after he had first disappeared. They got another call on 2 March 2021, in which Abdulrahman told his family he was going to be released from prison soon. Shortly thereafter, he was sentenced.
Several cases have emerged over the last 12 months showing that several Saudis who previously lived abroad and then returned home have faced draconian decades-long jail sentences for charges that include using Twitter, and following or liking Tweets by Saudi dissidents.
Twitter has repeatedly declined to comment about the cases to the Guardian. In 2021, a spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment on specific questions about Abdulrahman’s case but said the company had acted swiftly to cut off access to “malicious actors” using its user data as soon as it learned it had been infiltrated.
“We cooperated closely with authorities during their investigation, which has resulted in several indictments in the United States. We simultaneously moved to notify and protect affected account holders. We remain committed to protecting the public conversation from abuse by state actors,” the company – which was not then under the ownership of Elon Musk – said in 2021.
The Guardian received a poop emoji in response to a request for comment on Tuesday from Twitter’s press office, as is the company’s custom since Musk took over.
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