Areej Al-Sadhan, a US-based human rights activist, has accused Twitter of sharing her brother’s identifying information with the Saudi Arabian government, leading to his imprisonment. According to the activist, Twitter shared her brother’s personal details, then “As a result, Saudi Arabia kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and —through a sham trial — sentenced my brother to 20 years in prison, simply for criticizing Saudi repression on his Twitter account.”
Ars Technica reports that human rights activist Areej Al-Sadhan claims Twitter gave the Saudi Arabian government access to her brother’s identifying information, resulting in the government kidnapping him.
Areej Al-Sadhan, a U.S. human rights activist, has sued Twitter on the grounds that the social media site broke its terms of service by disclosing her brother’s identity to the Saudi Arabian government. Following criticism of the Saudi government, Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan vanished in 2015. It is believed that he was abducted, tortured, and given a 20-year prison sentence.
“This puts every Twitter user at risk,” Areej said in an affidavit supporting her complaint. “As a result, Saudi Arabia kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and—through a sham trial— sentenced my brother to 20 years in prison, simply for criticizing Saudi repression on his Twitter account.”
Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah, two former employees of Twitter, are also named in the lawsuit. Both were formally accused of spying for the Saudi government in 2019 and were accused of sharing private user data against Twitter’s privacy policy.
The case alleges that these ex-employees “unlawfully transmitted back the names, birthdates, device identifiers, phone numbers, IP addresses, and session IP histories associated with” 6,000 accounts that were critical of the Saudi government. The ex-employees allegedly accessed data 30,892 times, sharing confidential information on anonymous users with the government.
Areej’s lawsuit alleges: “Each time they accessed this user data, they committed a racketeering act in aid of the Saudi Criminal Enterprise’s goal of transnational repression,” potentially violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Areej’s lawyer, Jim Walden, said, “As long as we lay idle while the rights of Americans and their families are trampled, authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia will continue to penetrate U.S. business and to use them as weapons for their criminality. We look forward to holding Twitter and the Saudi regime to account.”
The lawsuit claims that because Saudi Arabia is a significant Middle Eastern market for Twitter, the company is financially motivated to ignore Saudi espionage on its platform. According to the complaint, Twitter was made aware of the Saudi espionage as early as 2015.
According to the Washington Post, Twitter is likely to maintain that its employees spied illegally and without authorization despite these accusations. Areej is still working to get her brother back to safety and to make Twitter answerable for its alleged involvement in these crimes.
Read more at Ars Technica here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan