How Despots Use Twitter to Hunt Dissidents

If you ignore all the self-promotion, ranting, and frog memes, it’s possible to see the Twitter that Jack Dorsey likes to talk about. It’s a “people’s news network,” he wrote in a memo earlier this year—a digital town square that connects voices from around the world. Taken together, the hundreds of billions of tweets that have been created over the past 10 years represent a constantly updating corpus of human conversation. Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive officer, sometimes brings up Salman Rushdie’s allegorical novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, about a boy who keeps the sea from being poisoned by evildoers who value silence over speech. In Dorsey’s imagining, Twitter is the sea and he is the boy.

Nowhere was the promise of Twitter more fully realized than in Saudi Arabia, where the service was embraced as a way to get around government censors. “People do not trust the official media,” says Hala Aldosari, a Saudi scientist who started tweeting in 2010 about such taboo topics as the kingdom’s guardianship laws, which prevent women from traveling or marrying without a man’s permission. A 2013 study found that 1 in 3 Saudi internet users was active on Twitter, the highest market share in any country. (In the U.S., it’s 1 in 5.) “The only way for us to discuss these issues is through social networks like Twitter,” Aldosari says. “It allows us to create groups of like-minded people.”