Saudi dissident Omar Abdul Aziz al-Zahrani is going to the US courts to sue Twitter for it complicity with the Saudi regime in breaching his account.
Al-Zahrani, who holds political asylum in Canada, will sue Twitter for failing to inform him of the hacking of his account by one of its former employees.
The employee, Ali al-Zubara, is close to the Saudi royal court and has been appointed to the Misk Foundation of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
According to al-Zahrani, the penetration of Zubara to his account, included access to talks between him and the late journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed by Mohammed bin Salman more than a year ago, regarding the project “e-bees.”
Al-Zahrani said that after the discovery of “Twitter” Zubara of the cooperation with the government of his country, he was dismissed in 2015, and informed some users of the possibility that the Saudi employee spying on them, but the company did not inform al-Zahrani.
Al-Zahrani says that spying on him was carried out in June 2018 by planting malware in his phone.
It is noteworthy that the Saudi authorities arrested more than a year ago, two brothers Omar al-Zahrani, who said that after the authorities failed to lure him, resorted to blackmail by harassing him and sending threats, until he was arrested members of his family.
Twitter has already agreed to delete hundreds of “fake” accounts in favor of the Al Saud government, which has set up an “electronic army” whose mission is to promote its agenda online.
Twitter has also closed hundreds of accounts believed to be “bots Internet” (retweet accounts) support the position of the Kingdom in the killing of prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which sparked international outrage, and negatively affected the image of the Kingdom.
Web bots are programs that automate online tasks and become a tool used by what is known as e-flies to automatically retweet to support or attack an issue on social media platforms.
NBC News provided a list of hundreds of accounts compiled by information technology specialist Josh Russell, who was retweeting positions published by pro-Saudi government accounts.
These posts ask people to question news reports that Khashoggi was killed inside the kingdom’s embassy in Istanbul using tags like #We_all_trust_Mohammad_Bin_Salman to support the crown prince.
Those who run these programs certainly know how Twitter works, as they are designed to automatically tweet, but slowly to give the impression of a momentum on the issue, and at the same time not captured by Twitter’s monitoring radars that fight media misinformation.
Most of these accounts were created in 2012, just minutes away from each other, reinforcing the theory that they are fake accounts used by electronic flies in the number war on social media platforms.