Twitter helping Riyadh expose dissidents?

Company X, until recently known as Twitter, is accused in a revised US civil suit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities to a far greater extent than it did for the US , Great Britain or Canada.

Last May, as reported by the British "Guardian", the lawsuit against the company was initiated by Arij al-Sadan, the sister of a Saudi humanitarian worker who suddenly disappeared and was later sentenced to 20 years in prison. The lawsuit focuses on the events surrounding the infiltration of the California company by three Saudi agents, two posing as Twitter employees in 2014 and 2015, which ultimately led to the arrest of Al Sadana's brother Abdulrahman and the exposure of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, including some were later allegedly detained and tortured as part of the government's offensive against dissidents.

Al-Sadan's lawyers last week amended the lawsuit to include new allegations that Twitter, under then-CEO Jack Dorsey, willfully ignored or had knowledge of the Saudi government's campaign to bait and expose critics, but that for financial reasons and efforts to maintain close ties with the Saudi government, a major investor in the company, aided Riyadh.

Prosecutors allege that an Arab agent infiltrated the company and has been sending confidential user information to Saudi officials since December 2014. He allegedly sent a message via the Twitter system to Saud al-Kahtani, a close associate of Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The message read "we will proactively and efficiently wipe out evil," which the lawsuit interprets as an intent to identify and eliminate Saudi dissidents using the platform. The USA suspects Kahtani of being the organizer of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, "The Guardian" writes.

"Twitter was either aware of this message - which was boldly sent from their platform - or deliberately chose to ignore it," the lawsuit states. It also points out that Twitter has been repeatedly notified of security risks and insider threats to internal personal data, which it allegedly ignored.

In late September 2015, Twitter received a complaint from a Saudi user that their accounts had been compromised, but the company did nothing about it even then.

"Twitter not only ignored all of these red flags ... but was aware of the malicious campaign," the lawsuit says.

The legal representatives of the technology giant did not respond to the "Guardian's" requests for comment on the accusations presented in the lawsuit.