One Journalist, One Regime, And One Compromised Platform – OpEd
When Saudi journalist Ali al-Ahmed lost access to his Arabic-language Twitter account, which is followed by over 36,000 people, and it wasn’t just a digital setback. It was a silencing. For al-Ahmed, a long-time human rights advocate living in Washington, DC, this was personal and political. It meant losing a vital platform for speaking to Saudis back home and potentially endangering the people who trusted him.
Ahmed is not just a dissident. He’s a father, an inventor, and the founder of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, which is a think tank that monitors human rights in the Gulf states. Over the years, his family members have been jailed by the Saudi regime. Yet, he continues to speak out. His tone is often urgent but never cold. In one moment, he’ll condemn state repression; in the next, he’ll joke about the gadget he built to remind his kids to wash their hands. That balance, between the political and the personal, is what makes his story so human, and so disturbing.
Al-Ahmed’s concerns about Twitter run deep. “Twitter is no different from Boeing or those military companies,” he once said. “They care about making money.” In his view, Twitter and other tech platforms were never champions of human rights, just corporations with shareholders and bottom lines.
And those bottom lines included Saudi money.
Before Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover in 2022, Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was Twitter’s largest outside shareholder. After Musk arrived, carrying a sink and slogans about “free speech”, the Saudi stake remained, quietly rolled into the new version of Twitter, now rebranded as X. Publicly, Musk said little about the regime’s past use of Twitter to surveil and entrap dissidents. Privately, he appeared more concerned with business relationships than ethical boundaries.
In 2021, al-Ahmed reported that Saudi authorities had used Twitter to unmask critics. He feared his own account had been compromised by spies — a fear that wasn’t paranoia. One of his contacts, Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, a humanitarian worker who ran a satirical Twitter account, was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. His sister, Areej, hasn’t heard from him in years.
Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has continued to expand its digital surveillance and transnational repression. Even after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, little changed in Silicon Valley’s relationship with the regime. Twitter, like many tech companies, seemed willing to look away.
Despite Musk’s populist posturing, the user experience worsened, moderation collapsed, and foreign influence deepened. Twitter wasn’t just a social platform anymore, it was an information weapon, increasingly shaped by the very regimes it once claimed to give voice against.
In the end, al-Ahmed’s story reveals a deeper truth: Twitter was never neutral. It had always been a battlefield, not only for ideas, but for power. And in that fight, the voices of the vulnerable were often the first to be sacrificed.
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