Middle East & Africa | Social media in Saudi Arabia

A virtual revolution

Why social media have a greater impact in the kingdom than elsewhere

People of the Facebook
|JEDDAH AND RIYADH

TUNE into one of Saudi Arabia’s television channels and you are likely to find a stuffy report praising the government or a sheikh spinning a dreary sermon. Little wonder that so many Saudis turn to YouTube and other online broadcasters for light relief. That has led to the emergence of new media companies, mainly in the more liberal coastal city of Jeddah, dedicated to amusing the kingdom’s growing population.

In the glassy offices of UTURN Entertainment, one such firm, men and abaya-clad women play table-football and squeeze putty between commissioning and recording videos for their YouTube channel. It airs a variety of shows, from cookery and religious programmes to talk shows and dramas about relationships between men and women. UTURN Entertainment now has over 300,000 subscribers—not surprising, seeing that a recent survey found that Saudis watch an average of seven YouTube videos a day.

Online videos are not the only fad. There are so many Twitter users among the 60% of Saudis who use the internet that the country has the world’s highest penetration of the microblog; the number of users rose by 45% between 2012 and 2013. About 8m of the country’s 31m people use Facebook. E-mail is already passé. “If I send my students an assignment, I have to tweet to tell them to check their inboxes!” says a university professor in the eastern city of Dhahran.

The youthfulness of the population helps explain the popularity of social media. The largest number of users are aged 26 to 34. The country’s repressive nature means many use Twitter, often anonymously, as a way to vent their frustrations. And the social peculiarities of Saudi Arabia account for the particularly insatiable appetite of its young for all things virtual. Unrelated men and women are forbidden to mix freely and fun is scarce, since cinemas and alcohol are banned.

Some reckon this makes the virtual world a socially progressive force, pushing the boundaries. It is for some. Yet Saudi conservatives and the ruling family have clambered onto the social-media bandwagon as quickly as the liberals, and perhaps in greater numbers. The five most-followed Twitter accounts are those of clerics. In a patriarchal society where women must still get permission from a male guardian to travel, go to the doctor or apply for university, an overwhelming 87% of Saudi users of social media are men. Jihadists fighting in Syria tend to use social media to publish and recruit to their cause.

On balance, however, social media are a force for modernity, albeit at the snail’s pace preferred by Saudi Arabia’s establishment. “The rulers can’t hide anything any more,” says a student in Riyadh. For example, when Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a deadly virus, broke out in the kingdom earlier this year, the government felt obliged to issue frequent updates, perhaps under pressure from the chatter flying around on Twitter and Facebook.

The kingdom’s ageing rulers will remain loth to confirm rumours such as those about infighting in the royal family as the next generation of princes jostle for power. And they will continue to clamp down as hard as they can against increasing political dissent.

On June 25th a court sentenced Fawzan al-Harbi, the founder of a human-rights group, to seven years in jail for disseminating information “harmful to public order”, citing a law against cyber-crime passed in 2007. The government also uses online activity to gather intelligence. Earlier in June Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby, said it had tracked spyware being used by the authorities in Qatif, an eastern province populated by the minority Shia, who have long faced discrimination. For good or ill, the kingdom’s appetite for social media knows no bounds.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "A virtual revolution"

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