Activists: Saudi Arabia, UAE influenced Twitter to suspend account of opposition paper

Human rights activists have accused Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of causing Twitter to suspend an account belonging to an Arab independent newspaper, Al-Estiklal.

Saudi activist, Omar Bin Abdulaziz, said on Twitter that the suspension came after the paper published a report on the role of Saudi and UAE research centres in planning for the counter-revolutions in the Arab world by penetrating existing research centres or creating new ones to promote Riyadh and Abu Dhabi’s agendas which link political Islam with terrorism.

Georgetown University researcher, Abdullah Al-Ouda, the son of the imprisoned Saudi cleric Salman Al-Ouda, expressed his solidarity with the newspaper’s administration and wrote on Twitter: “Suspending @alestiklal on Twitter is mistake. It is an Arabic e-newspaper that presents the peoples in the Arab world and this is why it is attacked by the Saudi and UAE bots.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE blocked the newspaper’s website in March, only two weeks after it launched in February.

The newspaper administration said in a statement that it was facing a “fierce war” after becoming “a destination for revolutionaries in the Arab world and a platform to expose the crimes of dictatorships against the peoples”.

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